Hammett, Daniel, Chasca Twyman, and Mark Graham. "The Contested Terrain of Development". In Research and Fieldwork in Development, by Daniel Hammett, Chasca Twyman, and Mark Graham, 33-46. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Hammett, Daniel, Chasca Twyman, and Mark Graham. "The Contested Terrain of Development". In Research and Fieldwork in Development, by Daniel Hammett, Chasca Twyman, and Mark Graham, 33-46. New York: Routledge, 2015.

• Current responses to international development are shaped by the responses and institutions mustered to cope with the devestation of Europe and East Asia in the aftermath of WWII (33). The Bretton Woods institutions and UN organs became the representatives of development because the US and other NATO powers promoted this form of purely economic development as the alternative to Communist development (36-37).
• Development as a modern political concept, as in something which people actually worked towards, comes from the 18th Century Englightenment, and its definition of 'progress'. It asserted that all people progress towards a point of development and that contemporary Europe, particularly France or England, represented the height of this development. This informed later concepts of development, usually in racist ways (35).
• Although the legacy of associating 'development' with European ways of doing things had obvious legacies through the influence of that logic in supporting European colonialism, it also had an influence on charity and missionary work in a way still reflected in current practices and rhetoric (35-36).
• The model of development developed by the West, particularly the US, after WWII was based on the success of the Marshall Plan in preventing the spread of Communism in Western Europe. These same tools were then applied to the rest of the world, often with mixed results due to radically different circumstances (37-38).
• Development does not exist in a natural or constant form, but is a contested concept defined for political purposes. The colonial definition of progress justified export-oriented infrastructure and forcible adoption of European dress and customs. The Soviet definition of progress demanded collectivized ownership and weakened family ties (36).
• During the 1970s, 'dependency theory' became an increased challenge to the Western concept of development, arguing that development along Western capitalist lines was impossible for most countries because the international economic structures of capitalism permanently exploited them. Since Western growth was built on exploitation of the Third World, the Third World could not develop because it had no one to exploit (38-39).
• The concept of development in the West began to expand during the 1970s, largely through the increased influence of rights discourse in the UN, to include not only economic development, but also societal development representing access to basic education, healthcare, and other social goods (39). This happened again in the 1990s (40-41).
• The increased influence of neoliberalism on Western political leaders during the 1980s precipitated another major change in the appraoch to international development. Since powers such as US, UK, and the Bonn Republic had a disproportionate influence in the Bretton Woods institutions, they were able to change development strategies along market-oriented neoliberal lines, with devestating results for African economies in particular (40).
• According to the authors, South-South development first became a concept in the 1990s, largely due to the influence of Western and South American scholarship, and represented the first real time that the Western hegemony over the concept of development had been broken (43). That fucking physically hurt to write; how ignorant of development can you be to not know about the Third World movement of the 1960s and its efforts, not to mention sweeping the entire history of Socialist development under the rug.

The account of development as a concept provided by the authors is grossly ahistorical (I would expect nothing less from political scientists), and entirely ignores any concept of development not grounded in the West. Although critical of the failures of Western development, it does so without recognizing the competiting definitions present, most notably in Socialist development and Third Worldist development. Much of the history it gives is just plain wrong, especially ascribing things as early as the 1940s to neoliberalism: do not cite.