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Abstract
Because of the absence of evidence to show for its utility, the notion of ‘development’ has been fraught with many debates over the years. This paper is concerned with re-examining the future of development studies, based on its past and present trajectories. The argument here is that development may be useful if its norms and practices become context-specific and are made to benefit its purported beneficiaries. The chronology spans the period after World War II to the present day, and thus covers theories that envision alternatives. While this chronology is overlapping, we hope to show that development studies has been marked by both continuities and discontinuities.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the casid section of the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Waterloo. Gratitude goes to panel chair and participants for their feedback, as well as to anonymous reviewers of this journal. Appreciation also goes to both the Trudeau Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (sshrc) for the financial support, which came in at the time this paper was being prepared. The usual disclaimer applies, however.
Notes
1. Rist, “Development as a Buzzword.”
2. Duffield, “Racism, Migration and Development.”
3. Cited in Nederveen Pieterse, Jan Development Theory.
4. Woolcock, “The next 10 Years in Development Studies.”
5. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 3.
6. Constructing a set of countries as ‘developed’ presumes that they have reached an ‘end state’ where there is no more ongoing development. But throughout the world countries that are placed in this category are continually seeking improvement, change and greater advancement – socially and economically as well as politically. It is therefore overly simplistic to use such categories without being able to show why one is ‘developed’ and the ‘other’ is ‘developing’. In fact, current trends in the global political economy (eg the rise of bric and the fall of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (piigs) have made this distinction more and more irrelevant. More so, the recently popularised global ‘South’ and global ‘North’ categories may only be useful in terms of geography but certainly cannot provide any logical definition of the social, economic or political conditions of these areas.
7. Bernstein, “Modernization Theory.”
8. Schuurman, “Paradigm Lost, Paradigms Regained?”
9. Broad and Cavanagh, Development Redefined.
10. Sumner, “What is Development Studies?”
11. Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory.
12. Ibid., 5.
13. Simon, “Separated by Common Ground?”
14. Brohman, “Universalism, Eurocentrism, and Ideological Bias.”
15. Huntington 1968; Apter 1968.
16. Fine, “Development as Zombieconomics.”
17. See Said, Orientalism.
18. Andreasson, “Orientalism and African Development Studies.” See also Moore-Sieray, “Towards a Decolonization of Scholarship in Africa.”
19. See an account of ‘academic dependency’ in Alatas, “Academic Dependency”; Alatas, “Academic Dependency in Social Sciences”; and In, “Academic Dependency.”
20. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future.
21. Preston, cited in Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, 8.
22. Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America; Dos Santos, “The Structure of Dependency”; Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment”; and Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.
23. See Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory.
24. Kay and Gwynne, “Relevance of Structuralist and Dependency Theories.”
25. Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform.”
26. Soros, On Globalization.
27. Cited in Broad and Cavanagh, Development Redefined, 10.
28. Escobar, “The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.”
29. Litonjua, “Third World/Global South.”
30. Harvey, “From Globalization to the New Imperialism.”
31. Klein, No Logo; and McMichael, “Globalization and Development Studies.”
32. See, for instance, Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization; and Bhagwati, “Globalization Increases Ethical Outcomes.” See also other supporters, such as World Bank, Globalization, Growth and Poverty; Dollar, “Globalization, Poverty and Inequality”; Dollar and Kraay, “Growth is Good for the Poor”; Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism; and Sachs, The End of Poverty.
33. Bond, “Accumulation by Dispossession in Africa”; and Mensah, “Cultural Dimensions of Globalization in Africa.”
34. Lewis, Race Against Time.
35. Daly, Beyond Growth.
36. Sen, Development as Freedom; Alkire, “Why the Capabilities Approach?”; and Fukuda-Parr, “The Human Development Paradigm.”
37. White, “Depoliticising Development”; Botchway, “The Paradox of Empowerment”; and Cornwall and Brock, “What do Buzzwords do for Development Policy?”
38. Cameron and Haanstra, “Development Made Sexy”; and Rutherford, A World Made Sexy.
39. This is the notion that people in the North, considered better off than majority of the Southern populations, have a responsibility to ‘save’ the poor from their predicaments through several poverty eradication mechanisms, including regular monetary donations and insecticide bed nets, among other poverty handouts.
40. Cameron and Haanstra, “Development Made Sexy.”
41. Singhal, “Women, Gender and Development.”
42. Rathgeber, “wid, wad, gad.”
43. Marchand, “The Future of Gender and Development after 9/11.”
44. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 16.
45. Huntington, “Cultures Count.”
46. Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa.
47. Ibid., 143.
48. Hyden, African Politics in Comparative Perspective.
49. Smith, “Discourses on Development.”
50. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 73.
51. For an account of ‘race’ and the ‘(post)colonial’ in development, see White, “Thinking Race, Thinking Development”; Kothari, “An Agenda for Thinking about ‘Race’ in Development”; and Abrahamsen, “African Studies.”
52. Simon, “Separated by Common Ground?,” 10.
53. See, for instance, Sen, Development as Freedom; Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities”; Nussbaum, “Human Rights and Human Capabilities”; Frediani, “Sen’s Capability Approach”; and Pick and Sirkin, Breaking the Poverty Cycle.
54. Rahnema, “Introduction.”
55. Esteva, “Development.”
56. George, “How the Poor Develop the Rich.”
57. Escobar, “The Making and Unmaking of the Third World,” 91.
58. Escobar, Encountering Development.
59. See, for instance, Illich, “Development as Planned Poverty”; and Escobar, “Planning.”
60. Sachs, “Introduction.”
61. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 111.
62. Ibid., 124.
63. Lind, “Feminist Post-development Thought.”
64. Illich, “Development as Planned Poverty,” 101.
65. Escobar, “Beyond the Search for a Paradigm?”
66. Matthews, ‘Post-development Theory.”
67. See Esteva, “Development”; Escobar, “The Making and Unmaking of the Third World”; Escobar, Encountering Development; Latouche, “Paradoxical Growth”; Sachs, “Introduction”; Rahnema (with Bawtree), The Post-development Reader; Rist, “Development as a Buzzword”; and Illich, “Development as Planned Poverty.”
68. Storey, “Post-development Theory.”
69. Nustad, “Development.”
70. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 1.
71. The deduction we are making here is just from the title of the article, not the content per se, because Fine, “The Developmental State is Dead”, actually argues that, under the post-Washington Consensus spearheaded by Joseph Stiglitz, even the World Bank has begun to consider the state in a more positive light, if cautiously. Hence there is a growing blurring of the market–state dichotomy – and a sense of new Keynesianism.
72. Migdal, “Studying the State,” 227.
73. Escobar, Encountering Development.
74. Latour, Pandora’s Hope.
75. Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, vi.
76. Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory, 7.
77. Collier, The Bottom Billion. See also N. Smith, “The Satanic Geographies of Globalization.” In this article, which is a strong critique of modernisation and globalisation, and an explanation of ‘uneven development’, the argument is that ‘the current fluid pattern of uneven development represents an always fleeting spatial solution to an inherent economic contradiction in the social relations of capital’. What Smith considers the satanic geographies of uneven development is ‘a striking spatialization of the class and race, gender and national relations that make global production a social process” (p 188), a feature that has increasingly become a hallmark of 20th century global geography.
78. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development.