Our theories are no better than what reality tells us; our methods no better than what they let reality show us. Because there is no magic bullet in the social scienc-es, theories come and go, and methods are on and off. Development becomes a moving target because political leaders raise popular expectations beyond what resources allow, policies fall short of intended goals, and analysts come in at the end of the process to put their stamp of failure on the efforts. For example, the move toward independence in Asia and Africa in the mid-twentieth century produced modernization theory; its insufficient delivery led to the theory of underdevelop-ment. So the saga has continued.
Development researchers have a say in this process, but as suggested above, they do not control it. Although their ability to put a stamp on the international develop-ment agenda occurred in the early days of developdevelop-ment research, the trend has been toward making the field more anonymous. It has become more difficult to identify specific contributions that make the development agenda move forward to a single or even a few names. Finding the candidates for the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in development research today would be a tricky and contentious affair.
Development research differs from conventional academic research in its ambition to be policy-relevant. It is sandwiched between general theories on the hand and policy practice on the other. It takes inspiration from both sides, but, as Figure 1 suggests, the main sources of inspiration have changed over time.
Figure 1. How development research has changed over time.
Structural emphasis
Agency-based approaches Ideological/Theoretical
Blueprints Practice-oriented/
Contextual Analysis Modernization Theory
Dependency Theory
Rational Choice Autonomous individual
”Drives of Change”
Power Analysis
Neo-institutionalism Participatory approaches
1960s and 1970s 2000s
1980s 1990s
The history of development research has been the subject of others, e.g. Leys (1996) and, within an especially ambitious format by the United Nations in its effort to trace how global ideas have contributed to and changed policy practice, (Jolly et al. 2005).
My own effort to trace this evolution builds on these other contributions but reflects my own interpretation of this process. Thus, I suggest that development research may be traced along two axes. The vertical axis in this figure indicates that research has shifted between structural explanations and those rooted in the notion of the autonomy of human agency. The horizontal axis captures the movement between general theory and practice, the latter also recognizing the contextual nature of de-velopment.
The figure indicates first that any paradigm in development research rarely survives longer than a decade. It is driven in parallel with changes in policy orientation. Be-cause development research is intertwined with practice, it is not neutral or autono-mous but is a factor that takes its lead from development policy. The arrows indi-cate the principal movements that have occurred since the 1960s. There is always a significant collective feedback from development research into politics and policy through books as well reports.
The second observation is that the academic influences on development research were especially prominent in the 1960s and 1970s – the heyday of the Grand Theo-ries. Leading academic researchers like Jan Tinbergen in the Netherlands, Just Faaland in Norway and Richard Jolly in the U.K. – to mention just a few – were ar-chitects of key approaches to development: Tinbergen shaped the emerging field of development economics, Faaland made a similar contribution in public administra-tion, and Jolly was at the forefront of putting a human or social face on develop-ment. With the benefit of hindsight, one can now say that these were the Golden Years for academics in development research. Their influence continued into the 1980s with the rise of rational choice and public choice theories that originated in the academic works of scholars like Mancur Olson (1965), and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962). However, these approaches, with their emphasis on au-tonomous human choices, paved the way for a turn toward practice, as suggested on the right side of the figure.
The third factor is that, while human agency has featured prominently in develop-ment research since the 1980s, in the work of scholars like Elinor Ostrom (1990) and, with reference to Africa, Robert Bates (1981), it has gradually given way to a greater respect for context. The whole Structural Adjustment movement that culmi-nated in the Washington Consensus was the most radical effort to prioritize human agency and the notion that policies apply regardless of context. However, the idea
that ‘best practices’ can be transferred from one development context to another as if they are culturally neutral has been gradually abandoned in the 2000s in favour of
‘best fit’ approaches that take into consideration contextual variables. The move-ment away from ‘blueprints’ has continued even further, with researchers like David Booth (2012) and Tim Kelsall (2008) arguing that development is most effectively pursued by ‘going with the grain’, that is, starting with what is on the ground rather than a preconceived theory or model.
The fourth comment is that for a long time development practitioners kept develop-ment and politics apart. The former, they argued, is about economics and relies on specific techniques and methodologies that are universally valid. In more recent years, however, there has been a gradual acceptance that development is political.
For example, its outcomes have both winners and losers. Politicians steer policy outcomes in ways that are not neutral. Thus, there has been a growing interest in political economy studies, some focusing on the role of power (Hyden and Mmuya 2008), others on the factors that drive change (Centre for the Future State 2010).
The research project on ‘Elites, Politics and Production’ (EPP) which Ole Therkildsen coordinated also makes the call for greater attention to be paid to the political econ-omy of national development policies (Whitfield et al. 2015). In short, the shift has been from treating development as a state or condition to realizing that it has to be treated as a process.
The fifth remark is that dominant ideas about development today, fed as they have been by development researchers, acknowledge its structural or contextual dimen-sions. The predominant focus on institutions that came with the interest in democ-ratization and governance has proved insufficient. We have learnt, for instance, that institutions, even if they are just, do not change human behaviour. The result has been the emergence of political systems that are formally democratic but in prac-tice lack most of the cultural attributes associated with such systems (e.g. Zakaria 2007; Levitsky and Way 2010). Explanations, therefore, have to be found in underly-ing structural factors that it may be possible to change, but not necessarily in the short run. We are not quite back to square one where it all started in the 1960s, be-cause the current use of structural explanations is not driven by optimism about social transformations but instead their opposite. Structural explanations today are brought in as a cautionary measure (Booth 2012).
The current dilemma for development researchers is that, while there is a growing consensus that progress is not made merely by identifying specific policies and in-stitutions that may have worked in other social or historical settings, the internation-al development community which funds much of this research says one thing but
does another. Recent political rhetoric building on the 2005 Paris Declaration (OECD 2005) and its principles about the national ownership of external resource flows, as well as the message contained in the 2013 United Nations High-Level Panel report on the post-2015 Development Agenda (United Nations 2013), call for greater un-derstanding of the historical and cultural foundations on which a country’s develop-ment rests. Yet, when it comes to finding out what works in developdevelop-ment, funding goes to standardized evaluation exercises that produce a form of knowledge that has little if any bearing on how policies really get implemented. This ‘thinning out’ of development research in favour of models with simple and short causal chains is harmful not only to the scholarly community, but also to those who have a genuine belief in the importance of national or local ownership of the knowledge formation process.