ABSTRACT
“Development” is one of the key organizing concepts of the modern era. As such, ideas and images of development are inevitably represented in a wide variety of ways, whether within academia, the policy world, or the general public domain. To this extent, it can be contended that all forms of development knowledge can be – and historically have been – largely understood as a series of “stories”. This is true not only in the pragmatic sense that to have an impact on public opinion, organisational strategy, or within academia, even the most elaborate equations and sophisticated data analyses need to be able to be expressed in everyday language (Denning, 2000), but also in the deeper philosophical sense that all knowledge claims are necessarily embedded in particular subjective understandings of how the world works, as was famously pointed out by Walter Benjamin (1989) in his classic essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”.
