Religions and development: a paradigm shift or business as usual?

ABSTRACT

There has been a ‘turn to religion’ by global development actors over the past couple of decades. This article examines the extent to which this is evidence of a paradigm shift or simply business as usual. The first part of the article will examine the nature of this ‘turn to religion’, including how it has been debated and conceptualized within academic research. I examine the usefulness of the concept of ‘religious engineering’ (the focus of this thematic issue) as a way of helping us broaden approaches to the ‘religion-development nexus’ beyond a focus on the relationship between formal international FBOs and secular global development institutions. The second part of the article develops the concept of ‘religious engineering’ with reference to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I argue that the concepts of habitus, field and capital help de-centre the focus of attention from global development institutions to other fields of religion-development intersection.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• development
• faith-based organization
• Pierre Bourdieu
• post-secular
• desecularisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include a focus on religion and sustainable development, and religion and gender. Related to these areas her most recent publications are Religions and Development (Routledge, 2013) and The Routledge Handbook of Religions and Global Development (2015). She is currently the principle investigator on a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK called ‘Keeping faith in 2030: Religions and the Sustainable Development Goals’, that involves research and events in the UK, India and Ethiopia. Her website can be accessed here: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20042/463/emma_tomalin.

Notes

1 The ‘Charitable Choice’ provision in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act allowed ‘religious organizations’ to compete for government contracts to provide welfare services, creating an environment that made it easier for faith-based organizations to receive federal funding where before they had experienced barriers (Chaves 2003; Jacobson, Marsh, and Winston 2005).

2 Elsewhere, I have defended Long’s interface analysis against the critique that the compartmentalization of ‘aid givers’ and ‘aid recipients’, ‘as if they were social groups governed by different, or even incompatible logics’ is reductionist and polarizing (Rossi 2006, 27; Tomalin 2020).

3 ‘Keeping Faith in 2030: Religions and the Sustainable Development Goals’ was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Tomalin, Haustein, and Kidy 2018a, 2018b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/P006418/1].