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Behaviouraldevelopment economics (BDE) has rapidly gained prominence as offering a noveldiagnosis of, and prescription for alleviating, poverty in the global South.Epitomised by the World Bank’s WorldDevelopment Report 2015: Mind, Society, Behaviour (WDR), proponents have depictedbehaviouralism as a cogent alternative to the conceptual and politicalpresuppositions of neoclassical economics. In particular, they have pointed tothe tradition’s rejection of neoclassical axioms of hyper-rationality and theirembodiment in Homo Economicus, infavour of greater empirical realism in describing decision-making. On thisbasis, BDE investigatesthe biases, heuristics and contextual factors impacting how the poor makechoices affecting their economic well-being, and then design and promulgateinstitutional arrangements correcting for their decision-making to facilitaterational, welfare-enhancing choices to escape poverty.However, drawingon Foucault’s work on neoliberal governmentality, this paper presents adiscursive analysis of the WDR and other selected policy documents from theglobal South to make the case that BDE buttresses,rather than undermines, a neoclassical approach to development. Specifically, behaviouraltheory is presented as an ‘apparatus of power-knowledge’, in which particularpolicy techniques are combined with a regime of positivist truths about themarket to demarcate what does not exist in reality – governable yet freeeconomic subjects – and then expose them to the division of truth or falsity basedon their market behaviour. That is, the tradition producesand legitimises a vision of HomoEconomicus as the normative subject necessary forsecuring developmental outcomes through the market.This, in turn, is demonstrated as depoliticising poverty, in that policyinterventions centre on augmenting the capacity of poor subjects for ‘rational’decision-making as both the means and ends of development. The paper articulatesthis argument in four sections. First, it presents a brief overview of the keytenets of BDE. It then reveals this tradition to be structured around thetheoretical problematic of neoclassical humanism: studying theconditions of existence for the harmonious reconciliation of individual andcollective rationalities. Within this problematic, whilerecognising its empirical falsity, HomoEconomicus functions as the essence of subjectivity that would serveas the normative ‘microfoundation’ of that harmonious social order.Section three utilises textual evidence from the WDR and other policy documentsto establish how BDE positions this subject as what Foucault terms the‘interface’ of government-individual relations. Impoverished individuals are pathologisedas deviatingfrom of Homo Economicus, yet it isprecisely the qualities of thisabstraction as a rational, autonomous subject that are deemed essential fordevelopment. Policy interventions thus manifestthrough a form of neoliberal governmentality, modifying the prevailing ‘choicearchitecture’ in which actors operate in order to promote capacity forachieving ‘entrepreneurship of the self’. The final section argues that thiseffectively depoliticises poverty, as bolstering the internal capacity of individuals becomes both the means and ends ofdevelopment. On the one hand, the state is not understood as concerned withtransforming prevailing political, economic and social factors, but rather augmentingindividuals’ aptitude for rationality. On the other hand, this capacity for‘rational’ decision-making, rather than welfare per se, becomes the primary metric for evaluating development interventions.In both cases, the extant structural determinants of poverty are left largely unaffected.The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of the preceding analysisfor political economic struggles to ground historically-specific understandingsof the human subject and its potential in relation to questions of development.

Behavioural Economics; Subjectivity; Governmentality; Depoliticisation; Homo Economicus