Post-Development from the Global South: Radical Alternatives or Ambivalent Engagements?

Post-development advocates and decolonial thinkers are calling for radical alternatives to development, but how do these ideals sit with the day-to-day reality of marginalised communities struggling with poverty, precarity, and the deprivation of human rights?

This book investigates how post-development alternatives are being understood and negotiated on the ground in the Global South. Indigenous concepts and practices attributed to people in the Global South are seen by post-development thinkers as offering transformative alternatives to dominant development models of progress and economic growth. For example, buen vivir from particular regions of South America points to a ‘culture of life’ and ubuntu in Southern Africa emphasises human connectedness and mutuality. Such terms are associated with social and environmental sustainability, and a greater connection to Southern epistemologies. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book takes us directly to Global South communities from around the world, to consider the complex ways in which they negotiate the ideas and practices associated with (post)development, and their views on the supposed indigenous alternatives. The book encourages a contextual approach that embraces the tensions and contradictions that exist within different communities.

Taking the reader from abstract post-development theory right into the heart of communities directly impacted by development, this book will be an important guide for students, researchers and practitioners looking for better ways to address the desires and aspirations of marginalised communities in the Global South.

Sally Matthews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is interested in a rather eclectic range of topics – post-development theory, the politics of knowledge production on Africa, the role of NGOs in Africa, higher education transformation and decolonisation – which are all loosely related to the question of whether and how those who occupy positions of privilege can act in the interests of the marginalised and oppressed.

Alba Castellsagué is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Pedagogy Department at the University of Girona (UdG). She has teaching and research experience in the fields of education and international development, gender equality and migration studies.