ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the 1990s, the development market place has been swept by new concepts and strategies - participatory governance, partner ships, social capital, synergetic development, and collective learning, to name just a few - suggesting that the crisis of development is long passed. Despite radical attacks on the idea of development by post-development scholars such as Sachs and Escobar, mainstream development thinking cur rently stands firm. This is probably because it is finally trying to come to terms with the complexity and diversity of development, and with the idea that development is about human beings. As a result, many elements and practices stemming from alternative development have gradually found their way into mainstream development (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998).
