ABSTRACT
‘Development’ – as it has typically been applied in practice and constructed in theory – can be seen as a presumptuous idea, but also one which has been the key mechanism for communications, interventions and resource flows between wealthy and less wealthy countries in the post–World War II era. It is criticized for being universalist as it is used globally with the same hallmarks, ethnocentric emerging from a European experience, rigid in that it has a set path to follow, and ideological since it is steeped in neoliberal dogma (Nisbeth 1969; Rist 2014). It habitually hierarchizes countries along income level and juxtaposes ‘developed’ countries against ‘undeveloped’ ones (Duffield 2007). As such it seems obsolete. Yet it seems unavoidable, reinventing itself in spite of cascades of critique (Hettne 1995; Schurman 2001; Pietersee 2009), typically finding its base in ‘development studies’ and/or ‘development theory’. 1
