The Rise of Global Development

Global Development Strategies and Policies

In this course, Dr Dinah Rajak (University of Sussex) explores global development strategies and policies from the mid-20th century to the present. In the first module, we look at the emergence of global development in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ambiguities around how the concept is defined. The second module then considers early development strategies from the 1950s-70s which focused on technological “fixes” to poverty, most importantly the Green Revolution. In the third and fourth modules, we examine neoliberal models of development, which were dominant from the 1970s, in terms of their emphasis on market liberalisation and the role of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in their implementation. In the fifth module, we think about the more recent incorporation of environmental concerns into global development policy through the concept of sustainable development. We conclude with a sixth module on inclusive growth, an important current development paradigm which sees the free market as the best driver of development, but argues that it needs to be made to “work for the poor”.

The Rise of Global Development

In this module, we think about the rise of global development from the mid-20th century. We focus on: (i) key actors in the global development community, including national governments and the private sector, and their core goal of reducing/eliminating poverty across the world; (ii) US President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address as a key moment in the emergence of global development, and in the articulation of some its key priorities, such as its emphasis on free trade and economic growth; (iii) how the context of the mid-20th century, particularly decolonisation in the Global South and the advent of the Cold War, shaped Truman’s ideas and, notably, made modernisation theory the ideological underpinning of the global development agenda; (iv) ambiguities in the concept and definition of global development, and different scholarly perspectives on the consequences of this vagueness for development policy.