The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
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by Wolfgang Sachs
"The idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work…. Nevertheless, the ruin stands there and still dominates the scenery like a landmark."
"The authors of this book deal neither with development as a technical performance nor with development as class conflict, but with development as a particular cast of mind. For development is much more than a socio-economic endeavor; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which conforms societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions. Perceptions, myths and fantasies, however, rise and fall independent of empirical results and rational conclusions; they appear and vanish, not because they are proven right or wrong, but rather because they are pregnant with promise or become irrelevant. This book offers a critical inventory of development credos, their history and implications, in order to expose in the harsh glare of sunlight their perceptual biases, their historical inadequacy, and their imaginative sterility."
Sachs brings together a collection of wonderful written essays which very clearly and powerfully seek to dismantle the myth that the international development in any way helps less developed countries. Sachs and his co-authors challenge the validity of development as practiced by transnational institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, OECD and others.
- Reviewed by Zaid Hassan
News from Pioneers of Change - SEPTEMBER 2007
10 Year Pioneers of Change Anniversary
