Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

by Philip McMichael

Development, today, is increasingly about how we survive the future, rather than how we improve on the past.

will define our existence.

central issue is how effectively policy makers (in states and development agencies) recognize the need for wholesale public coordination of planning to minimize and adapt to inevitable climatic changes.

more as a cacophony rather than a strategic endeavor to reverse our ecological footprint

development is now compromised by public austerity policies across the nation-state system, most recently evident in Greece.

This book is a guide to the rise and transformation of “development” as a powerful instrument of global social change over the last two centuries.

History and Politics

Development had its origins in the colonial era, as European domination came to be understood as superiority and leadership along a development axis.

they have been represented in theory as a set of idealized outcomes to be emulated by other countries.

development’s ends justify its means, however socially and ecologically disruptive the process may be.

Michael Cowan and Robert Shenton’s distinction between development as an unfolding universal social process and development as...

development was understood philosophically as imp...

European political elites interpreted development practically, as a way to socially engineer emerging national societies.

impacts began with the displacement of rural populations by land enclosures for cash cropping, a process that generated “undesirables,” such as menacing paupers, restless proletarians, and unhealthy factory towns.

Development, then, meant balancing technological change and the rise of new social classes, fashioning policies to manage wholesale social transformations.

Europe’s colonies, the inhabitants appeared undeveloped—by

ideological understanding of development legitimized imperial intervention,

social engineerin...

“white man’s burden”—the

Rudyard Kipling—imparting

implied racism remains a part of the normative understanding (and global cons...

the overriding object was either to adapt or marginalize colonial subjects to the European presence.

while industrialism produced new class inequalities within each society, colonialism racialized international inequality. In this way, development introduced new class and racial hierarchies within and across societies.

only became formalized as a project in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1945, the United Nations,

institutionalized the System of National Accounts.

gross national produ...

guise of civilizing inferior races morphed into the de...

self-maximizing consumers.

development is conventionally understood as economic growth and rising consumption.

Development Theory

Identifying development with rising consumption privileges the market as the vehicle of social change.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth o...

markets maximize individual preferences and allocate reso...

a deeply held belief now institutionalized in much development pol...

a belief in markets is a central tenet of liberal Western philosophy.

Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi

modern liberalism rests on a belief in a natural human propensity for self-gain, which translates in economic theory as the market prin...

Second, as Polanyi noted, to naturalize market behavior as an innate propensity discounts other human traits or values—such as cooperation, redistribution, and reciprocity, which are different organizing principles by which human societies have endured for centuries.

idealism of mid-twentieth-century nationalism.

Because of continuing First World dependence on raw materials from the Third World, some societies were more equal than others in their capacity to traverse Rostow’s stages,

this reality that stimulated dependency analysis and world-system analysis.

Dependency was, then, a relationship accounting for the development of Europe at the expense of the underdevelopment of the non-European world.

Human Development Index (HDI),

development theory provides a blueprint, and justification, for universalizing a European-centered process.

Such uprisings marked a long-term politics of decolonization, with colonial subjects gaining moral and material power as countermovements to European empires, which in turn became increasingly costly to maintain.

UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948), by which governments were enjoined to protect civil rights through a social contract between state and citizen.

idealistic contract defined the era of the development project (1940s–1980),

The following era of the globalization project (1980s through the present) saw marke...

tension between these poles continues in what may become a sustainability project