Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
distribution of income to be widening. Such a nation may have
grown, but has not developed, as only the elite will have got richer.
•
Self-esteem
is concerned with feelings of self-respect and indepen-
dence. Being developed means not being exploited/controlled by
others - for example, as is the case under colonialism. Similarly the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank dominate economic
policymaking in many developing countries. Also multinational corpo-
rations often exercise a strong controlling influence.
•
Freedom
refers to the ability of people to determine their own des-
tiny. People are not free if they are imprisoned on the margins of
subsistence, with no education and no skills. Expansion of the range
of choice open to individuals is central to development. The majority
not the elite must have choice.
In the words of Chant and McIlwaine (2009) '(i)n short, development
comprises multidimensional advances in societal well-being, many of
which defy precise determination'.
Anti-development stances
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Criticisms of development have been voiced ever since the 1960s. But
there are long antecedents to anti-(Western) developmentalism, stretch-
ing back to the nineteenth century. Anti-development is sometimes also
referred to as post-development and beyond-development (Corbridge,
1997; Blaikie, 2000; Nederveen Pieterse, 2000; Schuurman, 2000, 2008;
Sidaway, 2008).
In essence, the theses of anti-developmentalism are not new since
they are essentially based on the failures of modernization. Thus, anti-
developmentalism is based on the criticism that development is a
Eurocentric Western construction in which the economic, social and politi-
cal parameters of development are set by the West and are imposed on
other countries in a neocolonial mission to normalize and develop them in
the image of the West. Nederveen Pieterse (2000: 175) has commented
that 'Development is rejected because it is the “new religion” of the west'.
In this way, the local values and potentialities of 'traditional' communi-
ties are largely ignored. The central thread holding anti-developmentalist
ideas together is that the discourse or language of development has
been constructed by the West, and that this promotes a specific kind of
intervention 'that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with
