About Arturo Escobar: 'Encountering Development'

Literature Review from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,7, University of Auckland (Centre for Development Studies), course: Contemporary Theories of International Development, language: English, abstract: The field of development studies has seen an endless coming and going of various new paradigms in the latter half of the 20th century. They all claimed to be highly innovative, stirring hope that, after all the dissatisfactory experiences prior to their emergence, the big problems of developing countries can finally be solved. A vast body of major theory on development emerged since the 1940s, such as Modernisation theory, Dependency theory, World-Systems theory, and Neoliberalism with its strucural adjustment programms (Chant & McIlwaine, 2009). In the early to mid-1990s, an outraged collection of texts, highly critical of all those conventional development approaches, emerged. In contrast to former controversies, these writings were novel in the way that they casted 'a serious doubt not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development' itself (Escobar, 2000, p. 11), making use of newly revised poststructuralist and discursive approaches. This way of criticism became known as post-development. According to McGregor (2009, p.2), the 'most influential and widely read text however' was Escobar's (1995) Encountering Development: The Naking and Unmaking of the Third World. This article aims to review this book and is divided into three parts. The first section provides a brief summary of the text, followed by an analysis dealing with major potential contradictions and their relative insignificance, closing with the final part by highlighting the huge and unique impact the book had in the field of development studies and especially in the branch of post-development theory.