Kanttekeningen

Ontwikkelingen in ontwikkelingswerk: onverdroten activisme

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Abstract

Developments in development effort - Interest in Third-World development is changing. The public is increasingly preoccupied otherwise; its grasp of the development problem, never firm, is slackening; the credibility of ideological and professional advocates is waning. In the institutionalized development effort its conditionality is ignored. The standing discourse, apparently absorbing, is imperceptibly being overtaken by emergent issues. The competence of the development expert is not designed to address these more basic matters. Lest it remain blocked, adequate discourse may require an enlarged circle of scholarship, notably in the social sciences. ’Development’ need not remain the key notion :the inequality postulate inherent in aid jeopardizes its prospect. This paper reviews some of the problems demanding renewed attention : the diagnosis of underdevelopment as a bench-mark; the lack of criteria for success of aid; the inconsonant response of intended beneficiaries; the submissivenes of development studies to activism. It argues that in consequence of its modern-western nature the established development paradigm is alien to the situations upon which it is imposed and obsolete at that. It suggests urgent reconsideration, setting out from the realization that the emergent One World is marked by intensifying interaction between increasingly interdependent collectivities of many kinds.

How to Cite:

Van Nieuwenhuijze, C., (1993) “Ontwikkelingen in ontwikkelingswerk: onverdroten activisme”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 38(3), 309–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95146