History Of International Development Research Articles

The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global

AbstractThis essay traces different historiographical framings of the modern university in South Asia. Although the trajectories of this institution are manifold and complex, the university's deep imbrications with colonial expansion and developmentalist ambitions lend it to both national and global perspectives. Focusing on the late colonial to early postcolonial period, I examine how recent scholarship has positioned the university across multiple scales. In particular, I consider how the turn toward global, networked, and “entangled” perspectives — with examples drawn from global intellectual history and the history of international development — suggest fresh approaches, clearing the way for new questions as well as encountering unique limits. Ultimately, these frameworks help reorient the university toward its translocal dimensions: as a site of national imagining, internationalist claim‐making, development meaning‐making, global connectivity, and the transnational circulation of knowledge.

International development in Africa: Historiographical themes and new perspectives

AbstractThis article explores scholarship on the history of international development in Africa and highlights promising new perspectives. The literature review reveals common themes in writing on the history of development—neocolonialism, knowledge production, and statecraft—but also shows that scholars have given too much power to development paradigms and policies. While the scholarship has demonstrated the rhetorical significance of development and the importance of developmentalist states, historians have paid less attention to institutional cleavages, material outcomes, and the complexity of development intervention on the ground. New work draws on oral histories to center local communities, while also examining national and transnational actors and contexts. Examining how development was executed on the ground, and how local communities experienced and reconfigured development, has the potential to help scholars completely rethink these histories. Recent scholarship demonstrates the long‐term continuities of development; the disjunctures between economic theory and development practice; the particular forms of power and modalities of governance that have emerged in different settings; and the social, political, and material implications for local communities targeted by the international development apparatus.

Development as a form of religious engineering? Religion and secularity in development discourse

ABSTRACT The burgeoning literature on religion and development tends to frame development as a project of post-WWII secular modernism and hence postulates a new ‘discovery of religions’ in development discourse. This perception is based on a two-fold forgetfulness of history. On the one hand, the colonial genealogy of development in the ‘civilising mission’ came with a decisive Christian input. On the other hand, the notion of secular modernism conceals the conceptual interconnectedness of religion and secularity in Western debates from the neoclassical secularization theories to the recent ‘return of God’ narratives. Drawing out the contours of a long history of international development, the article argues that scholarship needs to move beyond simple diagnoses of the presence or absence of religion in development discourse, but highlight how the ideology of development has tended to follow narratives about progress and values that are closely connected to discourses about global religion and secularity.

Timothy Nunan. Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan.

The last sentence of the jacket copy’s descriptive paragraph for Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan sets very high expectations: “Humanitarian Invasion signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of international history.” The hubris of foretelling the place of one’s oeuvre in the future of an academic discipline notwithstanding, this is an elegantly written book that provides a history of, or perhaps a story about, American, European, and Soviet transnational and international aid in Afghanistan. If Humanitarian Invasion has a driving argument or overarching purpose, its author struggles to define it. The closest Timothy Nunan gets to defining the thesis of the book is to characterize it as “a history of international development and humanitarianism in Afghanistan” (15). As a history of ideas in communities of practice on two sides of the Cold War divide, the book does not disappoint. It weaves the intellectual histories of both European and Soviet aid-program strategists (ironically both rooted in leftist ideologies) with their implementation of aid programs in Afghanistan. Nunan carefully traces the influence of worldviews and understandings of Afghanistan on how aid programs were conceived and implemented, and on how they fared on the ground. Also interestingly, he describes the effect of failures and perceived successes on the development of thought among the Soviet and West European development and humanitarian workers. Empirics make it into the book (inter alia, chaps. 2 and 5) through several case studies of Cold War development efforts in Afghanistan by Americans, West Germans, and (mostly) Soviets.

Ethnic identity politics in Nepal: liberation from, or restoration of, elite interest?

The ethnic issue has dominated Nepal’s political landscapes since the birth of the Republic of Nepal in 2007. For decades, Nepal witnessed a series of peasant rebellions against the state and landed aristocrats. Ethnic peasants were at the forefront, demanding autonomy, dignity, and an end to state violence. Since the 1980s, however, the ‘ethnic question’ has become a development issue and the developmental idea of indigeneity has consolidated both ethnic elites and peasants. Recently, identity politics has become a dominant ideological force, rapidly unraveling the course of radical political developments in the country. Interestingly, this political movement emerged in a particular historical conjuncture where Nepali politics has been extensively shaped by the recent Maoist revolution and a long history of international development. This paper explores various aspects of ethnic peasantry and argues that the notions of indigeneity and identity politics have reinforced elite domination by depoliticizing ethnic peasant politics in Nepal.

A/Another History of Managing International Development?

In the received history of international development, its management or development- management for short, emerged from the remnants of colonial administration. From here, development-management gr...

Targeting, Accountability and Capture in Development Projects

If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding—which I jointly label capture—in more precisely targeted projects. More well-defined targeting results in superior accountability relationships because there is greater clarity of responsibility, clearer information about outcomes, and improved identifiability of stakeholders. I use an original cross-country, cross-project data set on the incidence of capture in World Bank-funded investment projects to test the theory. The data show a negative relationship between targeting and capture, and I demonstrate that this relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In addition, I find that there is a higher baseline likelihood of project capture in countries perceived as more corrupt according to commonly used survey-based measures from Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, cross-validating those measures and my own.

Targeted Aid and Capture in World Bank Projects

If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding --- which I jointly label capture --- in more precisely targeted projects. More well-defined targeting results in superior accountability relationships because there is greater clarity of responsibility, clearer information about outcomes and improved identifiability of stakeholders. I use an original cross-country, cross-project dataset on the incidence of capture in World Bank-funded investment projects to test the theory. The data show a negative relationship between targeting and capture, and I demonstrate that this relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In addition, I find that there is a higher baseline likelihood of project capture in countries perceived as more corrupt according to commonly used survey-based measures from Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, cross-validating those measures and my own.