CIAO DATE: 10/2008
March 2007
Has development thinking become too narrow and specialised? Does it fail to draw sufficiently on what has been learned outside the realm of development studies about how social change happens? These are the questions at the centre of this paper. The analysis is divided into three parts. Part 1 is a general survey of approaches to explaining change from the perspective of a wide range of academic disciplines, such as history, politics, psychology, and geography. Part 2 provides a thematic summary of these approaches in the form of a table, ‘The rough guide to how change happens’, which can be used as a tool to help understand and explain changes that have taken place. A case study of the British struggle against slavery and the slave trade illustrates the utility of the ‘rough guide’. Part 3 argues that current developing thinking advocates only a narrow range of approaches to change. The result is that most development strategies are limited in five main ways: they are excessively reformist and insensitive to underlying power and inequality; they largely ignore environmental issues; they overlook the importance of personal relationships and promoting mutual understanding as a strategy of change; they fail to appreciate fully the contextual factors that limit change; and they lack a multidisciplinary agility to draw on the broad range of approaches to change that exist outside the confines of development studies.
Resource link: How Change Happens: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Human Development [PDF] - 559K