ABSTRACT
The post-development school of development theory bluntly rejects ‘development’ simultaneously as a Eurocentric discourse, an imperialist project and a meaningless concept. It argues for alternatives to development, usually in the form of communities combining elements of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ culture, regaining control in the fields of politics, economics and knowledge in opposition to the state, global capitalism and science and thus finding ‘alternatives to development’. In the past decade, the school has been widely discussed and criticized. Despite the differences between the critics, there seems to be widespread agreement on the assumption that post-development is to be interpreted as a Foucauldian critique of development as well as on certain ‘standard criticisms’ against the post-development school. The chapter proceeds as follows: after defining post-development, it is examined in how far post-development can be seen as a Foucauldian critique of development. Then, the standard criticisms of the post-development school shall be described and evaluated. This procedure leads us to distinguish two variants of post-development: sceptical and neo-populist. The final sections are concerned with investigating the dangers of reactionary populism in neo-populist post-development and the convergence between the sceptical variant and radical democracy.
