Development and Social Change
A Global Perspective
- Philip McMichael - Cornell University, USA
- Heloise Weber - University of Queensland, Australia
Social Change & Modernization
Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective explains how development thinking and practice have shaped our world. It introduces students to four interconnected projects, and how their dynamics, contradictions and controversies have influenced development trajectories: colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development. Authors Philip McMichael and Heloise Weber use case studies and examples to help describe a complex world in transition. Students are encouraged to see global development as a contested historical project. By showing how development stems from unequal power relationships between and among peoples and states, often with planet-threatening environmental outcomes, it enables readers to reflect on the possibilities for more just social, ecological and political relations.
New co-author Heloise Weber from the University of Queensland brings her expertise on international relations and the politics of development to the text.
Ch. 1 has been revised to emphasize contemporary challenges--rising material impoverishment, struggles for racial equality and justice, ecological despoliation--and to connect these challenges to Modernization Theory
Ch. 2 incorporates recent critical revisions of the Eurocentric framing of development and notions of progress and backwardness.
Ch. 3 contains new material on Third World challenges to the colonial division of labor.
Ch. 5 has been reorganized to include aspects of Ch. 4 from the previous edition (Globalizing Developments), and contains new case studies to illustrate core political shifts.
Ch. 6 includes updates to global counter-movements: environmentalism, feminism, food sovereignty.
Ch. 7 updates a number of crises in the development project, focusing on austerity policies, associated legitimacy questions, and geopolitical divisions as the American Century winds down.
Ch. 8 and Ch. 9 have been reoriented around development in the context of the current climate emergency, and "green" initiative in urban and rural areas.
Ch. 10 now evaluates a number of emerging sustainable development paradigms, and possibilities for building a coordinated, coherent and just future for all peoples across the world.