The Next 10 Years In Development Studies: From Modernization To Multiple Modernities, In Theory And Practice

摘要

Recently I had the opportunity to deliver a capstone lecture in a course on poverty for the staff of Google. Given that I was speaking to a large gathering of people at one of the biggest and most ambitious new entrants into the field of development, I framed my remarks around the imperatives that drive the key actors in contemporary development, and offered some thoughts on whether the technologies, resources and sensibilities of a company whose distinctiveness lies in innovative computer programming and marketing was likely to reinforce or qualitatively alter those imperatives. In the end, my answer was 'both'. On the one hand, imagining that all manner of complex issues in development could ultimately (or potentially) be reduced to ones and zeros was likely to reinforce imperatives that strongly favour rapid, standardized, technocratic responses, no matter what the problem actually is. On the other hand, embedding new information technologies to facilitate transparency and accountability within an entirely different operating system for thinking about foreign aid and the development process had the potential to be truly revolutionary. The question was which outcome would prevail?