Development Theory

This book is about the deep inroads which the social sciences, with their specific approaches and theories, have made into development studies, thereby preventing the latter from addressing themselves to different and, in some cases, unique problems of their own. The social sciences and their corpus of theoretical knowledge are almost entirely rooted in the historical and social experiences of a few industrialized societies of the West. Development studies, on the other hand, are all about the problems of economic growth, political development and social change in developing societies which have come through historical and cultural experiences of a different kind. Moreover, the variety of backgrounds of different developing societies have also differently influenced their own development processes. However, the existing development studies, and their corpus of theoretical knowledge which has largely come from the social sciences, show little or no sensitivity to the basic differences in development experiences of different societies. The net result of this is that we are often unable to pay sufficient attention to some of their crucial problems.
Moreover, the tendency of the social sciences to chop and slice development process, so as to suit their own specialist requirements, has prevented scholars from addressing their theoretical efforts to the understanding of the complexity of such a process in different societies, and then come up with a nuanced analysis of the unique development experience of each. Whatever exists in scholarly literature on development process is an assumed replication of what the industrialized societies of the West went through. In development studies, therefore, we need a fresh round of cognitive effort which can be focused on the perceiving, knowing and conceptualizing of the actual complexity of development process in emerging societies.