Development Theory In Geography Research Paper

The theories of economic development employed in this early postwar literature were fundamentally those which had been developed in disciplines such as economics, political science, and sociology. In particular, most work by geographers in the 1960s fell more or less explicitly into the category of ‘modernization’ studies, adopting the view that all countries could and should follow more or less the same course of development as the advanced industrialized capitalist countries, passing through ‘stages of growth’ which lead from premodern, preindustrial, and relatively stagnant societies to societies which are industrial, modern, and dynamic. Geographers gave modernization approaches a spatial bearing through examination of issues such as urbanization patterns (Berry 1961), regional development (Friedmann 1966), and the development of transportation systems (Gould 1960; Taafe et al. 1963), as well as through statistical analyses of the diffusion of modernization indicators (Gould 1964).

By the time development geographers had embraced modernization approaches, however, modernization theories had already been under serious attack for a decade or more by various ‘core-periphery theorists’—including structuralist and dependency authors—who placed the claims of modernization theory up against the realities of development in peripheral regions of the global economy such as Latin America, and found the theory wanting. Structuralists found that the historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism—such as technological backwardness, maldistribution of wealth and income, and a large, underemployed rural labor force—made the development of modern industry in the periphery a much more problematic process than modernization theorists had suggested. Dependency authors more explicitly identified the process of development in core industrialized capitalist countries as an obstacle to development in countries of the global periphery, and more radical dependency and underdevelopment perspectives which became popular by the late 1960s went so far as to suggest the impossibility or unlikelihood of capitalist development in the periphery, precisely because of its relations with the core.

These structuralist and dependency perspectives, even though not originally articulated by geographers, helped bring greater attention to geographic differences in patterns of development and to relationships between development processes in different places. This spatial dimension was naturally attractive to many geographers and spurred a significant amount of core–periphery analysis, including theories regarding revolutionary change in Third World urban centers (Armstrong and McGee 1968), general theories of imperialism (Blaut 1970), and critiques of Eurocentrism in geographical research (Connell 1971). By the middle of the 1970s there were a large number of works which adopted either structuralist (e.g., Brookfield 1975) or dependency approaches (e.g., Santos 1974). This burst of core–periphery analyses opened a period in which attention to development issues in geography became much more sustained. Between 1974 and 1983, for example, articles which addressed development issues rose to 16 percent of all articles in Economic Geography and 13 percent in the Annals, while articles on development in the more recently founded Antipode reached almost 40 percent (Corbridge 1986, pp. 4–5).

Even with this more intensive theorization of Third World development and deployment of the spatial problematic, however, development geography remained more a theoretical borrower than a theoretical leader. By the mid-1970s, dependency approaches were already coming under increasing fire from Marxist scholars for fetishizing geographical relations and miscomprehending class issues, and were thus being forced into refinements which could take account of increasing complexity in the ‘world-system,’ including the possibility of ‘dependent development’ in what had formerly been peripheral areas. Moreover, the 1970s had seen the emergence within development studies of important work on gender issues, an emphasis which was still missing from work by development geographers.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a more fullyfledged turn in the direction of Marxist theory was evident in the work of many development geographers (Slater 1977), while others had taken note of the importance of world-systems theory (Taylor 1981). Eventually, development geographers also paid greater attention to the claims about dependency put forward by the partisans of ‘dependent development’ approaches (Forbes 1984, Corbridge 1986), and relatively complex arguments about the interaction of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ factors began to appear in works on issues such as regional development (Gore 1984) and urbanization (Armstrong and McGee 1985).

Within development theory in general, however, the issues raised by both dependency theory and its Marxist critics had largely faded from view in the 1980s. For neo-classically oriented economists, the dramatic growth of East Asian newly industrialized countries (NICs) in the 1970s and 1980s both undermined claims of blocked development on the periphery and vindicated assertions that unfettered markets performed better than those in which the state intervened. These arguments were countered by the claims of an emerging ‘neo-Weberian’ school which presented evidence for the important role of the state in guiding the economic growth of the Asian NICs.

In spite of the fact that theorization of Third World states by geographers has been limited (Glassman and Samatar 1997), emphasis on the political and economic role of the state was by no means foreign to development geography. Indeed, by the mid-1980s a number of development geographers had already begun to take up the theme of state activism in the East Asian growth story (Grice and Drakakis-Smith 1985, Browett 1986). Moreover, development geographers also foregrounded the spatial problematic in discussions of the state by highlighting the state’s role in creating and maintaining regional disparities within developing countries (Watts 1983, Samatar 1989, Slater 1989).

Work on issues such as gender and development continued to gain little attention in development geography until the end of the 1980s, when more studies began to emerge (e.g., Momsen and Townsend 1987). These included analyses of the gendering of immigration processes (Radcliffe 1986) and of the gendered environmental outcomes of development (Rocheleau 1987).

By the 1980s and 1990s, geography as a field could no longer be seen as a laggard and had begun to make what were arguably leading contributions to the formulation of theoretical positions surrounding important contemporary development issues. To some extent, this was less a matter of geography as a field catching up with development studies than it was a matter of development studies coming around to some of the issues which are part of the spatial problematic—in particular, geographic expansion of economic processes, human-environment interactions, and difference and spatiality.

2. Contemporary Themes In Development Geography

Geographical issues are now at the forefront of much work in development, a matter which can be highlighted by briefly summarizing two broad themes of contemporary research in development geography which are not only important within the discipline but are either already or potentially of leading significance to theory within development studies more generally.

2.1 The Spatiality And Unevenness Of Development

While modernization approaches had been generally optimistic about the prospects for capitalist development in developing countries, much of the literature by dependency theorists had been highly pessimistic. Since at least the 1980s, however, many development theorists have been inclined towards a more nuanced and contextual approach which recognizes both possibilities for and limitations to capitalist development. In place of the earlier emphasis on either diffusion or blocked development, there is now much greater emphasis on the general geographical expansiveness of capital and the unevenness with which its expansion proceeds. The important theoretical work of David Harvey (1982) has enriched the conceptual foundations for analyses highlighting uneven internationalization of capital—analyses which have been carried forward by a variety of development geographers.

Much work on uneven development by development geographers has focused on uneven development at the national scale, especially uneven economic growth between regions (Watts 1983; Samatar 1989; Slater 1989). The most basic point to emerge from such studies has been that capitalist development— whether or not it is relatively dynamic in a given context—occurs as the result of differential power relations which have concrete spatial expression. These differential power relations lie behind the spatial unevenness of capitalist development and tend to work at odds with efforts to create greater sociospatial equality in the development process. Indeed, in countries which have been relatively successful at ‘late’ industrialization, the production of disparity is sometimes accelerated rather than slowed.

Directly related to the phenomenon of national unevenness in the development process are issues surrounding urbanization in developing countries. While it is less fashionable now than it once was to speak of ‘over-urbanization,’ there is still much emphasis on how regional disparities in growth relate to the national pre-eminence of primate urban centers— these often being former centers of colonial administration and/or commercial centers of long standing. Instead of gradual equilibration of growth rates between these centers and outlying regions, capitalist development has generally increased the dominance of primate urban centers. Indeed, it has been suggested by development geographers studying Asia that continued expansion of primate urban centers has led to a historically unique form of extended metropolitan growth which blurs preconceived boundaries between urban and rural, industry and agriculture (McGee 1991). The evolution of such extended metropolitan regions poses unique new problems for urban management and environmental sustainability in Asian countries.

At the same time, the explosive growth of particular urban centers in the context of global economic transformation has led to increasing investigation of the ways uneven development detaches the trajectories of urban centers from their ‘hinterlands’ while creating global networks of cities through which there is an intensified flow of money, goods, and information (Friedmann 1986). On this view, the spatial unevenness of development increasingly manifests itself as a bifurcation between the major nodes through which capital moves internationally (large urban centers) and much of the rest of the world, with non-urban areas of the developing world being particularly marginalized.

To present the unevenness of capitalist development in this way, however, might be to risk reification of the spatial dimensions of development at the expense of a spatially grounded analysis of social relations. Geographers have attempted to guard against such ‘spatial fetishism’—that is, the view that geographical relations have their own independent dynamics, rather than being the spatial expressions of social processes—by foregrounding issues that include class struggles (Herod 1998) and gender relations (Hanson and Pratt 1995) in relationship to particular spatial dynamics. Uneven development thus implies not only uneven development between places but uneven power relations and opportunities for groups of people, dependent upon such characteristics as their class, gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age.

Among development geographers, then, much attention has been paid to the spatialization of disparity in the development process. For example, feminist geographers have examined how transformations in Mexico’s accumulation process have involved breaking down the hegemony of the family wage-based, male-dominated, and Mexico City-centered labor regime while substituting a lower-wage and geographically more decentralized regime in which women are employed in much larger numbers (Cravey 1998). They have also examined the migration of women to export processing zones which have been the key to economic growth in newly-industrializing countries of South-east Asia and Latin America (Chant and Radcliffe 1992, Chant and McIlwain 1995). Labor geographers have examined the strengths and weaknesses of attempts to create various forms of solidarity between labor and other popular organizations in developed countries such as the USA, and less developed countries such as those of Latin America (Herod 1995, Johns 1998). Authors writing about ‘new social movements’ and ‘popular development’ (Brohman 1996) have examined how such movements attempt to forge international linkages (‘jumping scale’) in order to strengthen their position. Geographers examining state power have noted both how it is transformed by processes such as ‘globalization’ and how it continues to play a crucial role in relation to various kinds of social struggles through which ‘globalization’ occurs (Agnew and Corbridge 1995, Webber and Rigby 1996, Dicken 1997). Finally, development geographers who foreground cultural dimensions of the social process have examined issues such as the importance of ethnic networks to economic growth in southern China (Hsing 1998), and struggles surrounding identity among South Asian communities in Tanzania (Nagar 1997).

All of these types of analyses exemplify certain aspects of the spatial problematic—in particular, issues of sociospatial difference in the process of development—and bring an explicitly geographical dimension to social critique. What is either implicit or explicit in such critique is an emphasis on the way general processes, such as capitalist development, can have different types of manifestations in different locations, because of the relationships between different social groups within and across those locations. Thus, the study of development requires balancing an adequately supple general theory with examination of the specifics of development in particular contexts. Theories of capitalist development must be able to explain why the features of capitalism which are posited as general can lead to different kinds of outcomes—e.g., ‘late industrialization’ in one setting and ‘blocked development’ in another; stagnant real wages in one setting and rising real wages in another; increasing marginalization of certain women workers in one setting and new opportunities for empowerment of women in another. This theoretically-informed attention to the details of development processes in specific settings is perhaps one of the most important features of work in development geography, and is particularly evident in work taking place around the second major theme of contemporary geographical work, globalization and human environment interactions.

2.2 Globalization And Human Environment Interactions

The internationalization of capital has become so extensive that many people in the social sciences speak of ‘globalization’—a qualitatively new phenomenon in which national boundaries are increasingly unimportant to the functioning of the global economy. It can be argued that the literature on globalization frequently overstates the unboundedness of capital, but nonetheless there can be little doubt that the growth of international production, trade, finance, and information flows is reshaping global geography in crucial ways. Indeed, it is perhaps globalization as much as any other single phenomenon which seems to have brought geographical perspectives to the fore in the study of development.

Among the phenomena intensified by globalization are increasingly complex issues of environmental change and degradation. Within development geography, an important literature on issues of political ecology has taken up the task of theorizing environmental change in the context of globalization (Peet and Watts 1996). Political ecology can be seen as combining a focus on details of local ecosystems and social structures with attention to global structural forces. In addition, political ecologists have shown a strong interest in what Peet and Watts (1996) term ‘liberation ecologies’—varied struggles to transform environmental conditions in developing countries, which are often approached by political ecologists through conceptual frameworks which are post-Marxist and or poststructuralist, emphasizing the multiclass and frequently community-based forms of local environmental resistance (Rocheleau and Ross 1995). A number of these political ecologists have brought gender into the center of the research agenda, highlighting, for example, the importance of genderdifferentiated control over local and household resources to the economic and environmental outcomes of development projects (Carney 1993). More generally, feminist political ecologists have noted how processes of transformation which are occurring in the global economy may have varied effects on women and men in specific localities, depending upon the social position in which they start and the sorts of resources to which they have (or are denied) access (Rocheleau et al. 1996). This may in turn place women at the core of movements to resist environmental degradation connected with development.

Political ecologists have paid special attention to issues of food and agriculture. Michael Watts’ study of uneven development and the food crisis in Nigeria (1983) helped bring the issue of food and access to it firmly onto the agenda, and subsequent research by development geographers has continued to analyze access to and control over agricultural resources. Topics examined in relation to such issues of access and control include the impact of contract farming on local food production (Little and Watts 1994) and the impact of new agricultural technologies on poverty and food security (Yapa 1993, 1996).

Globalization is not a process driven solely from above, but must be taken to include attempts to counteract the unevenness of capitalist development with ‘globalization from below’—as, for example, with the attempts at international labor and social movement solidarity mentioned earlier. ‘Globalization from below’ also includes the attempts of local environmental organizations to ‘jump scales’ and to make their struggles more national or international. This pertains not only to struggles over environmental conditions and control over resources in rural and agrarian communities but to popular struggles over the urban environment (the ‘brown agenda’). More generally, development geographers have become increasingly concerned with attempts to build national and international linkages between various types of ‘new social movements’—including women’s movements and other movements associated with so-called ‘identity politics.’ These actors are generally seen as the core of a project to promote ‘popular development.’

Popular development literature is closely interrelated with approaches which are post-Marxist and postcolonial, yet literature on postcoloniality has as yet made less of a mark on development geography than on some other fields. Even so, it has not been absent from discussions. For example, David Slater (1997) has championed postcolonial approaches as an antidote to Eurocentrism, while a variety of scholars have brought postcolonial approaches to analyses of specific development issues. These approaches are part of a broader ‘cultural turn’ in geography that is still in the process of making its mark within the field.

3. The Future Of Development Geography

The various but often overlapping and interconnected strands of research identified here—while all exemplifying the spatial problematic in development geography—need not be anchored in any one approach or research agenda which is putatively constitutive of geography as a discipline. Nonetheless, the proliferation of research topics and agendas also brings eventual attempts to synthesize and to identify unifying principles. This task has been undertaken by authors such as John Brohman (1996), who identifies the connecting threads in various attempts to construct alternatives to neoliberal development models, and Philip Porter and Eric Sheppard (1998), who identify a dialectic of unity-in-diversity running through processes of global change and development. Such syntheses must attempt, in particular, to connect the traditions of political economy of development, political ecology, and the emerging poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches to development studies. Indeed, it is at the conjunction of these approaches, particularly as they address various issues surrounding globalization, that much of the most interesting work may well be done. As the twenty-first century opens, the centrality of globalization, uneven development, and popular responses to these processes by diverse groups seems clear; and much of the specific research agenda confronting development geographers will be rgelated to this central problematic. At the same time, the pace and scale of global change itself makes attempts to predict where development theory in geography will head in the future a daunting task.

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