ABSTRACT

The reconstruction of war-torn Europe provided the model for state-directed modernization of the ‘new nations’. In this model, development was largely sociological and political in nature, and underdevelopment was defined in terms of differences between rich and poor nations. Development implied the bridging of the gap by means of an imitative process, in which the less developed countries gradually assumed the qualities of the developed. Marxist theory essentially shared this perspective. For structuralism, which dominated the early phase of development economics (still influenced by Keynesianism), a certain amount of intervention was considered necessary, due to institutional conditions which made growth in the poor areas less automatic than it was assumed to be in the so-called developed countries. From the late 1960s, modernization theory and structuralism were challenged by the Latin American dependencia school, which, together with the more global world system theory, articulated the weak structural position of Third World countries in the world system. The ‘dependentistas’, or ‘neo-Marxists’, asked for a radical political transformation within these countries, as well as a ‘de-linking’ of their economies from the world market (Blomström and Hettne 1984; Kay 1989). With its focus on state-driven industrialization, dependency theory did not differ much from the modernization and structuralist schools with respect to the content of development. In contrast, ‘another development’, a counterpoint to this modernist view, was defined as need-oriented, endogenous, self-reliant, ecologically sound and based on structural transformation (Nerfin 1977). However, the main concern for this and subsequent ‘alternative’ approaches was the many problems created in the course of mainstream development, and what to do with people who were excluded from development. Here the imperative of intervention reached a high degree of utopianism, but still it can be argued that the normative basis, against inequality and for emancipation, remains significant for development studies (Schuurman 2000).