ABSTRACT

Post-colonial, post-modern and feminist critiques have challenged the ways we theorise and practice development. Development is not just the conclusion of economic logic; its histories reveal a legacy of contested power, illuminating the contemporary battlefields of knowledge.
These essays explore the language of development, its rhetoric and meaning within different political and institutional contexts. The contested ideas behind world development are explained, with illustrative material, sensitive to place and time, chiefly drawn from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
This book examines the power of development to imagine new worlds and to constantly reinvent itself as the solution to problems of national and global disorder.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

Imagining development

part |86 pages

Histories of Development

chapter |18 pages

‘A New Deal in Emotions'

Theory and practice and the crisis of development

chapter |23 pages

Scenes from Childhood

The homesickness of development discourses

chapter |12 pages

Green Development Theory?

Environmentalism and sustainable development

chapter |12 pages

Selective Silence

A feminist encounter with environmental discourse in colonial Africa

part |94 pages

Geographies of Development

chapter |13 pages

Sustainable Disasters?

Perspectives and powers in the discourse of calamity

chapter |27 pages

The Object of Development

America's Egypt

chapter |17 pages

Modernizing Malthus

The World Bank, population control and the African environment

chapter |16 pages

Eurocentrism and Geography

Reflections on Asian urbanization