Concept and Brief History

of Development Studies
by
Ms. Bushra Aman

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 Introduction
• Development Studies describes a field that includes multi-, inter-
and trans-disciplinary approaches to economic growth, basic
needs, inequality, human development, rights, resources,
livelihoods and sustainability, focusing mainly, but not exclusively,
on ‘developing’ countries.
• Development Studies brings together diverse disciplines.
• With roots in anthropology, economics, sociology, politics and
geography, it may also combine with others such as psychology,
law, management, natural science, history, agriculture or
engineering.

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 Introduction
• ‘Development studies’ constitutes a relatively young field.
• The term has been used, since the late 1940s, to describe a
multi-disciplinary field within the social sciences, addressing the
economic, social and political concerns of the developing
countries.
• Emergence of Development studies was influenced by changing
colonial policy, and also by a move towards social democracy
and welfare states within the imperial core which became
defining characteristics of developed countries.

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 Introduction
• The ideas and institutions of development studies were strongly
influenced by the Cold War between the 1940s and the end of
the 1980s,
• and from then on by globalization, neoliberalism, the rise of new,
non-governmental development actors in the 1990s and recent
social market and social entrepreneurial approaches.
• Conventionally, development studies has been more concerned
with the ‘Third World’, ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ of
Africa, Asia and Latin America and less concerned with the
problems of the ‘Global North’ – the European, North American
and Antipodean ‘developed countries.
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 Introduction
• Development Studies is a diverse field of study that takes
‘development’ as its central concern.
• ‘Development’ is a contested concept, which encompasses two
broad sets of concerns.
• The first concerns processes of social, cultural, ecological,
economic and political change.
• Development in this sense can be a normative concept that
implies progressive change, as well as a focus of critique, with
attention to the uneven, contradictory and potentially negative
consequences of development-related change.

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 Introduction
• The second set of concerns relates to the architecture focused
on meeting certain goals, often based around improving the well-
being of people and sustainable use of natural resources.
• This ‘architecture entails a diverse set of actors, including states,
multilateral organizations, non-government organizations,
multinational corporations, small-scale enterprises, community-
based organizations, local volunteers and more.
• The study of intentional development can be oriented towards
working with these groups and individuals to improve
development practice, and/or efforts to reveal the unintended and
potentially negative consequences of development.
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 Introduction
• Although these two sets of concerns can be studied separately,
they are intimately connected and arguably should be studied
together.
• Intentional development is part of broader processes of change;
efforts to understand these processes in their historical and
contemporary context are vital to improving development practice
and revealing its consequences.
• All notions of development are relational global processes that
occur in and between all countries and are influenced by, and
have consequences at, local and individual scales.

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 Historical Origins of Development Studies
• Current patterns of global development have been profoundly
shaped by the history of capitalist and colonial power relations.
• ‘Development’ is conventionally understood as a post-Second
World War artefact, oriented towards national states’ pragmatic
concerns with planned economic growth and international
cooperation.
• However, this post-war agenda was not completely new, but built
upon historical patterns of colonial and imperial rule which
fundamentally structured global and local economies, societies
and cultures over several centuries.

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 Historical Origins of Development Studies
• Imperialism and colonialism profoundly reshaped the
relationships between people, nature and natural resources.
• The colonial concept of development referred to the development
of economic resources.
• ‘Developing’ a territory or region meant ‘opening up’ natural
resources for the colonial economy, mobilizing labour, possibly by
promoting large-scale labour migration and building infrastructure
such as railways, ports and roads to facilitate resource
exploitation.

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 Historical Origins of Development Studies
• Colonial regimes secured their access to resources such as land,
forests, water and minerals by codifying laws, procedures and
institutions of colonial administration, displacing the traditions and
norms that underpinned social relations and people’s access to
livelihood resources.
• Imperialists generally viewed their ‘development’ activities to be
humanitarian and benevolent, a view supported by the expansion
of both missionary activity and social science in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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 Historical Origins of Development Studies
• Social welfare became an explicit consideration with the advent
of a new mode of colonialism, the ‘dual mandate’, which cast the
colonizers in a tutelary, protective role, even as they sought out
resources and profits from their colonies.
• This ambiguous rationale continued into the era of decolonization
under the provisions of ‘trusteeship’.
• The British Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1939
defined trusteeship in terms of a colonial responsibility for
‘minimum standards of nutrition, health and education’.

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 Historical Origins of Development Studies

• After the Second World War, ‘development’ was presented as the

solution to a global problem of ‘underdevelopment’ in a new era of
decolonization and international cooperation.

• An international ‘New Deal’ was promised by the new global

power, the United States.

• At his 1949 inaugural address, President Truman declared that

‘the old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit – has no place
in our plans’.
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 Historical Origins of Development Studies

• Nevertheless, the political and economic self-interest of leading powers

remained important drivers of development in the former colonies and
geopolitical competition influenced the establishment and emergence of
development studies.

• While many consider development studies to be largely an ‘asymmetric

business’ involving Northern social scientists studying Southern
countries’ development problems, important exceptions include the Latin
American ‘dependency school’ and Islamic critiques of western
modernity.
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Thanks
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