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Five Assumptions of Dominant Thinking in International Development

Development Aims and scope

Abstract

Lawrence Haddad analyzes two key global crises of the past few years: climate change and the global financial crisis. He challenges five mainstream assumptions about development thinking and assesses how they have emerged from these on-going stress tests.

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Notes

  1. This article is written as a part of a project called ‘Reimagining Development’, funded by IDS and DFID. A series of case studies at 34 places, and spaces is available at http://www.ids.ac.uk/go/research-teams/reimagining-development/reimagining-development-research-sites.

  2. http://media.ft.com/cms/3e3b6ca8-7a08-11de-b86f-00144feabdc0.pdf.

  3. For a post-G20 London conversation with the coiner of the term Washington Consensus, John Williamson, see here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/09/AR2009040903241.html.

  4. See, for example, this quote from one of my Professors at Stanford, Robert Lucas (1988: 3).

  5. Humphrey (2007) notes the women's movement and the green movement as positive influences. And one can think of structural adjustment as a failed idea from the West's emphasis on neo-liberal remedies for its own economies in the 1980s.

  6. See Hulme (2010) for an interesting discussion of the difficulty of governing global knowledge mechanisms.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Naomi Hossein and Sara Walcott for comments on an earlier draft. All errors of fact and logic are mine.

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Challenges five mainstream assumptions about development thinking in view of the global crisis

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Haddad, L. Five Assumptions of Dominant Thinking in International Development. Development 55, 34–44 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.106

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