ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is conventional wisdom that the newly industrializing nations in the “global South” are very different from the postindustrialized nations in the “global North” in terms of culture, economy, and planning institutions. The dominant sentiment in the planning community is that such differences should be acknowledged explicitly in any effort to internationalize planning practice and education. This view, held by development scholars as well as practitioners, does acknowledge the intensification of global linkages, as is evident from a burgeoning literature on globalization, but prefers to focus on the differences between nations and peoples in various stages of economic and political modernization. In part, this is a reaction to the harm done by the rigid models of development – both economic and political – imposed in the past on newly modernizing nations by scholars and practitioners who did not appreciate such differences. As Albert Hirschmann (1987) wrote, international development experts treated these nations as if they were wooden toys that could be wound up to go through the same motions of progress as modernized nations did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But, if one accepts that neither the developmental priorities nor the institutional settings – which include planning – could be the same in the two types of nations, then the implication is that the appreciation of such differences is a prerequisite for a realistic, postcolonial view of how the global South can chart its destiny independently, free of Northern notions of development.
