Published on behalf of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
Debate
Bringing Development Back into Development Studies
Andrew M. Fischer 4JD
ABSTRACT
This article challenges Homer and Hulme's call to move from 'international
development' to 'global development' with a reaffirmation of the classical
traditions of development studies. With some adaptation to fit the chang­
ing contemporary context, these traditions not only remain relevant but also
recover vital insights that have been obscured in the various fashionable re­
imaginings of development. In particular, development thinking and agendas
in the past were much more radical and ambitious in addressing the impera­
tives of redistribution and progressive forms of transformation in the context
of stark asymmetries of wealth and power. Such ambition is still needed to
address the nature and scale of challenges that continue to face the bulk of
countries in the world, particularly given the persistence if not deepening
of asymmetries. This reaffirmation is elaborated by addressing three major
weaknesses in Homer and Hulme's arguments. First, they do not actually
define development, but instead treat it as simply poverty and inequality
dynamics, which are better understood as outcomes rather than causes. Sec­
ond, despite their assertion that the study of (international) development was
primarily concerned with between-country inequalities, this is not true. Do­
mestic inequality was in fact central to both development theory and policy
since the origins of the field. Third, the authors ignore the rise of neoliber­
alism from the late 1970s onwards and the profound crisis that this caused
to development outside of East Asia and perhaps India, which the jargon of
'global' implicitly obfuscates and even condones. Rather, the experiences of
East Asia and in particular China arguably vindicate classical approaches in
development studies.
This article is a response to the contribution by Rory Homer and David Hulme 'From International
to Global Development: New Geographies of 21 st Century Development', which appeared online
in December 2017 and is included in this issue. The author would like to acknowledge feedback
and comments from Kari Polanyi Levitt, Ben Radley, Charmaine Ramos, Andy Sumner, Mary
Zsamboky, and several anonymous reviewers. The article was written under the auspices of the
research project of the author (AIDSOCPRO: Aiding Social Protection: The Political Economy
of Externally Financing Social Policy in Developing Countries), which has received funding
from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme (grant agreement No 638647).
Development and Change 50(2): 426-444. DOl: 10.1111/dech. l2490
© 2019 The Authors. Development and Change published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf
of lnstitute of Social Studies.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 427
INTRODUCTION
Following the tum of the new millennium, there was a strong move to re­
name 'development studies' as 'international development'. This was not
without contestation because, among other concerns, the latter term appears
too closely associated with international development assistance, reinforcing
the common impression that development studies is largely about aid, which
of course it is not. Indeed, several development studies departments in the
UK were rebranding themselves around that time with titles barely differen­
tiable from the UK government Department for International Development.
Nonetheless, this renaming was said to be in the spirit of the millennium
times, conveying a more universal sense of interdependence, cooperation
and co-existence among nations. Development studies, by contrast, was per­
ceived to be associated with older colonial or Cold War ways of thinking
that some people were anxious to disassociate themselves from. But then
what about national and local processes of development? Are they subsumed
under what we would call international development? What exactly is the
'international' if it is not the relations between nations?
The move towards 'international development' in this sense was not well
thought out. 'Development studies' conveys the sense of something much
broader: processes of structural and social transformation that pervade our
modem existence and that are fundamental to understand the ways the world
has changed over the last two centuries. Understanding these processes and
their associated institutional, political, social and cultural manifestations is
fundamental to deciphering the evolution of power and wealth at local, na­
tional and global scales. It is also fundamental to recognizing the practical
prospects for emancipation (rather than just the imagination of emancipa­
tion) for those subordinate within those relations, whether under erstwhile
conditions of colonization and early decolonization, or else under the more
contemporary conditions of what has come to be called globalization. These
processes manifest in various ways in various contexts, but a systemic un­
derstanding of them remains essential if we are to make sense of this recent
experience of humanity, from which we have thankfully not yet extinguished
ourselves. The field of development studies, as it was originally conceived,
has held a special place in this intellectual endeavour because it takes such
modem transformations as the starting point of interdisciplinary inquiry,
rather than as an afterthought of core theorization.
Yet now, calls are again being made for a shift from 'international de­
velopment' to 'global development', as epitomized by this Forum Debate
contribution by Homer and Hulme (this issue). 'Moving from international
to global development', they argue, 'is a recognition that we live in "one
world" - albeit with major inequalities - and not in a ''North" or "South"
or in First and Third Worlds' (p. 368). 'Such a perspective seeks to account
for privilege and prosperity in "developing countries" and for marginaliza­
tion and relative poverty in "developed countries"' (p. 368). In other words,
428 Andrew M. Fischer
you can find the North in the South and the South in the North; both are
applicable anywhere, so we might as well call it all global.
Their argument essentially boils down to an assertion that binaries are no
longer relevant, largely because of 'converging divergence', which refers to
decreasing inequalities between countries and increasing inequalities within
countries. They frame this as a 'new geography of development', drawing
heavily on the idea of a 'new geography of global poverty'. All of this re­
quires a reformulation of development because international development
is rooted in notions of binaries and inequality between nations as its 'his­
torical focus' (p. 373), and also in international development assistance
which is now receding in importance (see, for example, p. 351 or Table 2,
p. 3 72). Horner and Hulme concede that this prior focus cannot be abandoned
or ignored given the 'continued extent of between-country inequalities' (p.
3 73). Nonetheless, they contend that 'more than at any time over the last cen­
tury, the contemporary global map of development appears increasingly at
odds with any idealized binary notion of a clear spatial demarcation between
First and Third Worlds, "developed" and "developing", or rich and poor,
countries' (p. 349). Hence, their perspective is that 'development is linked
to the whole world. In such a framing, global development is an overarching
focus, characterized by a number of dimensions that embrace both interna­
tional (between-country) and national (within-country) issues' (p. 372). To
support their case, they repeatedly note that the Sustainable Development
Goals already seem to be making this transition to a more global rather than
binary approach to development.
Again, we must question what, exactly, is the 'global' in this understanding
of global development? Is it about processes that have a global dynamic that
cannot be restricted by national boundaries and that should not be conceived
in terms of what Gore ( 1996) once called 'methodological nationalism'?
The most obvious examples are capitalism and demographic transition. But
this is no different from classical approaches in development studies, which
rooted the study of development within the evolution of capitalism and world
order. In any case, this does not seem to be the notion of 'global' that Horner
and Hulme are implying.
If the case for relabelling is merely based on the idea that relative poverty
exists in the 'North' and that poorer countries are now the location of substan­
tial wealth, this is also hardly a new phenomenon. The field of development
studies was in part born out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it
was very clear that the leading industrial powers of the world were capable
of producing quite broad and intense poverty. Similarly, some of the wealth­
iest individuals of the 19th century were, in fact, Indian and other national
elites in colonized countries, where they were given monopolies and privi­
leges in exchange for their service and loyalty to Empire (see, for example,
Washbrook, 1988). That most poor countries today possess a transnational
class of around 5 per cent of their population is hardly a ground-breaking
trend, even if the absolute numbers are large (e.g. 5 per cent of China is now
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 429
70 million people). The narrative of the new middle classes in poorer coun­
tries also needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt given its lack of analytical
content regarding the meaning of 'class' or even what constitutes 'middle'
(which Homer and Hulme acknowledge, see pp. 364, 370). However, the fact
that development results in rising wealth among increasingly urban popu­
lations should hardly be a surprising revelation. It is certainly not one that
challenges received notions of development.
Finally, if the idea is that we are now emerging into a more multipolar
world, thereby requiring a change of names to mark the occasion, the logic
of emphasizing 'global' is again questionable for a variety of reasons. Other
contributors to this debate have deconstructed much of the argument around
the 'rising powers' to demonstrate that this is largely a story about China, so
I will not belabour this point here.1 Rather, I will contribute three additional
points, based on three major weaknesses in the argument of Homer and
Hulme.
First, within their discussion of nomenclature, Homer and Hulme com­
pletely evade the question of what development is. Instead, they simply
reduce development to an understanding of poverty and inequality dynam­
ics. This is essentially confusing a description of stylized outcomes with an
analysis of causal processes.
Second, it was never the case that the study of development, in its clas­
sic sense, was primarily about between-country inequality. Such inequality
obviously described the context in which poorer countries lagged and were
subordinated, but development in its origins was primarily understood as a
national project of structural and social transformation aimed at overcoming
this lagging and subordination, or as 'catching up', as recently re-invoked
by Nayyar (20 13). Within this project, the issue of within-country (i.e. do­
mestic) inequality was central.
Third and more proximately, the article ignores the elephant in the room,
which is the rise of what is generally referred to as neoliberalism from the
late 1970s onwards and the profound crisis that this caused to development
outside of East Asia and perhaps India. Moreover, the way that data are mar­
shalled in the article implicitly condones the neoliberal period while hiding
the fact that we have been here before and the contemporary resurgence is
as much a recovery as it is an advance. And while the exceptional rise of
China drives most of the evidence for the convergence thesis of Homer and
Hulme, it also vindicates much of the classics of development studies.
BRINGING DEVELOPMENT BACK IN
On the first point, to their credit, Homer and Hulme do not reduce their
understanding of development to the 'doing' or 'making' of development by
1. For critical reflections on the case of China, see Fischer (2015) or Yu (2013).
430 Andrew M. Fischer
'practitioners', as is common in much contemporary scholarship (referred
to as 'big D' development by Hart, 2009). The problem, however, is that
they do not present an understanding of development at all. Rather, they
imply development by way of poverty and inequality outcomes. Poverty
and inequality dynamics might well be outcomes of development processes,
but they do not explain how or why development happens. They might
also be the result of something other than development. In contrast, the
classic understanding of development in early development studies in the
1940s and 1950s was grounded in an understanding of social and structural
transformation. Given that societies around the world have not ceased to
transform, this understanding has arguably never lost relevance.
At the risk of appearing pedantic, it is necessary to clarify this foundational
understanding given the degree of confusion that reigns in the literature and
for which Homer and Hulme offer no clarity. Development, in this classic
social scientific sense, refers to long-run social, political, economic and tech­
nological structural transformations that are distinctly modem, although not
necessarily conforming to modernization theory. The latter point is important
to emphasize because of the facile tendency in the contemporary literature
to deride any notion of transition or transformation as guilty of modern­
ization theory or Eurocentric teleology, particularly among more 'critical'
scholarship (see, for example, Li, 20 17).2 There is also a recent proclivity
to elevate scholars such as Walter Rostow to an intellectual importance that
they never possessed (versus an ideological and political importance, which
Rostow definitely did have within the US government). Indeed, Homer and
Hulme commit this simplification by suggesting that the changing pattern of
inequality 'leaves untenable any notion of development being simply about
developing countries (the poor South) emulating the paths previously taken
by developed countries (rich North)' (p. 369). It was only ever the most
rudimentary forms of modernization theory (or their reflections in various
policy documents or reports by governments or international organizations)
that propagated such notions and they were certainly not the generalized
basis of developmentalist thinking.
Rather, the seminal scholars of early development economics were by and
large very critical of modernization theory and the idea of stages through
which all countries travel. Most of these early scholars recognized that,
whilst the whole world was going through shared processes of transform­
ation, the challenges of post-war development were more accurately con­
ceived in terms of lagging and subordination within those transformations.
Both lagging and subordination necessarily implied different paths in ac­
cordance with fundamentally different structures and positionalities within
these transformations. Notably, many of them, such as Arthur Lewis, were
2. Indeed, in her three teleological stories of development, Li (20 17) sidesteps the fact that
Marxism is also teleological, and that a story of crisis can be as teleological as a story of
progress within an understanding of capitalism.
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 431
also staunch anti-imperialists and drew from an internationalist standpoint
that was increasingly wary of US geopolitical machinations.
Homer and Hulme also cite me (Fischer, 2015) in making their case for
global development, with reference to the contemporary relevance of the
notion of peripherality. They seem to imply that this justifies a change of
emphasis towards greater differentiation at smaller spatial scales and on new
categorizations. However, my point in that article (ibid.) was more precisely
that the notion of peripherality provides a logic for conceiving of the world
according to a North/South binary, or whatever terms one wishes, according
to key structural dimensions that are vital to understand wealth and power in
the global economy and geopolitics. In this sense, I argued that the 'challenge
of contemporary development studies is to understand this transmutation of
lagging and subordination, rather than prematurely succumbing to euphoric
narratives of paradigms undone' (ibid.: 704). It was an argument for the
persisting relevance of past frameworks rather than a call for new ways of
understanding development.
Within these frameworks, development definitely does imply a funda­
mental transformation from a pre-transitional condition to some form of
'modernity', whether beneficial, benign or perverse, without necessarily im­
plying that there is a predestined teleological path or outcome within this
transformation or that later ' developers' will necessarily follow the same path
as those that preceded them. Nonetheless, it does imply some discernible
structural features of transition.
The most essential are arguably demographic, technological and eco­
nomic. For instance, Dyson (2001) argues that integral core features of
development are found in mortality, fertility and related demographic and
sociological transitions, including urbanization. In this regard, the points
raised by Homer and Hulme on human development- that crude indica­
tors of health and education have been converging over the post-war period
- have been well-established in demography for decades. The important
observation is that improvements in health in particular have been achieved
even in contexts of stagnant incomes and persistent poverty, and hence have
been taking place throughout the world to a considerable extent independent
of economic performance or even levels of income. As argued by Dyson
(ibid.), this implies that the 'spark' of demographic transition has been re­
lated to technological or other changes that allow for increased control over
mortality. Given that these are affordable and easily accessible, they have
been disseminating throughout the world at various speeds and are affecting
all societies, rich and poor alike, as part of a global process.
On the other hand, technological dissemination in the economic realm is
key to the structuring of centres and peripheries within the global expansion
of capitalism, in particular because technological capability at the frontier
is neither affordable nor accessible. Technological dissemination in this
sense does not necessarily determine the growth experiences of countries,
even though it operates as a fundamental influence depending on whether a
432 Andrew M Fischer
country leads and emanates or follows and receives the dissemination. The
two are interdependent, but not necessarily in a deterministic causal manner
(determinism meaning that technological dissemination will stimulate cap­
italist growth in the manner that was experienced by the currently advanced
industrial economies). This offers a useful perspective to the dilemma faced
by many development theorists, as it is often assumed that 'modernization'
in one form or another will ultimately lead to fairly deterministic economic
outcomes in the long run and, in the absence of those outcomes, modern­
ization must therefore have failed. In other words, societies modernize in
terms of demography or even technological consumption without necessarily
making their way up the ladder of economic hierarchy.
As concerns the economic hierarchy, technological and economic aspects
of modernity essentially refer to the emergence of what Furtado ( 1983) called
'industrial civilization'. This is the structuring of an entire economy, includ­
ing the consumption patterns of its poorer and more marginalized members,
around industrial processes and technologies, even if large parts of the econ­
omy are not involved in industrial production per se and/or become progres­
sively marginalized from the wealth generated through industrial processes.
In many respects, integration into modem 'industrial civilization' happens
through consumption, not production. As argued by Furtado, the fundamen­
tal difference between earlier and later experiences of industrialization -
especially post-war industrialization in practically all developing countries
- is that production led consumption in the former, whereas consumption
led production in the latter. All developing countries in the post-war period
essentially accessed industrial consumption through imports as the starting
point of whatever development path they subsequently followed. With a few
exceptions, they continue to do so today with respect to industrial consump­
tion at the technological frontier. It is in this essential sense that they are still
peripheries, within this particular, but particularly important dimension.
Accordingly, (capitalist) economic development can be understood as an
increasing amount of value-added produced per person, achieved through
increasing labour productivity (output per unit of labour time rather than
simply people working more or more people working) and sustained by
capital accumulation, both at a relatively broad economic scale. At an ag­
gregate level, increasing labour productivity usually results from synergies
of increasing degrees of specialization and scales of production, as well
as increasing applications of technology in production processes (including
social organization, which can be seen as a social form of technology).
The precise combinations of these elements at various scales vary depend­
ing on patterns of integration into regional, national and global economies.
Indeed, some subnational regional economies might possess few or none
of the attributes of increasing productivity in agriculture or manufacturing,
but nonetheless experience the effects of a rise in national labour produc­
tivity, in particular through the supply of cheap mass-produced goods, the
circulation of monetary aggregate demand, migration, and the dissemination
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 433
of wage norms throughout the national economy supported by government
fiscal policy. Indeed, aid transfers can also be understood as another way to
raise incomes and hence modem consumption without necessarily entailing
economic development.
However, it is also difficult to know where to draw the regional bound­
aries of economic development, that is, the boundaries within which a region
can be considered to be developing economically on the basis of local, re­
gional, national or global capitalist processes. Notably, there are usually
wide swathes of territory and large proportions of population even in ad­
vanced industrial countries that are based mostly on the consumption of
modem goods rather than their production (increasingly so as employment
continues to shift into services). Similarly, many poor countries, such as in
sub-Saharan Africa, experience transformation through consumption-driven
integrations into 'industrial civilization' without necessarily being involved
in industrial modes of production, besides in enclave sectors such as mining.
Such patterns of integration can lead to many paradoxical dynamics within
the labour transitions of such peripheral economies, that is, paradoxical from
the perspective of our understanding of labour transitions from a classical
European perspective.
In this sense, it is important to break out of simplistic associations re­
garding development. It is not as if negative attributes (such as persistent
poverty) or even a lack of structural transformation in some sectors or
subregions of an economic system (such as the persistence of low produc­
tivity economic activities in rural areas) somehow invalidate the existence
or possibility of development. Rather, from a broader perspective, it is im­
portant to consider how such attributes are the dialectical parts of a de­
velopmental whole, especially with regard to the integration of peripheral
regions within wider economic systems. In particular, the ways that devel­
opment manifests in peripheral settings can be quite different from the ways
it manifests in more central locations, although this cannot be understood
in abstraction of how the system as a whole is structured and continues to
transform over time.
As Raul Prebisch outlined in his centre-periphery approach (UN, 1950),
peripheries tend to exhibit certain common features of economic structure,
conditioned by the propagation of technical progress that establishes the
outward-directed, externally propelled development of peripheries. Disar­
ticulated, fragmented and specialized production structures tend to produce
a wide and heterogeneous range of productivities, which provides the struc­
tural foundation for higher inequality given the large spread of wages and
productivity. It was these features that led Prebisch to suggest that two of the
four characteristics of peripheral capitalist economies are marginalization
of disadvantaged populations in the peripheries and imitative metropolitan
consumption patterns of periphery elites.
The contemporary relevance of these foundational ideas can be seen, for
instance, in current debates on the enclave-nature of foreign direct investment
434 Andrew M. Fischer
in mining in Africa. Some authors, such as Kaplinsky et al. (20 11 ), dispute
the enclave characterization of this sector insofar as the outsourcing of
most stages of the value chain to independent firms has replaced traditional
vertical integration within the sector.3 However, this somewhat misses the
larger point of the classic structuralist critique, in that enclaves are but one
manifestation of the tendency for polarization within peripheral economies.
In other words, outsourcing within a particular sector does not necessarily
address the heterogeneity of economic structures at wider economic scales,
which the manner of outsourcing might in fact reinforce.
These foundational approaches to understanding development are still fit
for purpose. The conditions that have allowed for the generalized resur­
gence of growth in the last decade or so have been based on a particular
conjuncture of commodity booms and intense financialization, which have
counteracted the austerity and punitive pro-cyclical disciplining faced by
most developing countries during the neoliberal heydays of the 1980s and
1990s. However, that this would tend to exacerbate polarization within the
domestic sphere of such peripheral economies has been a long-established
insight.
ON THE CENTRALITY OF DOMESTIC INEQUALITY THAT ALWAYS WAS
On the second point of critique, it should be obvious from the above that it
was never the case that the study of development, in its classic sense, was
primarily about inequality between countries. Such inequality described the
lagging and subordination of poorer countries, but development studies in
its origins was focused more precisely on solving the problem. This was nec­
essarily a domestic affair, understood as a national project of structural and
social transformation, relying mostly on domestic resources, and informed
by anti-imperialism and a commitment to self-determination. At a collective
scale, this could only ever be achieved by a state.
Within this project, domestic (within-country) inequality was a central
consideration. The idea that somehow it was not, has possibly been induced
by gross misrepresentations of Simon Kuznets and Arthur Lewis, among
others. For instance, Milanovic (201 1: 9), one of the current doyens in
the study of international inequality, claims that Kuznets argued that 'in
preindustrial societies, almost everybody is equally poor so inequality is
low'. Piketty (20 14) also misrepresents Kuznets in similar ways.
Kuznets actually argued the opposite. In his seminal article, Kuznets
( 1955: 25-26) doubted the relevance of his hypothesis for 'underdeveloped'
countries on the basis of the fact that they generally had higher levels of
inequality, not lower, and at lower levels of income than was previously
3. I am indebted to Ben Radley for pointing out these debates to me.
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 435
the case for the richer countries he was studying.4 He suggested that the
impact of an increase in inequality is far sharper because most of the popu­
lation is closer to the absolute threshold and the concentration of savings is
higher. These features were perpetuated by an absence of dynamic forces
that checked the upward trend of upper-income shares and of political and
social systems to increase the lower-income shares in such developing coun­
tries (i.e. fiscal and welfare systems were very weak in most cases). He also
presciently noted that financial liberalization would exacerbate these con­
ditions by facilitating the flight of elite wealth abroad or into real estate.
These observations led Kuznets to seriously question the presumptions of
modernization theory, contrary to how he is often portrayed.
The idea that domestic inequality is somehow newly relevant has also been
influenced by the narrative of new geographies of global poverty, on which
Homer and Hulme rely so heavily. This recent idea that the geography
of poverty has changed and that the majority of the world's poor people
now live in middle-income countries was first innovatively unearthed and
explored by Sumner (20 10), who has been hugely successful in entering this
idea into the upper echelons of policy consciousness and discourse. The idea
has now reached the status of an accepted stylized fact.
It must be noted, of course, that this is really about a threshold effect
rather than geography. In other words, a number of large countries passed
from lower-income country status to lower middle-income country status
(according to the World Bank Atlas method of calculating per capita gross
national income). For instance, India passed from US$1,000 in 2000 to
US$ 1, 1 10 in 2009, thereby passing the threshold of lower middle-income
country status (which was set at US$ 1,026 as of 2017). Indeed, Sumner
discusses this in his work and also stopped referring to geography after his
first several papers, but this has been largely ignored in the popular uptake
of the idea.
Sumner (20 16) nonetheless suggests that this change in status fundamen­
tally changes the distributive logic facing such countries, in terms of the
amount of domestic resources (per capita) that are now available to address
poverty in these countries. This contrasts with lower-income countries that
lack such domestic resources and therefore must rely on aid (or at least,
that more readily lend credibility to the case for aid). This is supported by
Hoy and Sumner (20 16) who show that most countries actually have the
resources to eliminate a large part of extreme poverty.
While the threshold is arguably not that significant in terms of funda­
mentally altering the distributive and redistributive options facing these
countries, the more important point is that the essence of post-war devel­
opment debates was always about national distribution and redistribution.
4. Lewis (1954) similarly noted that inequality in overpopulated underdeveloped countries is
usually higher than in advanced industrialized countries because agricultural rents are so
high.
436 Andrew M. Fischer
National liberation leaders and movements were intensely aware of the need
to redistribute highly concentrated wealth inherited from the colonial era
in support of decolonization, which was encouraged by the socialist pro­
clivities of many of these movements. Redistribution was also one of the
main messages of the Latin American structuralists in the 1950s, as a crucial
means to enhance domestic demand and integration, especially as they be­
came more and more critical of import substitution industrialization policies
that were being usurped by strategic doses of transnational corporate in­
vestment and ownership. Redistribution was also the big lesson from South
Korea and Taiwan, where extensive state-led land reform was implemented
at the beginning of their post-war development trajectories, while they were
still very poor, not once they had attained middle-income country status
(see, for example, Kay, 2002; Putzel, 2000). The reasons why some African
countries that attempted similar strategies (e.g. Tanzania) apparently failed
remain contested in interpretation (see, for example, Gray, 2018), although
the principle of strong asset redistribution remains a powerful lesson from
the few obvious cases of post-war development success.
One vital reason for this is because the domestic resource mobilization
strategies that were common among poor countries in that era, such as
policies to extract surplus from rural populations in order to subsidize and
finance industrialization, were possible only in the absence of high levels of
rural inequality. Otherwise, in the context of high inequality, as was typical in
Latin America, policies of rural surplus extraction would tend to drive the ru­
ral poor into even further crippling poverty. Such outcomes were evidenced,
for instance, by the way that colonial strategies of rural surplus extraction
caused widespread and intense famines in India (Davis, 2001; Mukherjee,
1974). Indeed, this is similar to the point raised by Kuznets regarding the
sharper impacts of rising inequality in very poor and unequal settings.
In any case, such strategies never stood a chance in high inequality coun­
tries given that they were blocked by powerful wealthy constituencies of
landowners and associated elite factions, which is a political economy char­
acteristic typical of high inequality settings. US-supported coup d 'hats (e.g.
Guatemala 1956, Chile 1973, etc.), and its support to right-wing military
regimes opposing surprisingly successful revolutionary movements (e.g. El
Salvador and Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s ), also made clear that
domestic inequality was definitely on everyone's radar then.
This calculus also applies to China. Both collectivization in the Maoist
period and de-collectivization in the immediate post-Maoist period estab­
lished a very strong equalization in the use of land assets among the rural
population. The development strategies pursued from the Maoist period up
to the 1990s, such as the implicit subsidization of urban industrialization by
rural areas through a variety of price and financial mechanisms,5 arguably
5. For a recent discussion of these strategies in the Maoist period, see Eisenman (2018).
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 437
could not have been pursued if the starting point in the late 1970s had al­
ready been at a high level of inequality, as it had been under the Nationalists
(Guomintang) prior to their defeat in 1949.
This role of redistribution in setting the stage for domestic resource mobi­
lization strategies has always been relevant for very poor countries; it has not
required their emergence into middle-income status in order to make it so.
The focus on thresholds as signifying some sort of fundamental change also
distracts us from the vital synergies that can be observed in successful histor­
ical cases of development between simultaneous or closely sequenced public
interventions in both domestic redistribution and production. These points
are generally ignored in the contemporary revival of attention to domestic
resource mobilization, such as in the current Financing for Development
(FfD)6 agenda, particularly as donors retreat from a variety of aid-dependent
countries in Africa. Rather, the main default strategy for domestic resource
mobilization is through value-added taxes, which are generally considered
regressive. As such, these current agendas lack ambitious transformative
visions or programmes that could render the aim of domestic resource mo­
bilization as socially and politically sustainable or legitimate.
DEVELOPMENTAL DEJA VU
Following from the above, it is important to recall that we have been here
before. The elephants in Horner and Hulme's room are the conditions that
led us away from that earlier point. These are the rise of austerity, structural
adjustment and neoliberalism7 for a large number of developing countries
as one particular creditor-biased way to aggressively overcome the systemic
impasse of the 1970s.
The context of the 1970s is important to recall. Rapid even if unstable
growth in most developing countries was closing the gap with stagnating
rich countries. There were strong calls and serious organization around the
idea of a New International Economic Order. As noted above, demands
for domestic redistribution in developing countries were also becoming
6. For instance, see: www.un.org/esa/ffd/; www.worldbank.org/en/about/partners/maximizing­
finance-for-development, or http:!/pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/822 15 153 151367069 1/Finan
cingforDevelopmentatthe WBGBrochureJuly20 18Edition-Updated-July-22-2018-reduce­
file-size-final. pdf
7. While the term neoliberalism has admittedly been overused and abused, here it is used in
its narrow political economy sense, referring to the ideological creed that policy should
strive towards creating or imitating perfectly competitive markets as much as possible. In
practical terms, this roughly equates to a combination of monetarist, purportedly neutral
but often pro-cyclical macroeconomic policy, the trio of privatization, liberalization and
deregulation, and attempts to introduce market-type or market-mimicking mechanisms into
spaces that operate according to different logics, particularly in the public sector, such as
New Public Management.
438 Andrew M Fischer
increasingly prominent in the 1970s, in particular from relatively successful
revolutionary movements (some socialist, others not) and from serious chal­
lenges to US hegemony and to US support for right-wing regimes around
the world, such as in Vietnam, Iran and Nicaragua. International organiza­
tions were also shifting towards greater advocacy for redistribution, coined
as development with equity or development with a human face. The influ­
ence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund was quickly
being eclipsed given their impotency in being able to regulate the anar­
chic international monetary system that emerged after the US went off
the gold standard in 1971, and because unprecedented supplies of afford­
able dollar liquidity were freeing middle-income countries from the need
to rely on official finance. Much like today, many people were predicting
the eventual redundancy of these Bretton Woods institutions, or else call­
ing for serious reforms to make them more representative of the emerging
new order.
The 1982 debt crisis then marked the decisive turning point of US global
hegemonic revival, at least with respect to the rebellious 'Third World',
ending its slow erosion of control on economic, political and military fronts
during the turbulent 1970s. It ushered in the 'changing of the guard' in the
World Bank, replacing the earlier (American) structuralist influence of Hol­
lis Chenery with the neoliberal ascendance of Anne Krueger. The tide also
turned within the field of development studies, although not without much
contention and resistance, if only because the focus was forcibly shifted to­
ward economic crisis and depression, which UNICEF coined as 'adjustment
with a human face' (Cornia et al., 1987). These shifts reflected the demise of
developmentalism in most low- and middle-income countries outside South
and East Asia, and of the Third Worldist activism and confidence that had
been effervescing throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Most of Latin America,
Africa and West Asia had been effectively disciplined through international
finance in a way that could not be achieved through direct politics or mil­
itary intervention, particularly following the US debacle in its war with
Vietnam.
However, it is important to recall that radically different paths could have
been taken. The idea that 'there is no alternative' (TINA) to the one taken
is the ideological construct of this US-led reassertion of hegemony. Indeed,
one of the more problematic aspects of the lexicon of globalization that
emerged in the 1990s is that it feeds into this TINA doctrine. The term is
generally used to refer to the post-1980 period and, in particular, the post­
Cold War neoliberal euphoria in the 1990s. As such, it effectively serves
as a depoliticizing device in the discussion of policy, similar to the role
of development goals, as argued in Fischer (2013, 2018b). In particular, it
makes the neoliberal path appear as an inherent and natural aspect of global­
ization, or as determined by globalization. If one accepts the good aspects of
globalization, such as increased human mobility, improved global commu­
nications and the dissemination of medical technologies, it must necessarily
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 439
follow that one accepts other aspects that effectively equate to a neolib­
eral ideological and policy position, such as privatization, deregulation, and
trade, financial and capital account liberalization. It is in this sense that the
anti-globalization movement arguably succumbed to forfeiting the narrative
battle given that what has really been at stake is the nature of policy, not
whether globalization is inherently a good or bad thing. The 'global' rhetoric
in this sense distracts us from fundamentally challenging or even addressing
the neoliberal paradigm, let alone capitalism.
As is common with many of the well-known millennia! books on poverty,
the economic data presented by Horner and Hulme are also predisposed
towards a revisionist reading of how the world has changed in the post­
war period, in particular by obfuscating the development gains and then
losses of the past. With one exception (Figure 1, p. 350), the economic
data start in the late 1980s or 1990s, in line with standard World Bank
practice and undoubtedly because the authors rely almost entirely on World
Bank data. In so doing, they hide the important development gains that
were made up to the 1970s and the damage that was done to develop­
ment in the 1980s. They also distort the perception of growth since the
early 2000s, much of which more accurately represents recovery once the
very austere and punitive international conditions facing many countries
were relaxed.
For Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, the two world
regions that were most subjected to crisis, austerity and structural adjustment
in the 1980s and 1990s, a start year of around 1990, as was institutionalized
by the Millennium Development Goals, represents about the worst point in
a disastrous and highly contentious period. Poverty rates notably started to
rise in these two regions from the late 1970s onwards and, in Latin America,
reached their apex around 1990.8 From this trough of depression, things
could have presumably only gotten better (although they generally did not
for a while more). A large proportion of poverty reduction since this time
(about half in the case of Latin America) effectively represents the recu­
peration of lost ground from previous development gains, following the
debilitating assaults during the 1980s on the means that were used to
achieve these previous gains.
The choice of start dates around 1990 in this sense lends itself to inter­
preting any recovery from deep economic depression as a vindication of the
prevailing international economic and political system that contributed to the
depression in the first place. This includes the role of leading international
financial institutions (IFis) in engineering the severe austerities imposed on
the debtor countries. There was some internal dissension in the ranks of
the IFis when times were still dire up until the early 2000s, but these were
mostly admissions that they had been too fervent, not that the direction taken
8. For Latin America, for example, see Cepalstat.
440 Andrew M Fischer
was wrong (for a recent example, see Ostry et al., 20 16). As noted by Mkan­
dawire (2014) in the case of Africa, the subsequent revival of growth also
revived self-celebratory narratives that structural adjustment nonetheless
provided the foundation for growth recoveries through the imposition of
sensible discipline and constraint on national governments (in contrast to
the simultaneous deliria occurring in international finance, which seemingly
faces no discipline or constraint). The possibility that growth recovered sim­
ply as a result of relaxing the shackles, allowing countries to start breathing
financially again and to return to their interrupted development endeavours,
is rarely considered within such self-congratulatory narratives.
In contrast, the sheer lack of analysis of the pre-1980 period is notable
in these exercises of policy-based narrative creation. This is again probably
due to the predominant practice of relying on the data of the World Bank
International Comparison Programme (as do Homer and Hulme), which
only starts around 1980. Indeed, the World Bank purchasing power parity
(PPP) poverty rates would lead us to believe that almost the entirety of
China's population (i.e. over 80 per cent) was on the verge of starvation
in 198 1. Even though the country was very austere at the time, it is highly
unlikely that more than eight out of ten people were living in a state that
is best described as one of hunger or starvation. Instead, as discussed in
Fischer (20 18b ), it is more likely that these poverty measures (and their more
recent revisions) are very poorly adapted to reflect the profound structural
and institutional transformations occurring since the early 1980s in China.
Through these transformations, the nature and experience of poverty has
transformed in profoundly, in particular with respect to the commodification
of health care, education or housing, as well as the breakdown of various
provisioning systems that, despite the evident austerity of the late-Maoist
economy, would have nonetheless permitted a decent level of health and
other basic needs. In this manner, the linear transposition of current metrics
into the past obfuscates the important development improvements that were
key preconditions to China's emergence in the 1980s, particularly in areas of
human development, such as the huge improvements in health and education
in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the linear transposition reinforces narratives
that China was essentially a basket case until it liberalized and privatized.
These points need to be stressed because the story about China, as well as
the story about recent resurgent growth in the South more generally, is much
better read as a vindication of many of the classics of 'old' development
economics- before it was replaced by what Hirschman (1981) famously
referred to as 'mono-economics' - rather than as a cause for putting into
question their relevance. The exercise of re-fashioning the semantics dis­
tracts us - in particular students and young scholars - from the important
lessons we can draw on, thereby doing a disservice to the legacy of our field
by encouraging an amnesia which is happily exploited by others, whether
neoliberal or post-developmental.
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 441
This amnesia is particularly unhelpful in the current conjuncture when
those countries that are struggling to attain middle-income status and/or
remain there are again potentially facing bouts of crisis similar to those
that brought down the previous era of developmentalism. As was classically
postulated by early development economists such as Prebisch on the basis of
practical experience, a fundamental dilemma facing development strategies
is that they tend to exacerbate external vulnerability. This is not necessarily
because of bad policy or behaviour, but because of structural economic
dependence, whereby the intensification of development strategies tends to
intensify reliance on foreign exchange (see Fischer, 2018a for an elaboration
of this point). Hence, it is no coincidence that 'Rising Africa' has come with
sharply rising African external debt or foreigners holding domestic debt
(see, for example, Akyiiz, 2017), much of it with interest rates that would
cause economic recession or worse in the US or Europe. As in the past, the
alternative of relying on foreign direct investment has also come at the cost
of a rapid deepening of dependency in economic structures. That both would
come with a rise of domestic inequality is not particularly surprising.
CONCLUSION
Any exercise of labelling development should logically begin with trying to
understand what development is, and not with a description of its outcomes
(or of the outcomes of other things such as crises for that matter). Homer
and Hulme avoid this task. They simply reduce their understanding of 'in­
ternational development' (as if this label had already become established
convention) to North-South binaries and between-country inequality. They
then propose 'global development' as an appreciation of a nuance that was,
in fact, always there, and a rejection of binaries that are, in certain important
respects, still with us.
Relabelling in this sense is problematic because it sets up a false caricature
of past thought. In the process, it does a disservice to the field, in particular
because so many of the classical concerns and lessons from the tradition
of development studies remain so relevant for understanding contempo­
rary problems, for poorer countries and even for those that have attained
middle-income status. Indeed, there remains a huge difference between the
disparities and perversities of rich countries, and the real challenges of de­
velopment that are still paramount to the large majority of countries around
the world, regardless of their diversity and regardless of the fact that they
contain some rich people.
Development studies - as it was and could continue to be - retains
value as an interdisciplinary field because it starts from an understanding
of transformation as the foundation of theorization and analysis, and how
associated social, political, economic and cultural dynamics interact with
and are conditioned by such transformation. Other social science disciplines
442 Andrew M Fischer
or interdisciplinary fields could supplant this role, but so far they have not.
It is time to reaffirm the field in this purpose.
This partly involves recognizing that development was always conceived
primarily in terms of national or collective projects of structural and social
transformation in contexts of lagging and subordination within globalizing
capitalism. It is relevant here to use the term 'global' with respect to cap­
italism because it is the operations of large transnational corporations and
international finance that have truly become global, albeit while still retain­
ing a centre of operations, where profits eventually come home to roost after
passing through numerous subsidiaries and affiliates in offshore financial
centres. However, this does not diminish the importance of the national col­
lective project, even though it changes the nature of the challenges that such
projects now face, particularly with respect to practising industrial policy or
maintaining control over fiscal systems in the context of liberalized financial
and trade regimes. The goal might be catching up, although merely keeping
up with changing structural and institutional norms is already a massive task
in most cases.
Within such projects, domestic inequality remains a crucial issue, even
for very poor countries. This is partly because it is very difficult to engage in
domestic resource mobilization strategies in contexts of high inequality, for
reasons of poverty, political economy and legitimacy, and also because of
the underlying structural tendency within peripheral economies towards do­
mestic polarization. This point is overlooked in the current FfD agenda and,
in the lacuna, the main default strategy for domestic resource mobilization
is through value-added taxes - which are generally considered regressive
- in the absence of any ambitious transformative agendas. It would be
important to revive the classical attention to inequality and redistribution,
but not necessarily for the reasons that Homer and Hulme stipulate, which
reproduce an amnesia of the past.
Moreover, through relying heavily on World Bank data and narratives,
Horner and Hulme implicitly condone the neoliberal period as one of prob­
lematic and yet tentatively emancipatory change. This is characterized as
the South gradually and diversely rising up to the North, although at the
cost of increasing differentiation within the South, both across countries and
within them. Yet, this fundamentally distorts the perception of how the world
has changed in the post-war period, with respect to important development
gains that were made up to the 1970s versus the development collapses
that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s outside of East and South Asia. And
while the narrative of a fundamental shift now is definitely inspired by the
impressive return of China to global prominence after a 200-year eclipse of
its geopolitical importance, even this tends to be subverted into the implicit
condoning of neoliberalism, or at least serves to obfuscate the neoliberal pe­
riod for everyone else. It avoids the fact that China's experience more or less
vindicates classical approaches to development, whereas crises everywhere
else also vindicate these approaches in their abandonment.
Debate: Bringing Development Back into Development Studies 443
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Andrew M. Fischer (fischer@iss.nl) is Associate Professor at the Institute
of Social Studies (The Hague, The Netherlands), editor at Development
and Change, and founding editor of the book series published by Oxford
University Press entitled Critical Frontiers of International Development
Studies. His most recent book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 20 18), was awarded
the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research
Programme on Poverty (CROP). He did his BA and MA in economics at
McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and his PhD in Development Studies
at the London School of Economics. He has been involved in development
studies or working in developing countries for over 30 years.