The Post-Development Reader

By Victoria Bawtree, Majid Rahnema, Victoria Bawtree

Book Overview

With the collapse of colonialism, the millions who had joined the struggle accepted their leaders' new call for 'development'. Little today remains of that enthusiasm. The question they now ask is: can anything be done to stop the process and regenerate the forces needed to bring about change more in accordance with their own aspirations?

This Reader brings together an exceptionally gifted group of thinkers and activists - from South and North - who have long pondered these questions. Diverse in background and experience, they are all committed, however, to seeing through the rhetoric of development, free from the distorting lenses of ideology and habit. They are also interested in looking at 'the other side of the story', particularly from the perspective of the 'losers'.

It is these orientations which make this Reader such an original compilation. The contributors illuminate the wisdom of vernacular society which modern development thinking and practice has done so much to denigrate and destroy. They deliver devastating critiques of the dominant development paradigm and what it has done to the peoples of the world and their richly diverse and sustainable ways of living. Most importantly, in terms of the future, they present some of the experiences and ideals out of which ordinary people are now trying to construct their own more humane and culturally and ecologically respectful alternatives to development, which, in turn, may provide useful signposts for those concerned with the post-development era that is now at hand.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1856494748
• ISBN13: 9781856494748
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Zed Books
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Best of Post-development Perspectives

This is an excellent collection of papers by the best known scholars in the tradition of Post-development perspective. It examines critically most of the key conceptual categories of mainstream developmentalism. Various papers also demonstrate how the radical elements of 'alternative development' are coopted by mainstream developmentalism and therefore end up rejecting altogether the idea of development. A clear statement of the perspective of Post-development also helps its critics who, while critical of many aspects of mainstream developmentalism, refuse to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'. Thus The Post-Development Reader is an extremely useful contribution to the literature on development at a time when there is tremendous confusion in development discourses which use the same terms to state very different ideas.

Diverse, multi-faceted

Like its subject, this book is incredibly diverse and many-sided. With so many illustrious contributors, it's hard not to be enlightened.

Mandatory Reading

As an "international development studies" major, I have leared a lot about the issue at my university but have consistently felt that something was missing or maybe wrong. After field experience in rural Bolivia and increasing doubts about the development paradigm, my advisor pointed me to this book (along with Wolfgang Sachs's "Development Dictionary"). At that moment reading these two books, which share much in common, felt like an intellectual revelation. The insights of great authors such as Escobar, Rahnema, Illich, and Shiva felt like a fresh breeze compared to my past studies. The deep insights of the writers have spurred only more questions which have occupied my time and imagination since. Given the stale manner in which development is taught and discussed in the academia and the media, I feel that this book is mandatory for any development student or practitioner regarless of experience or age. It is bound to make you think.

Must have

This book is a must have for anyone critical of the development discourse. Heavy texts from around forty different progressive scholars are accompanied by boxes with excerpts from even more, such radical thinkers and activists. Refreshing and almost invaluable!