The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Development Essentials)

In this pioneering collection, some of the world’s most eminent critics of development review the key concepts of the development discourse in the post-war era.

Each essay examines one concept from a historical and anthropological point of view and highlights its particular bias. Exposing their historical obsolescence and intellectual sterility, the authors call for a bidding farewell to the whole Eurocentric development idea. This is urgently needed, they argue, in order to liberate people’s minds - in both North and South - for bold responses to the environmental and ethical challenges now confronting humanity.

These essays are an invitation to experts, grassroots movements and students of development to recognize the tainted glasses they put on whenever they participate in the development discourse.

Wolfgang Sachs is a senior research fellow at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. He has long been active in the German and Italian green movements and is currently chairman of the board of Greenpeace in Germany. Amongst the various appointments he has held, he has been co-editor of the Society for International Development’s journal Development in Rome; Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Pennsylvania State University in the USA; and a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen. His first book, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires was published by University of California Press in 1992. He also edited the immensely influential Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power which was published by Zed Books in the same year and has since been translated into numerous languages. His most recent book in English (coauthored), Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity, marks an important shift of agenda beyond critique to envisaging concrete alternatives and feasible processes of social transition. Wolfgang Sachs travels widely as a public speaker and university lecturer in Europe, North America and the South. His books published by Zed Books: The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (edited) (1992) Global Ecology: A Mew Arena of Political Conflict (edited) (1993) Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity (coauthored with Reinhard Loske and Manfred Linz) (1998)