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 an author and research director at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, in Germany. He has been chair of the board of Greenpeace Germany, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is a member of the Club of Rome. Amongst the various appointments he has held are co-editor of the Society for International Development's journal Development; visiting professor of science, technology and society at Pennsylvania State University and fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen. He regularly teaches at Schumacher College and as Honorary Professor at the University of Kassel.

Wolfgang Sachs's first English book, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, was published by the University of California Press in 1992. Several of his works have been published by Zed Books. They include the immensely influential Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (edited, 1992), which has since been translated into numerous languages; Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (edited, 1993); Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity (co-authored with Reinhard Loske and Manfred Linz, 1998); Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development (1999) and (with T. Santarius et al) Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security, and Global Justice (2007).