ABSTRACT
It is a familiar cliché that actions speak louder than words, but this denies the power of words, and the ideas of those who make and spread them. As Jonathan Crush (1995) notes in Power of Development, the words written and spoken about development, the ‘discourse of development’, have enormous power. Development action is driven forwards by texts ranging from humanitarian tracts to national development plans. These portray the world in particular ways, often in crisis of some kind, and almost always as requiring management and intervention by the development planner (ibid.). These texts also determine who has the authority to act and establish the basis of knowledge that frames such action. The words we use to talk about development, and the way our arguments construct the world, are usually seen as ‘self-evident and unworthy of attention’ (ibid., p. 3), but they are not: in development nothing is self-evident, even if many choices or options remain hidden from view.
