The Rise and Fall of Development Theory

"He has this wonderful and rare capacity to delineate the mostcomplex of arguments in the most limpid prose. He never takes refuge in jargon. Hedemolishes pretentiousness. He is disarmingly honest. He hits you between the eyes.He is not afraid to be a lone voice as, increasingly, nowadays he is, the stillsmall voice of humane sanity in an increasingly barbarous and market-oriented world.He makes immediate sense to anybody voting marginally to the left of Genghis Khan, Mrs. Thatcher or Newt Gingrich." -- John Lonsdale, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

This book is a "stock-taking" ofdevelopment theory at the end of the 20th century. It argues that the assumptions onwhich development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The postcolonial"third world" for which development theory was originally developed hasfractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the postwar regime ofregulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed thescope for state economic intervention. A much broader based, more historical andmore explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for.