Development discourse & the postcolonial challenge - the case of Fiji's aid industry

This thesis presents a postcolonial critique of development and academic discourses in the context of the South Pacific. Focusing on Fiji’s aid industry, I challenge the apparent inevitabilities underpinning an increasingly narrow and parochial donor ‘good governance’ agenda in the region. I also confront geography’s sojourns in, and on, the ‘Third World’ laying bare a number of epistemological and methodological inconsistencies. Having exposed various definitional rigidities produced by these discourses, I emphasise the decentred and nuanced meanings and ways of envisioning ‘development’ enabled by postcolonial sensibilities. The thesis has three primary aims. First, to highlight the constraining and enabling aspects of discourses. I emphasise the productive features of development discourse; its framing attributes, fragility and transformative potential, drawing on the activities and intentions of NGOs and donor organisations operating in Fiji. Second, I draw attention to the way ‘identities’ form and shape aid relations in the country. Again, utilising examples from Fiji’s aid industry, I foreground the centrality of ‘traditions’, religion, gender and ethnicity in ‘development’ and critique their virtual silence in donor policies and programmes in the region. Finally, I ‘unpack’ the way academia intervenes in development settings. Here I suggest that any reflection on the relevance of research will inevitably involve taking methodology seriously and posing fundamental questions about why we are there in the first place. Advocating more than a methodological revisionism, I argue that ‘doing development differently’ will involve reorienting development relations and embarking on a far-reaching mission to subvert development’s self-evidence while proposing and supporting collaborative efforts that explore negotiated and newly emerging cultural forms.