ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Migdal’s challenge to the Weberian tradition of the ideal type of state and his state-in-society approach, which helps us to understand the existing fragments of power brokers in a society that guide social control and political power. Arturo Escobar’s post-modern critique of development discourse concludes that ‘underdevelopment’ is produced in the discourse and practice of ‘development’ where government, communities and individuals of the ‘Third World’ are seen as ‘underdeveloped’ or placed under such conditions where they tend to see themselves as such. The colonial legacy created a space for the imposition of development interventions and continued ‘by creating abnormalities’ in more concrete terms like ‘the poor’, ‘the malnourished’, ‘the illiterate’, ‘the landless’ and so on, which it would then address. James Ferguson deals with the two most common assumptions that depoliticize development planning: the principle of ‘governmentality’ and its corollary–the linear planning method.
