ABSTRACT

Scholars, international development personnel, social activists, and the media are deeply troubled by the growing gap between the social and economic development of industrialized countries of the West and that of the developing countries. The basic problem for development theory is that it hardly has any independent existence of its own, that is independent of the social sciences. For in development studies far too many complex factors are involved, simultaneously that do not easily, or without distortion, lend themselves to specialist approaches. Consequently, in development studies, an appropriate question would be whether in helping those who are locked in poverty more than economic measures are needed. While one can critique the unqualified extension to the non-Western world of the corpus of theoretical knowledge developed by the social sciences, one also needs to remember that this is the only knowledge, dealing with economic growth, political institutions and social change, and so on that we have.