ABSTRACT

One of the greatest development challenges since the mid-twentieth century has been to find effective means of confronting uneven development. Although a perfectly even development may be found only in utopian visions of the world, it is generally the case that most serious development problems tend to be associated with the downside of uneven development (e.g. peripherality, marginality, exclusion and powerlessness). Accordingly, ever since Dudley Seers’ (1969) influential reinterpretation of the meaning of ‘development’, in which inequality (as well as poverty and unemployment) should decline for development to occur, scholars and practitioners have paid increasing attention to distributional criteria (spatial, economic, social) in the theory and praxis of development.