1 Introduction
Our aim in this Handbook of International Development is to present some of the very best scholarship in the broad and interdisciplinary field of international development. The authors within this Handbook have made enormous contributions, over many years, to shaping academic debates, teaching and the ‘doing’ of international development. All of our contributors willingly accepted a demanding brief from us—to write a relatively short, yet fully comprehensive and intellectually challenging introduction to a major topic in international development—and their enthusiastic responses to our invitations demonstrated that the time was ripe for a bold restatement of the field and a collection that would showcase some of the most vital areas of research and teaching in the field.
There are two reasons above all for a new Handbook of International Development. The first is that, as we wrote this collection, a new era in international development was opening up: the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should mark a new era in global development and set out the most comprehensive understanding of the content and the processes of development to date. Negotiated through a more inclusive global process than their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs propose an ambitious and inclusive set of 169 targets for development within 17 broad themes:
- End poverty in all its forms, everywhere.
- End hunger, achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture.
- Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being.
- Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education.
- Achieve gender equality.
- Ensure the availability and sustainable management of water.
- Ensure access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy for all.
- Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work.
- Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation.
- Reduce inequality within and between countries.
- Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
- Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
- Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
- Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
- Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
- Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
- Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.
The SDGs will shape government targets, civil society activism and societal expectations in the field of international development for the next generation.
As we note elsewhere, the new SDGs require ‘a greater understanding of development needs and practices [that] can better sustain a new agenda for change, and a key step in this process is to identify priorities [and] new and longstanding knowledge gaps, to help orient decision-making processes and funding allocation in academia and beyond’ (Oldekop et al. 2015). They bury the idea, once and for all, that development is solely about aid or finding a technical ‘fix’ for poverty and they set a genuinely new approach to development. To quote from our paper with Oldekop et al. (2015), the SDGs suggest that any solution to global poverty must be ‘embedded in long-term strategies that combine inclusive and sustained economic growth, social development, and environmental protection’. The increasing focus on ‘green growth’ as well as efforts to develop alternative measures of both economic progress and rights-based development implicate developed and low- and medium-income countries in radically new ways (Oldekop et al. 2015).
The SDGs are not a panacea to development challenges and have already been criticised for failing to present an adequately progressive alternative vision to neo-liberal development thinking. Informed by this thinking, McCloskey (2015: 186) argues:
The development sector’s preoccupation with overseas development assistance has diverted our efforts away from larger, arguably more significant issues for the global South such as illicit financial flows, debt and unfair trade rules. Above all, we have failed to relate the dominant neoliberal economic model to persistent levels of poverty and climate change. Unless the SDGs come to terms with these larger obstacles to development they will fail to meet their targets.
Others from within civil society have set out an even stronger and more direct critique. The advocacy movement Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement) pre-empted the announcement of the SDGs by setting out an agenda for development based on an analysis of global power. In their report, The Poor are Getting Richer and Other Dangerous Delusions (Global Justice Now 2015), the SDGs were castigated as ‘business as usual’ for failing to sufficiently challenge the global distribution of wealth and power and therefore being inadequate to tackle global inequality (http://​www.​globaljustice.​org.​uk/​resources/​poor-are-getting-richer-and-other-dangerous-delusions).
We certainly share some of those criticisms. Like Kothari (2015), we are particularly concerned that the rights of migrant workers, refugees and others fleeing climate change and conflict are insufficiently addressed. We would also contend that the rights of women, the disabled, the infirm, the young, as well as adolescent caregivers and workers all require further attention.
While the SDGs are not, in themselves, the radical promise of redistribution that the world needs for reasons of survival and equity—rather they are infused with the compromises, adjustments and consensual language that come with the terrain of international negotiations—their progressive potential lies in the efforts of global society to realise them in particular ways. The SDGs provide a template for demanding more intensive, focused action by governments and civil society to tackle some of the pressing challenges around global inequalities and to hold power-holders to account. For this promise to be made real, we need knowledge, information and activism. This book, therefore, sets out to contribute new knowledge that is useful to scholars and practitioners in pushing the SDG agenda as far as it can go towards fair and equitable international development policies during the next decade and beyond.
There is another, equally significant, reason why we believe that this Handbook is needed and it is this: the field of international development has never been as alive, diverse, dynamic and interdisciplinary; nor has it been so open to new ideas, approaches and concepts. It is for this reason that our contributors come from sociology, geography, politics, international relations (IR), law, political economy, education, migration studies, global health and economics, as well as international development itself. International development has become a meeting point for social science and a site of new insights about how the social world works and the interconnectedness between society and the planet we inhabit. We wanted, in short, to celebrate the richness of the field. Our intention, along with all our collaborators in this volume, was to showcase outstanding and thoughtful contributions to social science-led debates in, around and for a more just global world.
2 Our Vision of International Development
We do not intend here to pre-empt or summarise the contributions of the various chapters in this Handbook. Instead, we briefly set out our own approach to international development, outlining the framing we have adopted in some of our own works and engagement with development (Fontana et al. 2016; Grugel and Piper 2007, 2009, 2011; Piper and Grugel 2015; Grugel and Uhlin 2012; Hammett 2007, 2008, 2014a; Hammett et al. 2015; Shortt and Hammett 2013; Staeheli and Hammett 2013). It is important in the context of this Handbook since we were not random in our selection. Extensive as it is, this volume does not cover every single topic that could fall under the rubric of international development; no Handbook could achieve that task. Instead, we have tried to incorporate not only a range of the more established and crucial issues facing scholars and practitioners but also a series of emergent concerns and issues that are likely to be of increasing importance within the field.
At its core, our understanding of international development is founded on a belief that notions of development should be conceptualised as a creative space for the promotion and realisation of a fairer and more just world. Fundamental to this vision is our belief that international development scholarship should not only critically engage with the structural concerns and obstacles to development and equality but also place the multiple, lived experiences of ordinary people at the heart of these engagements, allowing understandings and recommendations to be grounded in the daily realities and contextual experiences of individuals affected by development planning, policy and practice. In other words, international development should be, above all, a contribution to the creation of more socially just and sustainable global society that puts the needs and rights of ordinary people first.
To deliver this ambitious agenda, international development research must engage with the multiscalar, multiactor struggles for justice whilst simultaneously making visible the injustices reproduced through current social arrangements. Underpinning these efforts is a need to rigorously engage and explore contemporary injustices, whether social, economic, political, cultural or environmental and the global pathologies of power that uphold and replicate them (Farmer 2004). In developing this understanding, we draw inspiration, for example, from scholars such as Nancy Fraser (2000) who insists that injustice and exploitation across economic, political and cultural terrains are actively institutionalised through the intersections between the ‘rules’ of the global market and the enforcement of conservative ideologies, misogynistic social values and practices, racialised fears of the ‘other’ and global discourses of (in)security. This thinking reminds us why a ‘global sense of place’ and geographies of connection matter (Massey 1994), that geographies of responsibility and the ethics of development are not simply about those closest to us but are owed to those who may be distant from us but who are affected by our (in)actions (Bosco 2007; Massey 2004) and that development is not somehow happening somewhere else or those who are the object of international development ‘other’ to ourselves (Payne and Phillips 2010). Instead, we contend that we are all implicated in international development, and both the development and outcomes of development policies and practices affect (and are affected by) people around the world, whether in the ‘global north’ or ‘global south’.
Our thinking, therefore, is not solely aligned to key thinkers who have emphasised the significance of the global division of material and cultural r...