Politics of development

This course aims at familiarising students with critical approaches to development. Articulating the sociology of public action and the history and anthropology of development, it does not seek to assess development plans’ efficiency or to provide ‘solutions’ to particular ‘problems’. It aims, instead, at reaching a better understanding of the ways in which the definition of both problems and solutions reflect transnational and local relations of power, as well as socially situated forms of knowledge. We will study the ways in which ‘development’ projects are concretely conceived, set up, and how they are received, understood and appropriated by their ‘beneficiairies’.