ABSTRACT
Having followed the history of the term development through various decades and issues, it is now time to take stock of the analysis and contextualise it within the research on discourse in development studies. This research is relatively novel and has (except for a few early starters) emerged during the 1990s (see e.g. Escobar 1985 and 1995, Sachs 1990 and 1992, Manzo 1991, Nederveen Pieterse 1991, Ferguson 1994, Crush 1995, Moore/Schmitz 1995, Apthorpe/Gasper 1996, Cooper/Packard 1997a, Grillo/Stirrat 1997) and has continued to draw attention in the 2000s (Abrahamsen 2000, Biccum 2002 and 2006, Karagiannis 2004, Oommen 2004, Stein 2004, Eriksson Baaz 2005, Groves/Hinton 2005, Mosse/Lewis 2005, Smith 2006, Duffield 2007a and 2014, Li 2007, Greenstein 2009, Cornwall/Eade 2010, Griffiths 2010). However, there were numerous books on the history of development theory and the idea of development in earlier decades (e.g. Alcalde 1987, Arndt 1987, Nisbet 1969) without using the term discourse which became popular only in the – often somewhat superficial – reception of the works of Michel Foucault.
