Geographies of Development in Latin America

The last major intervention on Development in Latin America was arguably Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development. Nearly a decade on, his scathing indictment still casts its shadow of critical development studies.

Geographies of Latin American Development elaborates a framework for understanding development processes in Latin America that focuses on the geographically differentiated interactions between political economy, organized intervention, and livelihoods. It argues that intervention and livelihood do not simply derive from political economy. The first section elaborates this analytical framework and the overall argument of the book. The second section uses this framework to explore a series of cases drawn from Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia and Mexico, thus helping to ground discussion in specific historical and geographical contexts. Each case focuses on particular themes and above all the interventions of particular types of actors.

Bebbington draws on concepts within geography to both respond to and build on Escobar's interpretation in a way that retains many of his critical insights while recovering some of the emancipatory connotations of development, the diversity of its trajectories and possibilities and thus contributing more directly to development alternatives.