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

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 though rural development to the margins in Afghanistan. To quote Corinthians, in trying ‘to be all things to all people’, alternative development saved no one.