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Disability and Development: Critical (Dis)Connections

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The Palgrave Handbook of International Development

Abstract

The recent World Report on Disability (WRD) (WHO and World Bank (2011) World Report on Disability. Geneva, WHO) estimates that around 15 % of the world’s population are disabled people, that is, close to 1 billion people. Some 80 % of these are located in the Global South, many living in rural areas in conditions of poverty and extreme poverty. International development, though, has been slow to acknowledge the links with disability as a legitimate development issue and concern, and slower to engage with it discursively, theoretically, and in practice. This chapter draws from Critical Disability Studies and Postcolonial perspectives to explore the connections between disability and development. It critically discusses a number of issues in the disability/development nexus and gaps arising when articulating a debate around disability in the Global South in order to raise questions and seeks to generate much needed critical debate in and around ‘disability and development’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Drawing from a social constructionist perspective, this social model as it came to be known (Oliver 1996), removes impairment (the biological condition) from the disability equation. Instead, it politicises disability as ‘an expression of wider socio-economic, political and cultural formations of…the exclusion of people with impairments’ (Goodley 2007: 5). Breaking away from the monopolistic throes of medicalisation, the problem is no longer seen as an individual one located in one’s body, but one triggered by a disabling society erecting attitudinal, physical, and institutional barriers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Critical Institute, Malta, UK

    Shaun Grech

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  1. Shaun Grech
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, United Kingdom

    Jean Grugel

  2. Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Daniel Hammett

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Grech, S. (2016). Disability and Development: Critical (Dis)Connections. In: Grugel, J., Hammett, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_29

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