1.

1 MEANINGS OF
DEVELOPMENT
Introduction: The Rough Guide
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Definition of Development
International development is the journey the world must take in order for
poor countries to become prosperous countries. At the very least it’s about
making sure that the most basic things that we take for granted can also
be taken for granted by everyone else in the world. People in all countries
should have food on their plate every day; a roof over their heads at night;
schools for their children; doctors, nurses and medicines when they are sick;
jobs which bring money into the home. International development –
sometimes called global development – describes the collective efforts of
all countries which are working to free people from poverty. (Wroe and
Doney, 2005)

The quotation above is taken from The Rough Guide to a Better

World, which was produced by Rough Guides and the Department for
International Development (DFID), the UK Government agency for
development. The extract first emphasizes that international devel-
opment is something that has to be pursued by the world as a whole.
It continues by highlighting the desirability of poor countries becom-
ing prosperous ones, stressing that incomes and standards of living
are important components of development. The definition then sug-
gests that development involves making sure people have the basic
things they need, like food, housing, schools, health care and jobs.
Finally, freeing people from the grip of poverty is seen as a vital task
of development.
The quotation witnesses that a major use of the word ‘development’
is at the global scale. The principal division of the world is between
so-called relatively rich ‘developed nations’ and the relatively poor
Copyright 2012. SAGE Publications Ltd.

‘developing nations’. Overcoming this divide is frequently understood

to involve stages of advancement and evolution. At the simplest level
developed countries are seen as assisting the developing countries by
means of development aid, in an effort to reduce poverty, unemployment,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG
AN: 775768 ; Potter, Robert B..; Key Concepts in Development Geography
Account: s6390179.main.ehost

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 18 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 1.1 Meanings of Development

inequality and other indicators of ‘underdevelopment’. A key part of

this is making sure that the basic needs of the people are being met.
All of these aspects of development are alluded to in the Rough Guide/
DFID definition.
But in day-to-day terms what exactly is meant by ‘development’?
Have views of, and attitudes toward, development changed markedly
over the years? Who is development for? Do global institutions, national
governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), firms and indi-
viduals understand the word ‘development’ to mean much the same
thing? These issues are the focus in this chapter.

The Modern Origins of the

Process of Development
The origins of the modern process of development lie in the late 1940s.
The so-called ‘modern era’ of development is often directly linked to a
speech made by the then United States President, Harry Truman in
1949 (Potter et al., 2008). In this, Truman employed the term ‘underde- 19
veloped areas’ to describe what was soon to be referred to as the Third
World. In his speech, Truman made clear what he saw as the duty of
the developed world or ‘West’ (see Chapter 1.3) to bring ‘development’
to such relatively underdeveloped countries.
Colonialism may be defined as the exercise of direct political control
and the administration of an overseas territory by a foreign state (see
also Chapter 1.3). Thus, effectively Truman was emphasizing a new
colonial – a neocolonial – role for the USA within the newly independ-
ent countries that were emerging from the process of decolonization.
Truman was encouraging the so-called ‘underdeveloped nations’ to turn
to the USA and the West generally for long-term assistance, rather
than to the socialist world or ‘East’, based on Moscow and the USSR.
The genesis of much of development theory and practice lay in the
period between 1945 and 1955 and what is referred to as the period of
high modernism. Modernism may be defined as the belief that develop-
ment is about transforming ‘traditional’ countries into ‘modern,
Westernised nations’. For many Western governments, particularly
former colonial powers, such views represented a continuation of the
late colonial mission to develop colonial peoples within the concept of

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 19 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 Key Concepts in Development Geography

trusteeship (Cowen and Shenton, 1995). Trusteeship can be defined as

the holding of property on behalf of another person or group, with the
belief that the latter will better be able to look after it themselves at
some time in the future. At this stage there was little recognition that
many traditional societies might, in fact, have been content with the
way of life they already led.

The Origins of Development in

the Enlightenment
The origins of modern development, however, undoubtedly lay in an
earlier period, specifically with the rise of rationalism and humanism
that was held to have occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. During this period, the simple definition of development as change
became transformed into the idea of more directed and logical forms of
evolution. Collectively, the period when these changes took place is
referred to as the Enlightenment.
20 The Enlightenment generally refers to a period of European intellectual
history that continued through most of the eighteenth century (Power,
2003). In broad terms, Enlightenment thinking stressed the belief that
science and rational thinking could progress human groups from barbari-
anism to civilization. It was the period during which it came to be increas-
ingly believed that by applying rational, scientific thought to the world,
change would become more ordered, predictable and meaningful.
The new approach challenged the power of the clergy and largely
represented the rise of a secular (that is a non-religious) intelligentsia.
The threads that made up Enlightenment thinking included the pri-
macy of reason/rationalism; the belief in empiricism (gaining knowl-
edge through observation); the concept of universal science and reason;
the idea of orderly progress; the championing of new freedoms; the ethic
of secularism; and the notion that all human beings are essentially the
same (Hall and Gieben, 1992; Power, 2003).
Those who did not conform to such views were regarded as ‘tradi-
tional’ and ‘backward’. As an example of this, the indigenous Aborigines
in Australia were denied any rights to the land they occupied by the
invading British in 1788, because they did not organize and farm in
what was seen as a systematic, rational Western manner. It was at this
point that the whole idea of development became directly associated

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 20 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 1.1 Meanings of Development

with Western values and ideologies. Thus, Power (2003: 67) notes that
the ‘emergence of an idea of “the West” was also important to the
Enlightenment … it was a very European affair which put Europe and
European intellectuals at the very pinnacle of human achievement’.
Thus, development was seen as being directly linked to Western reli-
gion, science, rationality and principles of justice.
In the nineteenth century, the ideas of the natural scientist Charles
Darwin on evolution began to emerge, stressing gradual change
towards something more appropriate for future survival (Esteva, 1992).
When combined with the rationality of Enlightenment thinking, the
result became a narrower but ‘correct’ way of development, one based
on Western social theory. During the Industrial Revolution, this
became heavily economic in its nature. But by the late nineteenth cen-
tury, a clear distinction seems to have emerged between the notion of
‘progress’, which was held to be typified by the unregulated chaos of
pure capitalist industrialization, and ‘development’, which was repre-
sentative of Christian order, modernization and responsibility (Cowen
and Shenton, 1995; Preston, 1996).
It is this latter notion of development that began to characterize the
colonial mission from the 1920s onwards, equating development in over- 21
seas lands with an ordered progress towards a set of standards laid
down by the West. Esteva views this as amounting to ‘robbing people of
different cultures of the opportunity to define the terms of their social
life’ (Esteva, 1992: 9). Little recognition was given to the fact that ‘tra-
ditional’ societies had always been responsive to new and more produc-
tive types of development. Indeed, had they not been so, they would not
have survived. Furthermore, the continued economic exploitation of the
colonies made it virtually impossible for such development towards
Western standards and values to be achieved. In this sense, underdevel-
opment was the creation of development, as would later be argued by
dependency theorists such as André Gunder Frank (see Chapter 2.2).

Conventional Development: ‘Authoritative

Intervention’ and Economic Growth
In his speech of 1949, President Truman stated directly that the under-
developed world’s poverty is ‘a handicap and threat both to them and
more prosperous areas … greater production is the key to prosperity and

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 21 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 Key Concepts in Development Geography

peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous
application of modern scientific and technical knowledge’ (Porter, 1995).
Enlightenment values were thus combined with nineteenth-century
humanism to justify the new trusteeship of the neocolonial mission, a
mission that was to be accomplished by authoritative intervention, pri-
marily through the provision of advice and aid programmes suggesting
how development should occur (Preston, 1996). Clearly, the ‘modern
notion of development’ had a long history.
It is, therefore, perhaps not too surprising that, in its earliest mani-
festation in the 1950s development became synonymous with economic
growth. One of the principal ‘gurus’ of this approach, Arthur Lewis, was
uncompromising in his interpretation of the modernizing mission, ‘it
should be noted that our subject matter is growth, and not distribution’
(Esteva, 1992: 12). In other words, increasing incomes and material
wealth were seen as being of far more importance than making sure
that such income was fairly or equitably spread within society. During
the second half of the twentieth century, therefore, the development
debate came to be dominated by economists.
The prominence and influence of development economics in the 1950s
22 and 1960s have clear repercussions on the way in which underdevel-
oped countries were identified and described, a point covered in
Chapter 1.3. The earliest and, for many, still the most convenient way
of quantifying underdevelopment has been through the level of Gross
National Product (GNP) per capita pertaining to a nation or territory.
This can broadly be seen as measuring income per head of the popula-
tion and its method of calculation is explained in Chapter 1.2.

Wider Definitions of Development:

Social Well-being and Freedoms
Classical economic-inspired approaches thus dominated development
thinking in the 1940s and 1950s, based on concepts such as moderniza-
tion theory, and top-down development. Little changed until the 1960s
when, in the wake of the Vietnam War and a number of other develop-
ments, radical dependency approaches were advanced (see Chapter
2.2). The approach argued that the development of the West had acted
as an inhibitor of development in the emerging developing world. The
1970s then witnessed another counter movement, one that argued that

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 22 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 1.1 Meanings of Development

development should be based on local resources rather than economic

efficiency – giving rise to development from below, rural-based develop-
ment, and eco-development, something that would later become sus-
tainable development.
Accordingly, the 1970s and 1980s saw the appearance of a whole
series of social indicators of development, including those relating to
health, education and nutrition. The argument that development is
more than economic growth was advanced on a number of fronts. The
main issue is that even with growth and the provision of more goods
and services, it depends how these are distributed between different
members and groups of the society. This emerging view was reflected
in the derivation of the Human Development Index (HDI) as an overall
multidimensional measure of development (see Chapter 1.2). In this,
income is still included as a measure of standard of living, but as one of
three major variables: the other two measuring health (life expectancy)
and knowledge/education (literacy, educational enrolment).
Eventually, such social indicators were broadened to incorporate
measures of environmental quality, political and human rights and
gender equality. This has recently been fully explored by the Nobel
Laureate in economics, Amartya Sen (1999), in Development as 23
Freedom, where he argues that ‘Development consists of the removal of
various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little opportunity of
exercising their reasoned agency’ (Sen, 1999: xii). In this view freedom
is defined in terms of certain human and civil rights that must be guar-
anteed for all. Above all, people must have the opportunity to be fit,
healthy and educated. For Sen (2000) development consists of the
removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people little choice
and few real opportunities. Sen’s emphasis is on the need for instru-
mental freedoms – those that will make a difference to peoples’ lives.
The need for an understanding of the multidimensional nature of
development had in fact been clearly outlined by Goulet in his book The
Cruel Choice: a New Concept on the Theory of Development (1971). In this
he recognized three components of development, these broadly equating
with the economic, followed by personal and wider societal freedoms:

•• Life sustenance is concerned with the provision of basic needs.

No nation can be regarded as developed if it cannot provide its
people with housing, clothing, food and education. This is, of
course, closely related to the issue of distribution within society. It
is perfectly possible for a poor country to be growing fast, yet its

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 23 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 Key Concepts in Development Geography

distribution of income to be widening. Such a nation may have

grown, but has not developed, as only the elite will have got richer.
•• Self-esteem is concerned with feelings of self-respect and indepen-
dence. Being developed means not being exploited/controlled by
others – for example, as is the case under colonialism. Similarly the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank dominate economic
policymaking in many developing countries. Also multinational corpo-
rations often exercise a strong controlling influence.
•• Freedom refers to the ability of people to determine their own des-
tiny. People are not free if they are imprisoned on the margins of
subsistence, with no education and no skills. Expansion of the range
of choice open to individuals is central to development. The majority
not the elite must have choice.

In the words of Chant and McIlwaine (2009) ‘(i)n short, development

comprises multidimensional advances in societal well-being, many of
which defy precise determination’.

24
Anti-development stances
Criticisms of development have been voiced ever since the 1960s. But
there are long antecedents to anti-(Western) developmentalism, stretch-
ing back to the nineteenth century. Anti-development is sometimes also
referred to as post-development and beyond-development (Corbridge,
1997; Blaikie, 2000; Nederveen Pieterse, 2000; Schuurman, 2000, 2008;
Sidaway, 2008).
In essence, the theses of anti-developmentalism are not new since
they are essentially based on the failures of modernization. Thus, anti-
developmentalism is based on the criticism that development is a
Eurocentric Western construction in which the economic, social and politi-
cal parameters of development are set by the West and are imposed on
other countries in a neocolonial mission to normalize and develop them in
the image of the West. Nederveen Pieterse (2000: 175) has commented
that ‘Development is rejected because it is the “new religion” of the west’.
In this way, the local values and potentialities of ‘traditional’ communi-
ties are largely ignored. The central thread holding anti-developmentalist
ideas together is that the discourse or language of development has
been constructed by the West, and that this promotes a specific kind of
intervention ‘that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 24 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 1.1 Meanings of Development

the deployment of terms of power and intervention, resulting in the

mapping and production of Third World societies’ (Escobar, 1995: 212).
Thus, Escobar argues, development has ‘created abnormalities’ such as
poverty, underdevelopment, backwardness, landlessness and has pro-
ceeded to address them through what is regarded as being a normaliza-
tion programme that denies the value of local cultures. Here the
anti-developmentalist in general, and Escobar in particular, places
great emphasis not only on grassroots participation but more specifi-
cally on new social movements as the media of change.
Usefully the anti-development movement has brought about a
re-emphasis on the importance of the local in the development process,
as well as the important skills and values that exist at this level. It also
reminds us of what can be achieved at the local level in the face of the
‘global steamroller’, although few such successes are free of modernist
goals or external influences.

key points

•• The Rough Guide to a Better World stresses that development is 25

something that has to be pursued by the world as a whole, in both
material and wider terms.
•• The origins of what we understand as international development lie
in the Enlightenment period, which occurred in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and stressed a belief in science, rationality,
and ordered progress. It was thus a very European view of progress.
•• The modern idea of development came about from the late 1940s and
the so-called era of modernity.
•• Early views of development emphasized economic growth and pros-
perity. From the 1960s onward, wider definitions involving social
well-being and freedom were increasingly stressed.
•• There have always been critics of the development mission, and they
are today voiced in the form of ‘anti-development’.

further reading

The Rough Guide/DFID Rough Guide to a Better World provides an inte-

resting and generally very accessible starting point for the interested
reader (Wroe and Doney, 2005) and is downloadable from the DFID

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 25 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM

 Key Concepts in Development Geography

website (www.dfid.uk.gov). Helpful wider academic accounts are to be

found in Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine (2009) Geographies of
Development in the 21st Century: an Introduction to the Global South
(Chapter 1) and Rob Potter et al.’s (2008) Geographies of Development:
an Introduction to Development Studies (Chapter 1). A somewhat more
advanced treatment is provided in Chapters 1 and 2 of Rethinking
Development Geographies (2003) by Marcus Power.

26

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/26/2020 2:14 PM via UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

02-Potter-4351-Sec 01.indd 26 15/02/2012 11:25:22 AM