ABSTRACT
Development means different things to different people, but everywhere it is associated with ideas of progress and betterment. Development makes people more prosperous, delivers the advantages of modernity (clean water, healthcare, electricity) and, ideally, creates a just society of active and empowered citizens at the same time. In recent decades all of these hopeful visions have been strongly critiqued, and observers from all walks of life have argued that so often, and in so many unanticipated ways, development has failed: More people might have access to electricity and telecommunications, but at the same time the global divide between rich and poor has been growing larger; the world might be more interconnected, and in richer places people are living longer than ever before, yet in many other parts of the world people are dying from diseases long ago eradicated from the minority world. 1
