theorists claimed to see considerable problems
with any sort of dependency approach
(Corbridge, 1986). Nonetheless, central argu-
ments put forward by dependency theorists
continue to haunt manydevelopmentdebates
today (Gwynne, Klak and Shaw, 2003). jgl
Suggested reading
Corbridge (1986); Evans (1979); Frank (1967);
Gwynne, Klak and Shaw (2003); Kay (1989);
Wallerstein (1979).
desertification A term coined in 1949 to
refer to an extreme form of ‘savannization’,
the conversion of forest into savanna, involv-
ing severe soil erosion and the invasion of
dryland plants. The Sahel drought andfamine
of the early 1970s triggered concern about
advance of the Sahara, and extensive scientific
debate about bio-geo-physicalfeedback(the
effect of land-use changes on atmospheric
processes because of dust, surface reflectance
or other factors). This environmental narrative
had great power with policy-makers (Swift,
1996). Current understanding (e.g. in the
UN Convention to Combat Desertification,
1994) distinguishes between long-term large-
scale climatic processes that create desert
conditions, and local causes of ecological deg-
radation and poverty (Mortimore, 1998).wma
development A central keyword of twentieth-
centurypolitical economyand social policy,
which can broadly refer to processes of social
change or toclassandstateprojects to trans-
form national economies, particularly in for-
merly colonized orthird worldgeographies.
Cowen and Shenton (1996) provide a geneal-
ogy of these conceptions of intentional and
immanent development emerging from an
eighteenth-century European intellectual his-
tory concerned with secularized progress in
the wake of social disorder. Such a genealogy
must be pluralized and grounded in inter-
twined spatial, natural and cultural histories
of improvement, colonization, commodifica-
tion, discipline, predation, government, trans-
formation, destruction and renovation. A
category that carries such enormous and
variable analytical weight is inevitably con-
tentious, and the idea of ‘development’ has
always been subject to critique (Cooper and
Packard, 1997), long before the efficacy of
the idea itself was called into question at the
end of the twentieth century, whether for its
allegedly inevitableeurocentrism(Escobar,
1995) or for its scepticism of the invisible hand
of themarket(Lal, 1985). One way to frame
the long history of development before the
concept’s use is through four key intellectual
traditions: (1) political and economic liberal-
ism and the defence of ‘free markets’; (2)
Marxist critique of class, class struggle and
imperialism; (3) social Darwinist notions of
evolution through racially hierarchized envir-
onments; and (4) anti-colonial defence of cul-
tural difference and the possibility of national
self-determination. These four currents have
provided content, and contention, to what
would be thought of as ‘development’, as well
as to the technocratic and statist enterprise that
came together in the wake of mid-twentieth-
centurydecolonization.
The narrower conception of international or
intentional development came to its own after
the Second World War, in an ensemble of insti-
tutions, policies, disciplinary formations and,
most importantly, practices of intervention in
the alleviation ofpovertyin the Third World
recently decolonized nations, as they sought to
steer a tenuous path through thegeopolitics
of thecold war. Development now signified
intervention by governments, rich and poor,
and by an array of international institutions
and organizations incivil society(Cooper
and Packard, 1997). Intentional development
was shaped by proximal legacies: ideas of ‘late
development’ in Bismarck’s Germany and the
nascent Soviet Union, inter-war arguments
for state intervention either to managecapit-
alism, as envisioned by Keynes, or to resist
the destructive aspects of commodification
through some form of democraticsocialism
(as in Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). US political sci-
entists were crucial to the emerging doctrine of
modernizationtheory as a disciplinary forma-
tion in the US academy (Gilman, 2003) tied to
the conceit that the right kinds of social and
economic planning would bring Third World
countries in line with Western capitalist norms
of social transformation. Development eco-
nomics and newstatecapacities fueled the
Promethean visions of Third World states,
many of whom used modernization theory to
navigate through the Cold War, controlling
diverse and often undemocratic polities, while
forging shifting economies from reliance on pri-
mary-product exports to import-substitution
industrialization.
This orthodoxy of modernization, statism
and developmentalism was soon called into
question through oppositional forces of the
1960s and early 1970s, which sought to
redefine ‘development’ in more radical terms.
These forces were sometimes inspired by
radical anti-colonial thinkers such as FanonGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_D Final Proof page 155 1.4.2009 3:15pmDEVELOPMENT