Geographies of Development

An Introduction to Development Studies

Robert Potter, Tony Binns, Jennifer A. Elliott, Etienne Nel, David W. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000024180
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its fourth edition, Geographies of Development: An Introduction to Development Studies remains a core, balanced and comprehensive introductory textbook for students of Development Studies, Development Geography and related fields. This clear and concise text encourages critical engagement by integrating theory alongside practice and related key topics throughout. It demonstrates informatively that ideas concerning development have been many and varied and highly contested - varying from time to time and from place to place.

Clearly written and accessible for students, who have no prior knowledge of development, the book provides the basics in terms of a geographical approach to development what situation is, where, when and why. Over 200 maps, charts, tables, textboxes and pictures break up the text and offer alternative ways of showing the information. The text is further enhanced by a range of pedagogical features: chapter outlines, case studies, key thinkers, critical reflections, key points and summaries, discussion topics and further reading.

Geographies of Development continues to be an invaluable introductory text not only for geography students, but also anyone in area studies, international studies and development studies.

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PART I

Conceptualising development: changing meanings of development

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Chapter 1

Questioning development

Having outlined the overall aims and the structure of Geographies of Development in the Introduction, the present chapter provides a background context for understanding the evolving nature, changing conceptualisation and meaning of development and the degree to which contextual change has shaped its focus. This account provides an overarching context for the chapters that make up the rest of this book on development studies. This initial chapter is about the ways in which actors in the development process think about development: how they seek to define it, determine its components and conceptualise its purpose. It is also about understanding fundamental critiques of development, or so-called ‘post-development’ and ‘anti-development’. Factors influencing current conceptualisations of development are explored, as is the globalisation of the development agenda through the Millennium Development Goals and, more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals. In the second half of the chapter, the spatial expression of development in the form of the Third World, Developing World, Global South and Poor Countries is considered in the light of current patterns and processes of development. More specifically the chapter:

Overviews how development has been, and can be defined and conceptualised for academic and policy-related purposes;

Explores how development has been measured, from quantitative counts of relative wealth per person such as Gross Domestic Product/Gross National Product/Gross National Income (GDP/GNP), to the Human Development Index (HDI) and the qualitative conception of development as ‘freedom’ and human rights;

Overviews how development has been defined over time and how its application has evolved as a result of theoretical advances and applied considerations;

Seeks to make readers aware of recent critiques of development, such as those presented by anti-development and post-development;

Stresses that while general indicators show that the developing world has witnessed substantial socio-economic improvements as a whole since the 1970s, during that same period the world has become progressively more unequal;

Introduces the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as an agreed set of global development targets adopted in 2000, and reviews the degree to which they had obtained their objectives by 2015;

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Overviews the focus of the Sustainable Development Goals introduced in 2015;

Reviews and assesses the genesis and nature of spatial categorisations of development such as the ‘Third World’, ‘Developing Countries’, the ‘Global South’ and ‘Poor Countries’;

Finishes by linking geography and development through a concern with what we may refer to as ‘distant others’ – people who live far away from us.

Introduction: from ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘development’ to ‘post-development’

The application and pursuit of the concept of ‘development’ has been one of the defining features of the modern world. While the concept of development is used in various fields to detail processes of change – such as in the disciplines of psychology and education – in geography, economics and the work of international organisations it relates to efforts to bring about changes which impact on the well-being of countries and their inhabitants. The type of changes required, their focus and the strategies needed to achieve them are the subject of debate and underlie the evolving and often contested nature of development which we overview in this chapter.

This chapter first looks at the ways in which the term ‘development’ has been defined and characterised. This proceeds from the simple consideration of the general use of the word ‘development’ in everyday life. Following on from this, the major focus of the chapter is on a detailed overview of the multifarious approaches that have been adopted, over time, to implement changing conceptualisations of what development is. This section considers the changing interpretations of how development has been understood, measured and applied since the Second World War. The role played by broader political and economic processes also helps to shape the discussion.

A closely related argument is that such development initiatives have not worked effectively in the past, and indeed (by definition) the view that the types of development attempted could never ultimately be successful, is considered. This line of argument is referred to as ‘anti-development’, ‘post-development’, or ‘beyond development’, and is associated with what has been referred to as the ‘impasse in development studies’ (Schuurman, 2008; Power, 2003). In addition, we need to acknowledge that ‘development’ is not an apolitical or neutral process. It has been influenced by key global concerns and economic shifts since the Second World War, including, amongst others, the Cold War, the rise of neo-liberalism as the dominant economic discourse in the world, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and, more recently, incipient signs of post-neo-liberalism.

As part of this discussion, efforts to improve conditions in developing countries are considered, specifically in respect of what were known as the International Development Targets or, more commonly now, the Sustainable Development Goals (which superseded the Millennium Development Goals in 2016).

The current state of the gap existing between the poorer and richer nations of the world is also examined in this chapter, with emphasis being placed on whether conditions are improving or worsening, that is ‘converging’ (getting more similar) or ‘diverging’ (getting more varied), at the international scale.

In the latter part of the chapter, spatial aspects of development and development initiatives are considered in detail. Such an approach involves interrogating the utility of terms such as the ‘Third World’, ‘Developing World’, ‘Global South’, ‘Poor Countries’ and the like. Globally speaking, to which spaces do these sorts of terms apply? Are they helpful labels? Which terms have the widest currency at the present time?

The chapter finishes with a brief discussion of the changing relationships between geography and development. It is the express aim of this chapter to set out a number of major themes that will have pertinence at many points in the rest of the book.

The meanings of the word ‘development’

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines the word ‘development’ as ‘[g]radual unfolding, fuller working out; growth; evolution . . . ; well-grown state, stage of advancement; product; more elaborate form . . . ; Development area, one suffering from or liable to severe unemployment’.

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Figure 1.1 Global divisions: The North and South, 2010

Source: Adapted from Willy Brandt, North-South: A Program for Survival, figure ‘Models on the 1980s: North and South; core, periphery and semi-periphery’, © 1980 The Independent Bureau on International Development Issues, by permission of the MIT Press and also from North-South: A Programme for Survival, Pan, (Brandt, W. 1980). Copyright © W. Brandt, 1980, by permission of Pan Macmillan.

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As this dictionary definition suggests all too clearly, ‘development’ is a word that is almost ubiquitous within the English language. People talk about the ‘development of the child’ and the ‘development of the self’. Many firms have ‘research and development’ divisions, in which the creation and evolution of new products, from sports trainers and car exhausts to laptop computers and mobile phones, is the specific focus of attention.

Turning to the level of the state, ‘physical development (land use) plans’ are produced; so too are ‘national economic development plans’, dealing with the economy as a whole. These sorts of plans are expressly designed to guide the process of development and change in the sense of unfolding and working out how things should be in the future. In this sense, development has a close connection with planning. Planning itself may be defined as foreseeing and guiding change (Hall, 1982; Potter, 1985; Pugh and Potter, 2003).

In the arena of development policy, development processes are influenced by development planning, and most plans are in turn shaped by the prevailing development theories that ultimately reflect the way in which development is perceived; in other words, by what we may refer to as the ideology of development. Prevailing ideologies, such as belief in state determined leadership – called Keynesiasm (after the economic theorist Keynes whose ideas were implemented after the Great Depression in the 1930s), and neo-liberalism (which is defined later, but broadly refers to support for and reliance on market forces as opposed to state control), have shaped how development is understood and the associated strategies and mechanisms deemed necessary to achieve it.

However, the development process is affected by many factors other than ideologies (Tordoff, 1992), although ideologies often condition state and institutional reactions to these. The precise nature of development theories, development strategies and development ideologies forms the subject of the review of development theories and strategies that is provided in Chapter 3.

Applied development in terms of efforts to bring about changes in physical and human conditions (e.g. building roads and improving education provisions, etc.) is undertaken in all countries, however, in terms of the focus of this book, our primary focus is on the application of the term ‘development’ at the global scale. At this level, development is conceived of as an approach to respond to and address one of the main divisions of the world, between the so-called ‘developed nations’ commonly referred to as the ‘Global North’ (i.e. North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, sometimes referred to as the ‘West’) and ‘developing nations’ often referred to as the ‘Global South’, which is manifest in a range of economic, social and political scores (see Figure 1.1.). In this sense development is frequently understood to involve stages of advancement and evolution, as in the dictionary definition provided at the beginning of this section. At the simplest level, countries of the North are seen as assisting the countries of the South by means of development aid, in an effort to reduce unemployment and other indicators of ‘underdevelopment’. In recognising this argument, and whilst not denying the value of improvements in health, education, transport, etc., we must however be conscious of the fact that such an approach has traditionally privileged conceptions of ‘development’ held by the North and assumed that their interventions are appropriate and even desirable in...