Blackwell Reference Online

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“Development” is a slippery concept. Is it an ideal, an imagined future toward which institutions and individuals strive? Or is it a destructive myth, anthropology's “evil twin” ( Ferguson 1997) , an insidious, failed chapter in the history of Western modernity ( Escobar 1995) ? Conventionally, “development” may connote improvements in well-being, living standards, and opportunities. It may also refer to processes of commodification, industrialization, modernization, or globalization, and it can be a legitimizing strategy for states. A vision of development as improved well-being, especially in post-colonies, has gradually replaced the one-dimensional economistic measures such as GDP growth, typically favored by neoclassical economists. Influenced by scholars such as Amartya Sen, the United Nations Development Program created a Human Development Index that combines indicators of health, life expectancy, literacy, formal education, political participation, and access to resources. During roughly the same period, a growing coterie of scholars and grass-roots activists, some of them influenced by Michel Foucault's understandings of power, has rejected outright the desirability of “development,” which they see as a destructive and self-serving discourse propagated by bureaucrats and aid professionals that permanently entraps the poor in a vicious circle of passivity and misery. Some ... log in or subscribe to read full text