The Gaze of Development after the Cultural Turn

Abstract

Development studies is a multidisciplinary field that interrogates the practices and policies of international development. There is a strong emphasis in the discipline on building theoretical models intended to predict how the manipulation of specific variables may impact on economic growth. With the exception of two theoretical streams with a very marginal status in the field – Post-development and Marxism – it views development as congruent, indeed as isomorphic, with the expansion of the liberal capitalist model on a global scale. In as much as development studies involves a critique of global liberal capitalism, it is a critique of its worst excesses and many of these – poverty, inequality and even exploitation, for example – are viewed as a remnant of earlier economic forms and not as intrinsic to capitalism. Notwithstanding this belief in a benign form of capitalism, it also acknowledges that economic growth on a national or global scale has not reduced inequalities in the distribution of material resources and may even have exacerbated them. In response to this persistence of material inequality, it is centrally concerned with how to ‘lift people out of poverty’ and with erasing the widening material and symbolic inequalities that practitioners, policy makers and academics alike generally regard as the contradictory impacts of development. Given the enormous scope of the development project it is hard to find a discipline that cannot lend itself to the interrogation of development. Its theoreticians include people trained in biology, engineering, health, education, sociology, anthropology, political science, international relations and of course economics. It also engages policy at national and international levels, and has practitioners in government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charities. With such a vast theoretical and practical scope the only unity that development studies can claim is in its attention to the same object – economic development.