Development Theory

Most contemporary development theories seek to define the social, economic, or political conditions under which humans, both individually and collectively, are able to realize their potential, build self-confidence, and live with dignity and fulfillment. Such a simple definition, however, obscures the range and conflicting nature of practices that theorists have identified as significant in this pursuit.

The earliest theories of development emerged during the 1950s after the end of World War II. Before this time, there was limited concern for the levels of inequalities in existence among the world's human populations, most of whom were subjects of colonial rule. With decolonization and the emergence of a host of newly independent nation-states that appeared shortly after World War II, inequality, poverty, and standards of living materialized as issues of concern to political leaders and scholars in both the colonizing and postcolonial worlds. Arturo Escobar argued that the emergence of development theories at the end of World War II, however, must also be understood in the[Page 102] context of the cold war, particularly the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for ideological and political supremacy. In this context, Escobar argued that development theory represents more than a humanist desire to spread peace and abundance throughout the world; it is also a social imaginary that historically has been used to justify a host of interventions that have at times been of greater benefit to the First World than to the Third World.

At the heart of all development debates continue to lie two fundamental disagreements. The first disagreement is over the extent to which securing the social conditions for dignity and self-determination should take precedence over creating the conditions for increasing productivity and economic growth. The second disagreement is over the value and meaning of collective and individual dignity and fulfillment itself.

Early development theories were primarily extensions of conventional economic theory that equated development with economic growth and industrialization. Embedded in both Western notions of progress and colonial constructions of race, early development theories viewed the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as undeveloped and in need of significant economic change if they were to emulate the standards of living in existence in Europe and North America. Implicit in early theories was the assumption that development was a natural process that had reached its zenith in the industrialized countries of Europe and North America. As a naturalized process, the idea of development was closely linked to the associations made between science and progress in Anglo-American societies from the 18th century onward. Within this framework, poor countries could find dignity and fulfillment only if they emulated the economic experiences of the developed world and instituted policies to catch up with the West. Modernization theorist Walter Rostow, for example, argued that all countries passed through the same historical stages of economic development and that countries with less material wealth were merely at an earlier stage in this linear historical process. For Rostow, development required a five-step application of policies focused on investment, savings, and the encouragement of an entrepreneurial class. More sophisticated formulations, such as Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis's two-sector model, also constructed the problem of development as the consequence of the lack of accumulation of productive capital and a low savings rate in poor countries. In Lewis's model, the modern sector is typified as progressive, oriented toward industry, and more likely to be the vanguard of wealth creation. In contrast, the traditional sector was characterized by a large supply of unemployed and unproductive labor that was viewed as unlikely to contribute significantly to the development process given its inability to save. By establishing the conditions for capitalists within the modern sector to make profits, Lewis argued that there would be greater levels of reinvestment and available capital. Most modernization models of development made assumptions about the meaning of development that ultimately proved to be deeply problematic. Both Lewis and Rostow, for example, relied on binary differentiations between the modern world and the traditional world that not only were ethnocentric (the modern was seen as Western-like, integral, and progressive, whereas the traditional was seen as non-Western, backward, and residual) but also denied the histories that produced the patterns of uneven development between the First World and Third World and within the Third World itself.

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