ABSTRACT
Assessments of post-development thought divide around the issue of the demand for transcendence (‘beyond development’/‘alternatives to development’): some critics reject this demand as a rhetorical and empirically vacuous thesis; others welcome it as a genuine possibility for radical social change. The climate of the post-development debate has recently shifted from a sceptical rejection of the demand for transcendence to a more positive evaluation of this demand. More recently, a number of scholars have attempted to rearticulate a potential link between post-development thought and transformative politics (Hoogvelt 1996; Fagan 1999; Nustad 2001; Rojas 2001; Saunders 2002; Matthews 2004; Rapley 2004; Ziai 2004): they suggest that the demand for ‘alternatives to development’ can be elaborated by alternative normative criteria to those which predominate in mainstream development studies such as the feasibility of policy making, global governance, and institutional arrangements.
