Between Ruptures and Continuity: Modernisation, Dependency and the Evolution of Development Theory

Abstract

The field of development studies provides a number of diverging perspectives to the pressing challenges of our time, but few clear answers to them. This article therefore questions why six decades of development studies have not been able to come up with more generally acceptable recommendations and solutions to old as well as new challenges. The argument is that as a field of study development studies has been so fixated with ruptures and paradigm shifts that much valuable insight of theories and perspectives rejected has been lost. In order to pursue this argument, the article's main focus is modernisation and dependency. While often argued to be opposites, modernisation and dependency approaches have in fact much in common and are still in use in both actual policy making and discourse as well as providing explanations of outcomes and events. However, current development practice also shows that the decades of criticism that development studies has provided towards both concepts have been lost on academics and politicians due to the eagerness to provide clear-cut categories. This argument is illustrated by recent empirical examples from Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa.

Keywords:

• development theory
• modernisation
• dependency
• Latin America
• Africa

Notes

¹This article as well as Benedicte Bull's speech on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of International Development Studies, Roskilde University Centre, are based on the authors’ work with the four-volume reader in International Development published by Sage in 2010 (Bull and Bøås, 2010a).

²The exception from this trend is Brazil.