Since the mid-twentieth century development has been promoted as the process of overcoming the condition of deprivation that prevails in many regions of the world. Underdevelopment is, correspondingly, a situation from which people and governments want to remove themselves, using science and technology to increase efficiency and generate innovations in the production of goods and services. Social science plays a crucial role in explaining the causes of and finding solutions to underdevelopment.

Development discourse often acts like an ideology, either as an uncritical recipe for all kinds of social ills or as a way of justifying policies that benefit the powerful while speciously purporting to aid the poor. In their 1992 work The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power Wolfgang Sachs, Ivan Illich, Vandana Shiva, Arturo Esteva, and others recommend dropping development discourse altogether as being part of a project based on the quantitative and...