Global Development and Colonial Power

Although Germany was one of the principal colonising nations in Africa and today is the world’s second largest aid donor, there is no literature on the postcolonial condition of contemporary German development policy.

This book explores German development endeavours by state institutions as well as NGOs, and provides evidence of development policy’s unacknowledged entanglement in colonial modes of thought and practice. It zooms in on concrete policies and practices in selected fields of intervention: development education and billboard advertising in Germany, and – taking Tanzania as a case in point – obstetric care and population control in the Global South. The analysis finds that disregarding colonial continuities means to perpetuate the inequalities and injustices that development policy claims to fight. This book argues that colonial power in global development needs to be understood as functioning through the transnational character of development policy at home and abroad.