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Science and Technology in Development

Article · September 2018

DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2180

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Hebe Vessuri Ronald Cancino

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Science and Technology in Development
HEBE VESSURI1 AND RONALD CANCINO2
1 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
2 Universidad de la Frontera, Chile

The belief in a virtuous relationship between science, technology, and development

coincides with the deployment of modernity and its underlying idea of society. Sci-
ence and technology have been the classic tools for seeking development, the promise
of how it was possible to advance in the construction of modern societies in traditional,
“less developed,” marginal nations. But it was not any science—science and technology
in development was clearly differentiated from international science carried out in col-
laboration and competition with international partners within the “developed world”
(Vessuri 2017). It was expected that the results of science for development would be
translated into technological results, constituting the evidence of society’s advancement.
On the other hand, anthropology distinguishes itself largely by the kinds of societies
or settings it studies. Anthropologists, in practice (at least those who are trained and
hired by leading departments), work mostly in the “Third World” and specialize dispro-
portionately in the study of small, rural, isolated, or marginal communities; when they
do work in the “developed world,” they tend to study the poor, the marginalized, the
“ethnic”—in short, the “Third World” within. This gives enduring relevance to anthro-
pology insofar as there continue to be millions of marginalized, excluded, or “outside”
people in the world. However, anthropology risks being ignored or marginalized from
decision making as much as the people it has defined as its target groups to study.
In the historic matrix between these unlikely partners lie a number of problems
indicative of the process of Western modernity throughout the twentieth century and
reaching out well into the twenty-first. The complexity of the relationships between
science and technology when targeted at solving development problems made it
inevitable that there would be an increasing involvement of anthropology in the
equation. There has been constant need to observe the emergence of sociotechnical
phenomena nested in myriad local contexts to help make them comprehensible. The
current trend among the sciences and science organizations asking for a broader
participation of the social sciences, in particular of anthropology, in areas of interest
to the natural sciences, as reflected in the Biodiversity Convention, makes it possible
to envisage a greater hybridization of knowledge in the future, at the levels of agenda
setting, the recognition of evidence, and the proposal of technical responses.
Anthropology’s relationship to science, technology, and development has been both
especially difficult and especially central because of anthropology’s historical role as the
science of “less developed” peoples, those perceived as a distinctive class set apart from,
and in some sense anachronistic to, “modern,” “Western,” “civilized” society (Ferguson
2005). Before the 1950s, anthropology does not seem to have considered the idea of
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2180
2 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT

development, much less the centrality of science and technology to the question of ana-
lyzing the impact of Western expansion on peripheral or colonized peoples. The opera-
tive concepts, instead, were “acculturation” and “assimilation” in the United States and
“culture contact” in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, an ambiguous charter, a broad
vision that was shared by a wide set of transnational elites in the postcolonial world,
framed the “problems” of the “new nations” in terms of a developmentalist story about
nations moving along a predetermined track, out of “backwardness” and into “moder-
nity.” The anthropological concern with social and cultural change became increasingly
linked to the idea of development, and especially in the US to modernization theory,
as elaborated in other disciplines (notably political science and sociology). Increasingly,
the question became how do “traditional societies” become modern and how could they
be helped to make this transition? Significantly, this question was linked less to abstract
theoretical speculation than to explicit programs of directed social change.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War between the Western allies and the
Soviet bloc implied the planning and implementation of development programs, finan-
cial aid, technological “fixes,” volunteer groups, trade stimulation, academic exchanges,
and arms sales in the rest of the world, all in a struggle for supremacy. At the same time,
after the Bandung Conference in 1955, a “Third Worldist” conception of social justice
emerged around the calls for a larger share of the world’s resources to be devoted to the
poorest countries. The development framework was embraced and reshaped by policy
makers and social scientists everywhere, even in Latin America a century after its own
independence. However, after decades of development, the so-called underdeveloped
portion of the world was not doing well. Despite growing internal diversification in the
“Third World,” the income ratios between the world’s rich and poor countries contin-
ued to grow: in 1960, it was 20:1; in 1980, it had increased to 46:1; and by 1989 the ratio
was as high as 60:1.

Normativity and asymmetry

The way science and technology in development have been construed and debated made
two problems visible. The first one relates to normativity. Western modernity has natu-
ralized the normative ideal according to which (well managed, well driven) science and
technology can lead to development. But why science and technology? Robert Merton
(1968) argued that science is an autonomized space with respect to society and that
such autonomy allows the deployment of scientific logic: the search for truth, univer-
sality, and disinterestedness. Although the critique of this approach has been at the root
of the sociology and anthropology of science in recent decades, Merton synthesized a
Western ideology and transformed it into a theory of science. Here lies a key to under-
standing the debates about science, technology, and development: modernity (taken as
promise of future development) requires constant adjustment and new designs, an issue
that remains encapsulated within science, technology, and innovation policies. A suc-
cession of models indicates both the state of the societies that define those models and
of the societies that ought to implement them.
 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT 3

The second problem is one of knowledge asymmetries. Science became the engine of
progress as it expanded its merit and social legitimacy simultaneously with Western
expansion through military and naval technological advances. It did so by establish-
ing a hierarchical relationship between kinds of knowledge: the superiority of Western
knowledge versus the inferiority of local knowledges whenever it confronted them.
The relational mechanism between societies was crucial to understanding the logic
of technology transfer and, above all, to understanding the sociocultural status of the
successive policy models and debates. This asymmetry fed its own tensions. Policies
constitute “descriptive theories” of how best to organize science and technology for pro-
ducing development. But the societies receiving them transformed descriptive theories
into normative policy models. In implementing them, they faced tensions when try-
ing to generate the expected results, for the agents were not as the normative model
envisaged. The same happened with the mode of how they produced science, devel-
opment, and technological innovation, since they generated neither collaboration nor
specialization patterns as expected. Thus the latter appeared as underdeveloped, lacking
modernity, immersed in tradition, and in permanent need of technology transfer.
The aim of understanding the difficulties of a conceptual category acquired new
relevance, that of culture, which became a true focus, something incomprehensible that
could not be grasped but would be a source of tensions in the search for development.
Recently, many development practitioners have acquired a new respect for what is
called “indigenous knowledge.” Yet the very category suggests that such knowledge
can be neatly bounded from knowledge of the more universal sort; it is assumed that
Africans, or Asians, or the primeval nations in Latin America know certain things by
virtue of their birth and culture whereas the rest of the world knows certain things
by virtue of having had to learn them at school.

Uses, debates, and policies

Development had been a concern of the European colonial powers, particularly in the
late colonial period, when they increasingly adopted interventionist development poli-
cies in colonial territories, trying to reinvigorate and reinforce their legitimacy in a
rapidly changing geopolitical landscape (Tilley 2011). The United States, as it emerged
as a superpower after World War II, joined other colonial powers in the goal of rais-
ing standards of living in the underdeveloped nations during the postwar period. A
belief was installed in the virtuous articulation between science and industry (as sug-
gested, for instance, by Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier, a 1945 report to
President Roosevelt stressing the importance of science to US security and industrial
success) which became a model for international cooperation. The American effort in
the Truman years took development out of the colonial realm and made it a basic part of
international politics (Cooper and Packard 2005). The idea of development was linked
to a specifically international conception in which formerly “primitive,” underdevel-
oped, and colonized peoples might proudly emerge into the modern world and take
their seat at the table of the “family of nations.”
4 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT

Combining large-scale, new technology, a desire for industrialization, a modern aes-

thetic and materials, and a notion of population crisis (to be solved through a techno-
logical fix), development theory and practice rapidly turned to a unilineal approach, in
conditions in which problems tended to be depoliticized and their solutions cast as sci-
entific or technocratic. Paradigms of science and technology policy (Salomon, Sagasti,
and Sachs-Jeantet 1994) had a social impetus toward the desired transformations but
also produced unexpected—positive or negative—effects, which created sociocultural
puzzles. Our knowledge and our ignorance have been influenced by the values and
commitments underlying the prior choices giving shape to the research that was even-
tually carried out. This was particularly strong at the microlocal level, in spaces in which
controversies got activated around cultural identities, the defense of local cultural patri-
monies and possibilities, and also the difficulties of upgrading local knowledges. Some
of those controversial fields are described in the following sections.

Infrastructure and technology transfer

A host of “development agencies,” programs of “development aid,” and so on were
conceived and put in place in the years after World War II as part of the growing conver-
gence of US and European interests around the need to generate development through
technical assistance programs. However, whereas industrialized societies were expected
to unproblematically articulate science to existing industry, in developing societies,
by definition, there was not yet an industrial or institutional base that could facili-
tate the achievement of development. Attempts were made to generate infrastructure
as a precondition for production and consumption and to promote the transfer of tech-
nologies for starting the pathway to development. Under this logic, a first generation
of development programs was implemented, obeying a particular notion of society and
knowledge: societies at the limit of employing their maximum efficiency, that if left to
themselves could do no more, were the standard explanation for technological back-
wardness, rurality crisis, and early scenarios of decolonization. New development waves
followed suit until the present. Necessary questions in the case of science and technol-
ogy for development, which have often found unsatisfactory answers, if at all, are: Who
needs the technology being transferred? Who will benefit from it? Who will pay the
costs? What happens when it goes wrong? Who is going to regulate it and on behalf of
whom?

Institutional landscapes
While in the developed world the aim was to consolidate a transnational institutional
setup (for instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was
created in 1961) that defined regulations for the growing internationalization of inno-
vation, technology, and science, in developing countries the attempt was to create a
modern institutional setup that included science and technology as relevant elements
in development policies. At this juncture a debate took form: Was it a question of reg-
ulating or of planning? The transfer of technology was followed by the transfer of insti-
tutional designs. The idea of science became a promise of modern institutional design
 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT 5

based on a growing faith in the role of science and technology in combating poverty and
disease and focused on infrastructural and institutional improvements as well as the
technical enhancement of agriculture, industry, and health care through innovation.
The strengthening of national levels of government in countries of the global South,
and then the redirecting of scientific and technological activities when the crisis of the
nation-state loomed, opened the way to a diversity of management models. Different
from the developed world that was considered in transnational terms, developing coun-
tries were concerned with exploring the local socioproductive, identity, and cultural
specificities in science and technology priorities. More recently, the role of the state in
the developing world was increasingly hollowed out from above as well as from below
in a new international political and economic setting.

Dependence
The optimism of the postwar years was soon over. Studying issues of development in
the increasingly radicalized and policitized context of the 1970s became more legiti-
mate and more intellectually exciting. The critiques of the ideology of the neutrality of
science and technology and the growing wave of constructivism in the social studies of
science, especially since the 1970s, were accompanied by a theoretical proposal coming
from Latin America, that of dependence. Dependence theory and world-systems theory
insisted that differences between societies had to be related to a common history of con-
quest, imperialism, and economic exploitation that systematically linked them. Instead
of being simply “undeveloped” (an original state) the “Third World” now appeared as
actively underdeveloped by a “First World” that had underdeveloped it. It was the first
time that globally in social and cultural terms the Western belief in science as the engine
of progress was suspended. Science was depicted as a social construct, technology was
interpreted as a local and global threat, and science and technology policies were seen
to reproduce scientific and technological dependence.
This mode of understanding the science–technology–development relationship had
some long-term effects on debates. In developing societies, dependence dilemmas were
“unfolded” within the countries, opening up a local level of debate, the value of local
knowledge. If dependence generated difficulties for the development of scientific and
technical capacities, the reaction consisted in the development of technologies at the
local level—appropriate and/or alternative technologies—for the solution of microlo-
cal problems. As an effect of the relationship between the internationalization of science
and national policy designs, a new form of dependence was identified, “subordinate
integration” (Kreimer 2006), revealed by the patterns of international scientific collab-
oration in research programs. Evidence suggests that the agendas are transnationally
driven, thus activating a problem for the public perception of science: for if science and
technology enable development, then how are we to understand that their agendas do
not respond to national or local priorities? This has not only raised a global question for
science but also about hegemony, dependence, and subordination in the global science
interdependence.
6 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT

Poverty and sustainability

The debate on world poverty and wellbeing has clearly evolved from economics to
broader conceptualizations. It will always be necessary to refer to poverty in full aware-
ness of the footnote problems that arise in the differences of definitions, classifications,
and measurements regarding both poverty and development indicators. The 1980s were
indicative of the emergence of new problems in the relationship between science and
technology in development which persist even today and seem to condense social and
cultural dilemmas. In developed countries, especially in Europe, interest concentrated
on the mechanisms that give rise to the emergence of technological innovations and
the notion of innovation system. In developing countries, to the contrary, the problem
was how to avoid the negative effects of globalization (crisis of industrial models, new
international consortia based on the exploitation of natural resources). The notion of
the endogenous prevailed as a process of making use of local capital, although shutting
it off from globalizing processes, through development projects based on traditional or
alternative technologies. It was the “small is beautiful” metaphor in action. A new idea
of knowledge emerged: local knowledge was conceived as a possible driver of an alter-
native development. In sociocultural terms the small, the local, was conceived as a space
of resistance to globalization. For that, the valuing of traditional and local knowledge
was fundamental but it faced the might of globalized science and the emergence of a
new extractivism.
The environmental harm caused by extractivist models (old and new) (Bebbington
and Bury 2013), “green grabbing” (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), genetic modi-
fication and agrofuels, poverty (sharpened by neoliberal trends and liberalizing adjust-
ments), the fall in principal exports, and volatility in international markets affecting the
commodities that poor countries export, in addition to a recession among the BRICS
nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), are all factors that have placed
many developing countries in an economically, politically, and socially fragile situa-
tion. Transnationalization not just of the institutional setup but also in the shape of new
forms of capital accumulation, scientific collaboration, and distribution of technical
progress made it evident that it would be difficult to consolidate the science and technol-
ogy projects conceived in previous decades. The new regime requires low technological
development and is accompanied by poor-quality jobs, require little knowledge inten-
sity, and generates the reproduction of poverty conditions, now together with a new
phenomenon: the spread of environmental microcrises and the questioning of the sus-
tainability of the industrial development model. This feeling of crisis takes two forms: in
the developed world through the observation of the risks of the so-called reflexive scien-
tification; in the developing world through environmental crises caused by the extreme
exploitation of natural resources (Bridge 2008).

Competitiveness and territory

Since the 1990s, the belief that science-based technological innovation produces devel-
opment by means of the design of active and selective science and technology policies
prevails. There are two aspects of this that are worth considering here. One is that
 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT 7

there has been a turn in the understanding of the “positive” social and cultural dimen-
sions of development processes animated by systemic notions of science and technology. If
in previous decades development problems were explained by a cultural lack in soci-
eties, now the prevailing systemic notions conceive of central aspects of a social and
cultural nature that affect positively the achievement of results in technological inno-
vation. In the developed world, “positive” sociocultural aspects allowing development
were recognized, for instance, in the notion of skills in the nascent evolutionary eco-
nomics; in the developing world, by contrast, the normative logic was translated into
incentives for an associativity that did not occur naturally in society. The difference lay
in identifying evidence of a “systemic culture of innovation” articulated, for example, to
what was known as social capital versus the efforts to building up a systemic innovation
culture from policy decisions. When this did not happen, traditionalism served to thus
explain away the difficulties in installing a systemic logic in societies in transit toward
the knowledge-based society.
The other aspect has to do with the territorial question. The identification of territo-
rial disparities is an add-on to the observation of local cultural sensitivities, expressed
as much in the processes of cultural patrimonialization as in intercultural conflicts.
In the developed world, “the territorial” assumes the form of “regional systems of
innovation.” In the developing world this same process becomes a normative policy
model. In a country like Chile, for instance, the issue is that priority sectors are
defined and then an attempt is made to have them behave like a technology-intensive,
high-associativity cluster, while social conditions are not satisfactorily taken into
account. Whereas the global salmon industry articulates scientific and technological
knowledge in its productive chain, in Chile it is an industry that relates territories
with different potentialities in different phases of the salmon growth. Its exploitation
has created sociocultural and environmental problems. In the early phases of the pro-
ductive chain (alevines and smolt), productive plants were installed in clear-watered
Andean territory. Water contamination by industry resulted in a serious productive
crisis with the outbreak of salmon diseases. This in turn led to sociocultural problems
because the plants are also located in the midst of territories heavily populated by
native communities. The problems identified include reinforcing enclave economic
processes, which encapsulate the benefits of development and generate a weakening of
local political structures, deep changes in local lifestyles and loss of productive capacity
of peasant and native economies, with the consequent deepening of rural poverty
(O’Ryan et al. 2010). Thus the sustainability of this type of development around the
competitive cluster logic is highly questionable.

Conclusion

The social appropriation of anthropological concepts often hides a denial of sociocul-

tural differences under the preeminence of the normative logic: on the road to devel-
opment ideals, science and technology require that local societies “adjust” themselves,
denying their traditionality. Thus the effort to grasp the processes of sociotechnical
8 S CI E N CE A ND T E CH N O L O G Y IN D E V E L OP ME NT

transformations can enable understanding of the value, role, and mechanisms of socio-
cultural change in complex societies. A relevant problem today is the proliferation of
controversies, which has a long tradition in science but now involves a heterogenous
range of stakeholders. From the local to macro levels, networks are articulated that not
only position agents (or objects depending on the approach) or negotiate positions but
also produce definitions of new relevant sociocultural phenomena—intensive processes
of patrimonialization of culture, new citizen subjectivations, the activation of identities
by means of virtual networks, the conformation of knowledge networks beyond the
realms of traditional scientific expertise—all of them being new phenomena that should
be observed and analyzed by anthropologists.
SEE ALSO: Agricultural Systems Research; Applied Anthropology; Colonialism and the
Museum; Coloniality of Power; Consultancy, Anthropology and; Dams; Dependency
Theory and Underdevelopment; Development Agencies; Development and Forced Dis-
placement; Empiricism; Energy Issues in Development; Extension, Communication,
and Education; Extractive Industries and Development; Global Health Interventions
and Research; Green Revolution; Indigenous and Local Knowledge and Science: From
Validation to Knowledge Coproduction; International Development, Anthropology in;
Modernity; Modernization Theories of Development; Postcolonialism; Research Bod-
ies in Development; Scientific Expertise; Technology; World-Systems Theory

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