The Age of the Techno-Fix

About the lecture

In this module, we think about early global development strategies in the mid-20th century, and particularly their preoccupation with “fixing” underdevelopment through technological modernisation. We focus on: (i) the concept of development associated with the World Bank’s “war on poverty” in the 1960s, in which underdevelopment was framed as a consequence of the backwardness of the Global South; (ii) the “Green Revolution”, a key initiative in this period which, adopting this understanding of development, sought to drive economic growth through the introduction of western agricultural methods in the Global South; (iii) two important positions regarding the Green Revolution - firstly that, rather than bringing development, it caused significant environmental and social destruction and, secondly, that despite this it was a “painful but necessary process”; (iv) some of the wider negative consequences of the Green Revolution, including worsened food insecurity in the Global South and widespread environmental degradation.

About the lecturer

Dr Dinah Rajak is a Reader in Anthropology and Development at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the role of corporations in global development and the concept of corporate social responsibility. She is author of In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (2011) and co-editor of The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility (2016).