What is it about?
'Development' can mean different things - from planned interventions, to unfolding change. Or rich countries acting upon poorer countries. Historically, an important meaning of 'development' refers to the containment of disorder under capitalist change, and to processes of contestation and resistance during industrialisation. This paper explores the confusion around different meanings of 'development' and contextualises the concept more carefully. It asks whether we can move beyond the question of whether it refers to the idea of unfolding change, or to interventions to try to make things better.
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Why is it important?
This paper detaches the idea of development from the international context and shows how it refers to processes of dislocation and resistance in any society. And that development arises from a dialectic.
Perspectives
I wrote this paper after trying to use the 'Big D' and 'little d' idea in my classes at LSE - as a way of introducing the concept of development in an open-ended, critical way to first year students.
David Lewis
London School of Economics and Political Science
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Big D’ and ‘little d’: two types of twenty-first century development?, Third World Quarterly, June 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2019.1630270.
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