MARITIMEPOSTS.COM – Development has long been presented as a noble mission to reduce poverty, improve livelihoods, strengthen institutions, and create more prosperous societies.
Governments, international organizations, corporations, and non-governmental organizations frequently pursue these goals through carefully designed interventions.
Yet despite decades of planning, funding, and institutional reforms, many development programs continue producing uneven or unexpected outcomes. Communities often respond differently from what planners anticipate, while intended improvements sometimes fail to address deeper social realities.
This persistent gap between development intentions and actual outcomes forms the central concern of Tania Murray Li’s influential book The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and inspired by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Li fundamentally rethinks how development should be understood.
Rather than questioning the sincerity of development practitioners, Li argues that governments, development agencies, corporations, and non-governmental organizations are generally motivated by a genuine desire to improve society. This aspiration is what she describes as the “will to improve.”
The desire to improve generates countless initiatives promoting poverty reduction, environmental conservation, community empowerment, agricultural modernization, education, health, and sustainable development.
These interventions frequently emerge from optimistic assumptions that carefully designed programs can transform society for the better.
However, Li argues that development does not simply identify existing problems waiting to be solved. Instead, development first constructs particular understandings of what counts as a problem before proposing corresponding technical solutions.
Communities rarely define their own situations exactly as development agencies do. While local residents may prioritize unequal land access, political exclusion, or elite domination, external institutions often frame these concerns as technical deficiencies requiring administrative intervention.
This process leads to one of Li’s most influential concepts: “rendering technical.” Political, historical, and social conflicts become translated into manageable technical problems suitable for planning, budgeting, monitoring, and evaluation.
Questions concerning power, inequality, or competing interests are frequently reformulated into discussions about participation, capacity building, institutional strengthening, or community awareness. Political struggles gradually disappear behind administrative language and technical expertise.
According to Li, this transformation fundamentally alters how development operates. Instead of confronting structural inequalities directly, interventions frequently seek technical improvements while leaving underlying political relationships largely unchanged.
Development therefore becomes not only a collection of projects but also a particular way of governing society. Through policies, expertise, statistics, planning documents, and professional knowledge, institutions encourage citizens to become responsible, productive, participatory, and self-managing.
This broader process reflects Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Governance extends beyond legal authority by shaping how individuals understand themselves, regulate their own behavior, and participate within broader systems of social administration.
Li further argues that development experts necessarily simplify complex realities. Effective planning requires categories such as poor households, beneficiaries, vulnerable groups, women, youth, or farmers, making diverse communities administratively manageable.
Although these categories facilitate program implementation, they inevitably overlook internal diversity, conflicting interests, unequal power relations, and historical experiences that influence everyday social life. Simplification therefore becomes both necessary and politically significant.
One of the book’s strongest contributions is its insistence that politics can never be removed from development. Every intervention reflects choices regarding whose knowledge matters, whose priorities receive attention, and whose interests become institutional objectives.
Consequently, development programs should not be understood as politically neutral activities. Decisions concerning project design, resource allocation, beneficiary selection, and program evaluation inevitably privilege certain actors, perspectives, and institutional priorities over others.
Li also challenges the assumption that communities passively receive development interventions. Local people continuously interpret, negotiate, adapt, modify, resist, or strategically engage with projects according to their own experiences, expectations, and aspirations.
Resistance does not always appear through demonstrations or direct confrontation. It frequently emerges through silence, selective participation, informal negotiations, delayed compliance, reinterpretation, or subtle everyday practices that remain largely invisible within official evaluations.
This perspective shifts attention from project implementation toward the political relationships surrounding implementation. Researchers are encouraged to observe how interventions interact with local histories, institutions, power structures, and community agency rather than evaluating technical performance alone.
The implications for contemporary development practice are profound. Successful programs require more than efficient administration, measurable indicators, and well-designed planning frameworks.
They also require understanding how communities define their own realities and negotiate external interventions.
Li therefore encourages researchers to begin with empirical realities rather than predetermined development models. Instead of asking whether communities fit institutional frameworks, scholars should investigate how institutional frameworks fit—or fail to fit—community realities.
This methodological orientation places local experiences at the center of development analysis. It recognizes that meaningful understanding emerges from listening carefully to multiple voices rather than imposing universal solutions derived from technical expertise alone.
The book also offers an important reminder that development is never simply about delivering projects. It is equally about producing knowledge, defining problems, exercising authority, and shaping how societies imagine progress and collective improvement.
For scholars of governance and community empowerment, The Will to Improve provides a powerful framework for understanding why technically successful projects sometimes fail socially, while modest initiatives grounded in local realities may generate more sustainable transformations.
Nearly two decades after its publication, Tania Murray Li’s work continues challenging researchers and practitioners to reconsider the foundations of development itself.
Her enduring contribution lies in demonstrating that improving society requires more than technical expertise; it demands critical attention to power, politics, knowledge, and the lived realities of the people whom development ultimately seeks to serve.
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Primary Reference
Li, T. M. (2007). The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Duke University Press.
Foundational Theoretical References
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87–104). University of Chicago Press.
Ferguson, J. (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
Development and Political Ecology
Li, T. M. (2014). Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Duke University Press.
Agrawal, A. (2005). Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Duke University Press.
Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. Pluto Press.
Participation and Development
Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (Eds.). (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny? Zed Books.
Hickey, S., & Mohan, G. (Eds.). (2004). Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. Zed Books.
Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. Intermediate Technology Publications.
Governance and Institutions
Helmke, G., & Levitsky, S. (2004). Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda. Perspectives on Politics, 2(4), 725–740.
Helmke, G., & Levitsky, S. (Eds.). (2006). Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Collaborative Governance
Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 543–571.
Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T., & Balogh, S. (2012). An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22(1), 1–29.
