ABSTRACT

This chapter offers an overview of ways in which different types of knowledge have informed understandings of and approaches to development over the course of the twentieth century. By studying how development knowledge has been produced, applied, and adapted, we can learn much about the interests and assumptions that have informed particular development approaches. This, in turn, can help us understand why some approaches have appeared as more promising or more popular than others at certain times. The chapter starts out with a discussion of the ways in which colonial administrators promoted certain types of development-related knowledge and tried to prevent others from being used. It then turns to the ways in which, after the end of formal colonial rule, knowledge became a developmental resource the newly independent nations competed for and applied in the effort to accelerate their respective development processes. It was in this context, with the Cold War looming in the background, that the field of development studies emerged and professionalized. The chapter closes with a look at the challenges to mainstream development thinking and the emergence of alternative forms of development knowledge.