Between Realism and Idealism in the Politics of Development

Politically-informed approaches to development assistance have become highly influential, particularly in reaction against the era of ‘Good Governance’. A notable feature of this trend has been explicit antipathy to ‘idealist’ thinking, and concomitant preoccupation with being realistic, pragmatic, understanding political realities, and eschewing moralism, utopianism, idealism, and the like. In other words, there has been an underlying philosophical turn towards political realism. Now, the political philosophy literature would suggest that realism typically generates questions and worries relating to normativity: how values, ethical constraints, political ideologies, visions of desired futures, and so on, might work under realism. Do corresponding concerns also attend the realist turn in the politics of development? I argue that they do. They can be organised heuristically as a sequence of three problems: loss of critical distance; crypto-normativity; creeping return of idealism. This is the realist’s trilemma. It generates normative quandaries and an inherent logical instability that makes the realist posture a difficult one to maintain for long. I argue that it is better, when thinking about the politics of development, simply to grasp the third horn of the trilemma and let idealism back in, though tempered by the useful critical intervention of the realist turn.