ABSTRACT
What relevance do development and law and development discourses have amid global economic and environmental crises marked by ecological and climate catastrophe, impoverishment, conflict, digitalisation and surveillance capitalism? This chapter discusses the history of law and development and its becalment in a world in which the failed tenets of neoliberalism continue to underpin mainstream, hegemonic conceptions such as sustainable development. It critically examines conventional discourse on development, postdevelopment and alternatives to development. We argue that existing concepts of law and development used in orthodox, reformist and even critical accounts tend to shift our collective gaze away from global injustices and the new imaginaries needed to address them, which have to be inspired by subaltern global South and feminist perspectives based on alternative conceptual frameworks of relationality, care, commons and new economics to meet contemporary challenges in a world of rising authoritarian populism, nationalism, xenophobia and democratic and legitimacy deficits.
