1st Edition

Development Theory and Practice in a Changing World

By Pádraig Carmody Copyright 2019
    266 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    266 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Taking a critical and historical view, this text explores the theory and changing practice of international development. It provides an overview of how the field has evolved and the concrete impacts of this on the ground on the lives of people in the Global South.

    Development Theory and Practice in a Changing World covers the major theories of development, such as modernisation and dependency, in addition to anti-development theories such as post-modernism and decoloniality. It examines the changing nature of immanent (structural) conditions of development in addition to the main attempts to steer them (imminent development). The book suggests that the era of development as a hegemonic idea and practice may be coming to an end, at the same time as it appears to have achieved its apogee in the Sustainable Development Goals as a result of the rise of ultra-nationalism around the world, the increasing importance of securitisation and the existential threat posed by climate change. Whether development can or should survive as a concept is interrogated in the book.

    This book offers a fresh and updated take on the past 60 years of development and is essential reading for advanced undergraduate students in areas of development, geography, international studies, political science, economics and sociology.

    Introduction

    Chapter 1 The Idea of Development and Modernisation

    Chapter 2 Early Critiques: Dependency, World Systems and Alternative Theories of Development

    Chapter 3 The Neoliberal Revolution in Development: Participation, Power and Poverty

    Chapter 4 Impacts of Neoliberalism and the Revival of Modernisation?

    Chapter 5 The Role of the State: "Developmental States", Geopolitics, Industrialisation and Security

    Chapter 6 Deconstructing Development: Postmodernism and Decoloniality

    Chapter 7 Aid, Development and South–South Cooperation?

    Chapter 8 ICT4D: Information Technology for Development?

    Chapter 9 "The Resource Curse": Land, Wealth and Politics

    Chapter 10 Urbanisation and Development: Generative Cities or Slumification?

    Chapter 11 Rural Development and Climate: Crisis and Transcendence?

    Chapter 12 Getting to or After Development?

    Biography

    Pádraig Carmody is Associate Professor in Geography, Head of Department, Fellow and director of the Masters in Development Practice at Trinity College Dublin and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. His research centres on the political economy of globalisation and economic restructuring in Southern and Eastern Africa. He has published in a variety of journals, such as Economic Geography, World Development and Political Geography, amongst others. He has published seven books. The second edition of his New Scramble for Africa has recently been published. He sits of the boards of the Journal of the Tanzanian Geographical Society, African Geographical Review, Political Geography and Geoforum, where he was previously editor-in-chief. He is currently an associate editor of the journal Transnational Corporations, published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

    "This book builds some of the most important bridges between the intellectual work that so badly needs to be in the centre of our discourse on all aspects of development – global hunger, trade, development, urbanisation and the pre-crisis need to link economy, ecology and a global ethics. Its inter-disciplinary character will be particularly welcomed by students anxious to move from good scholarship into the most practical of applications, in both the short term and a hopefully sustainable future. Above all, I welcome it in its challenge to inevitabilities of thought and practice that need to be questioned, and it is a real contribution in that sense to the pluralist scholarship we need."

    President Michael D. Higgins, Republic of Ireland