ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the state of development thinking today. The Global Financial Crisis, the rise of China and successive global agreements regarding the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals has led some scholars and practitioners to argue that neoliberalism is dead. Instead, this chapter argues that neoliberalism has evolved and uses the term retroliberalism to encapsulate today’s development paradigm. Given path dependence, some key elements of neoliberalism have persisted, in particular the primacy of the markets and limiting the size of states, but development thinking is also now reviving older traditions, including first, mercantilist state-supported development strategies; second, imperialism’s focus on nationalist self-interest; third, modernization theory’s prioritization of state infrastructure investment to produce economic growth; and fourth, the neostructuralist agenda of the 2000s on poverty reduction and reconstruction of states.
