ABSTRACT
In 1992, a collective volume edited by Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary, started by making the radical and controversial claim, ‘The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary’ (Sachs 1992: 1). If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a ‘post-development era’ (Escobar 1991) in response to this question, and a second collective work, The Post-development Reader, launched the project of giving content to the notion of ‘post-development’ (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). According to the editors of this work, the word ‘post-development’ was first used at an international colloquium in Geneva in 1991. Six years later, it had caught up in the imagination of critical scholars and practitioners in the development field. Reactions on all sides of the scholarly-political spectrum have continued since, resulting in a vibrant, albeit at times somewhat scattered, debate. This debate has brought together practitioners and academics from many social science disciplines and fields.
