Tania Murray Li: Development, Exclusion and the Will to Improve

Tania Murray Li is the anthropologist at the University of Toronto who has best explained why development programmes designed to improve the lives of the poor so often end up producing exclusion and dispossession. Her main work, The Will to Improve (2007), analyses two centuries of interventions in Indonesia, from the Dutch colony to the World Bank, and shows that the will to improve operates by turning political problems into technical questions; Land's End (2014) follows highland communities in Sulawesi who, by planting cacao for the market, lost their land and were left without a place in the economy. Although her field is rural, her concepts have become central to understanding exclusion in cities.

Rendering technical: the will to improve as trusteeship

Her key concept is rendering technical. Experts, Li argues, frame poverty as a problem of lacking capacities, infrastructure or markets, solvable through projects, and leave outside the frame the political causes: who owns the land, who captures the surplus, who decides. Development thus becomes a relation of trusteeship, in which the expert governs on behalf of the beneficiary without giving them power, and every failure generates a new project rather than a question about structure. Her analysis of the World Bank's community development programme in Indonesia showed how participation was designed to avoid politics.

Land's End: dispossession from within and surplus population

Land's End supplies the mechanism of dispossession. In the mountains of Sulawesi, Lauje families adopted cacao as a cash crop, enclosed formerly common plots, went into debt and sold to the neighbours who did best, and within a generation a class of smallholders and another of landless families emerged without any state or company expropriating anyone. Li shows that capitalist relations can produce exclusion from inside a community, and that development's usual answer, more market, more credit, speeds the process. The excluded find no job in any factory, which is why she speaks of a surplus population that capital does not need.

From Sulawesi to the city: upgrading, megaprojects and informality

Carried into the city, that analysis illuminates several processes. Informal settlement upgrading designed as technical projects of water and titles, without touching who owns the land, can prepare gentrification. Large infrastructure projects and satellite cities that displace communities in the name of development repeat colonial trusteeship. And urban informality, where those who lost land in the countryside end up, is the counterpart of the surplus population Li describes. Her work converses with Ananya Roy, James Ferguson and Michael Goldman in the critique of development and with studies of land grabbing.

Repoliticising development: tenure, commons and guaranteed income

Li does not propose giving up on improvement but repoliticising it. Her studies document how communities resist and negotiate, occupying plantation land, organising cooperatives, demanding agrarian reform, and she argues that useful interventions are those that redistribute power and resources rather than capacities: tenure reform, protection of commons, guaranteed income and services for those the market does not employ. In Plantation Life (2021), with Pujo Semedi, she extended the analysis to oil palm plantations, where corporate occupation of territory produces a social order she calls plantation life.

Tania Li's lesson for planning is that no development policy is neutral: every project defines a problem, chooses whom to help and leaves out what it does not want to see. Asking who owns the land, who captures the value and who decides, before designing the improvement, is the condition for the will to improve not to end, as in Sulawesi, by leaving the improved without land and without a place.