Trying to Be All Things to All People: Alternative Development in Afghanistan

• Published in: Revue internationale de politique de développement Vol. 12; no. 12
• Main Author: Mansfield, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement 01.09.2020; Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement
• Subjects: alternative development policies; drug control strategies; drug cultivation; international cooperation; official development assistance (ODA); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); America North; United States; Asia South; official development assistance (ODA); war on drugs; drug cultivation; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); alternative development policies; international cooperation; drug control strategies
• ISSN: 1663-9383; 1663-9375; 1663-9391
• DOI: 10.4000/poldev.3751

Alternative development has had little success in Afghanistan. Understood and implemented as geographically bounded interventions designed to reduce drug crop cultivation, these projects failed to achieve their objectives throughout the 1990s. Since 2001, following the fall of the Taliban, unprecedented rises in levels of opium production, and an inflow of substantial amounts of aid, alternative development came to mean different things to different people in Afghanistan. To some, alternative development continued as short-term interventions designed to extract agreements from communities to reduce opium production, or reward those that had already done so. To others, it could be any development programme implemented in a poppy growing, or potential poppy growing, area often without any consideration of the causes of cultivation and how they differed by location, gender or socio-economic group. This chapter argues that a lack of consistency and clarity in approach—and in particular the failure to articulate and implement a strategy to support farmers transitioning to licit livelihoods within a changing framework of development assistance—confined alternative development and efforts to reduce poppy cultivation through rural development to the margins in Afghanistan. To quote Corinthians, in trying ‘to be all things to all people’, alternative development saved no one.