The hydra of development studies

Abstract

Development Studies has been mired in allegations of theoretical impasse since the mid-1980's. This article investigates the modalities and vagaries of the dialectic between social science's theoretical image of the Third World, which could be summarized as the oppositional Modernization and Dependency “paradigms” prior to the alleged impasse, and the actual substantive Third World development trajectories that have emerged. Now a new convergence, negative and perhaps enduring, has supplanted the optimism of the original Modernization postulate and may provide a seedbed for a resurrection of the pessimistic Dependency underdevelopment thesis. For the first time there has been a coming together in the study of the Third World on the one hand, manifested as majority theme Development Studies, and on the other hand, actual objective development in the vast majority of countries under study. But this intersection only arises insofar as both appear to be in equivalent difficulty. In the Third World there has been increasing divergence in trajectories of development, with polarization of income both within the South, and in an even more pronounced manner vis-à-vis the First World. If the 1980's have become known as the “Lost Decade' in developmental terms for Africa and Latin America, the 1990's ended with the emergence of a new development blockage among the NIEs and near NIEs of the Asian region. The crisis in Development Studies becomes all the more obvious considering the emergence of the Neo-classical format as part of the 1980's development counterrevolution. Now the neo-classically inspired minimalist state — which was a product of its predecessor, downsized in order to serve the market and contribute to Pareto optimality — a historical reversal of its colonial and earlier post-colonial form — must confront renewed demands to solve the internal problems that accelerated Globalization has generated in the context of a crisis of overproduction.