Progress in Development Studies

New ways are needed of framing the international politics of development in the context of global restructuring. The old thinking that employed such terms as ‘Third World’, ‘developing countries’, ‘core and periphery’, even ‘North’ and ‘South’ needs to be abandoned. It does not travel well into a globalizing world. New interpretations of international inequality emerged in the 1990s - the so-called ‘Bretton Woods’ and ‘United Nations’ paradigms - and are linked to attendant economic liberal and sociological strands of political economy analysis. But both approaches underplay politics. However, the new global politics of development can be satisfactorily framed, provided that we adopt an approach that takes globalization seriously, recognizes the continuing, albeit changing, realities of states and interstate politics and reinterprets development as a universal problem. Attempts to classify states and societies in advance of research must also be avoided.

Assuming a close relationship between peace and development, this paper analyses a succession of schools of thought in development forming part of three distinct, historically contextualized development and security discourses: the industrialization imperative in the emerging state-system in nineteenth-century Europe, the international concern with global poverty in the bipolar post second world war world and the current meaning of development in a globalized and increasingly chaotic world. The third of these discourses contains major challenges for development theory. The discourses are related to great transformations in political economy, understood in Polanyian terms as tensions between market expansion and societal response.

Is aid effective in increasing growth rates of recipient countries? This is the burning question in any economic evaluation of aid effectiveness, yet there is no consensus on the answer. Recent advances in growth theory help us to identify the various mechanisms by which aid can increase growth, notably through increasing investment in physical and human capital. The empirical evidence has tended to focus on aid effectiveness by examining its impact as (physical) investment and, more recently, by considering the relationship between aid and government economic policy. There is an increasing body of evidence that aid does work, conditional on other variables in the growth regression.