Development discourse

Abstract

Two different discourses, development and globalisation, can be identified as successively dominating global North-South relations in the past decades. A concise analysis of both discourses is relevant and insightful because notions of development and of globalisation are conceptualising social change in strikingly different ways and with different attitudes towards social engineering. Globalisation discourse in line with neoclassical economic theory and regards interventions in the market mechanism as the source of inefficient resource allocation resulting in higher prices and lower quality in goods and services. In the neoliberal perspective, whose theoretical basis was to be found in neoclassical and monetarist economics, the perceived failures of development policy were attributed to flawed Keynesian strategies: the idea of the necessity and beneficial effects of state intervention was blamed for over-inflated public sectors, inefficient state enterprises, and an overemphasis on the means of production.