A Taste of One?s Own Medicine: Assessing Post-Development.

The failure of the post-World War II development project to make real progress in alleviating poverty in the Global South has spawned a series of critiques coupled with alternative projects: import substitution industrialization, participatory development, gendered development, ?good governance,? and many others. In the late 1980s, a new self-described ?post-development? approach arose in the critical development literature. Drawing on the work of postmodern philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this approach calls for the ?end of development.? The ?post-development? scholars, as they came to be called, seek to uncover the ways in which the notion of development as proffered by the global North through its various agents (particularly the international development aid agencies) was a means of domination over the economies, politics, and peoples of the global South. Using the methods of discourse analysis, post-development scholars seek to denaturalize development ideas and practices and uncover the ways in which conventional development theory and policies have served the interests of the global North and further impoverished the global South. In recent years, post-development itself has been subject to a number of counter-critiques, both from the right and the left. The present paper will offer an overview of post-development and some of the major criticisms of it with the goal of evaluating the value of the post-development approach as an alternative to mainstream understandings of development. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]