The Post-Development critique of ‘development’ has been around for more than 30 years now. While it is far from a homogenous school of thought, let alone practice, critical interventions of Post-Development proponents have been widely acknowledged and have punctuated mainstream debates. What is missing, however, is some closer engagement with how ideas and propositions can be translated to practice, and even more specifically, if and how they are reconcilable with logics, structures and institutions of states. In ...

Property relations have long been at the centre of social justice considerations and efforts for socio-economic change. Since the 1990s ethnic minorities who often happen to live in particularly biodiverse regions of the planet have started to challenge these often exploitative relations by claiming formal property rights based on territorially defined cultural identities. Originally celebrated by various critical schools of thought as a turning point in global neoliberal hegemony and a promising manifestation of ...

Comparing examples from Kenia, Ethiopia and Nigeria, the article examines how displacement through infrastructure projects is being legitimised in development discourse. Three typical justifications are the inevitability of progress, the greater common good and property rights. They are closely linked to elements of development discourse: the transformation of geocultural differences into historical stages, Othering of allegedly backward peoples, the concept of trusteeship and the assumption of the beneficial effects ...

This paper analyses existent and perceived rules and restrictions of the global development dispositif working to maintain inequalities in interactions of International NGOs (INGOs) and Haitian organisations. It does so by exploring constructions of partnership and their clashing realities. Development organisations and agencies have influenced the fabric of Haitian society and politics not only by their mere presence but also by the rules they impose. The paper approaches this by identifying positions of power and ...

20 years ago, the Inspection Panel was founded as a mechanism of accountability for people negatively affected by projects funded by the World Bank. It allows them to call for an investigation if social and environmental standards of the World Bank have not been adhered to and. Its origin can be traced back to pressure exerted by a transnational NGO campaign on US congress in the wake of the Narmada Valley Development Project. While the Panel’s history since then shows that it usually does not have the power to ...

DPS Activist Special I ssue is published alongside the standard academic issue to provide a perspective from an activist positionality on postcolonial and development issues.

The paper seeks to define and situate postdevelopment (PD) theory within the social sciences by discussing its relation to other theoretical approaches. It concludes that PD can be seen to a rather limited extent as a development theory, but rather as a sociology of knowledge of this discipline and a critiqu e of its foundation. PD shares the critique of capitalism with Marxism but also has a more negative view of industrial modernity, its relation to nature, economic growth and productivity. For some, PD is characterized ...