Course description

The 21st century world is far from the postwar vision of modernisation under the aegis of a liberal international order. What does development mean in a world that has never been more divided and unequal? When people, money, microbes, and coastlines move - and borders are drawn and redrawn - what do powerful, wealthy societies owe the global majority? Can guest workers, squatters, and First Nations do what green revolutions couldn’t? This class examines how the focus of development has shifted from growth to health, and expanded to include women and other marginalised groups, and in so doing also set in motion new kinds of politics and new ideas of progress.

Teaching staff

Ryan Schram
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building, Room 410

Assignments summary

Title Due date Points Weight Length Hurdle task
Research essay interactive presentation November 2 100 15% 500 words
Research essay November 1 100 40% 2500 words
Take-home essay-response assignment September 13 100 30% 1500 words
Weekly writing assignments weekly 100 15% 10 x 150 words

Weekly schedule

Week Date Topic and reading(s)
1 August 3 What happened to development?: A snapshot of the state of the world in 2026 / Rist (2007) / Rist (2014), chap. 1-2
2 August 10 The white man’s burden / Lorenzini (2019); Pedersen (2015); Lugard (1922) / Rist (2014), chap. 3
3 August 17 Making the Third World: Truman’s Point Four, Third Worldism, and the New International Economic Order / Getachew (2019), chaps. 3, 5; “Text of the Final Communiqué of Asian-African Conference” (1955); United Nations General Assembly (1974) / Rist (2014), chap. 4-6; Illich ([1970] 1973)
4 August 24 Villagization and African socialism: State power and utopian imagination / Scott (1998), intro. and chap. 7; Lal (2015), chap. 4 / Rist (2014), chap. 8
5 August 31 Whither development?: The crossroads at the end of history / Escobar ([1995] 2012), intro. and chap. 3; Sen (1999), intro. and chap. 4 / Rist (2014), chap. 11
6 September 7 The roads not taken: Alternatives to development / Martinez-Alier (2014); McMichael (2014) / Freire ([1970] 2005)
7 September 14 Human resources: Empowering informality and the transformation of the development subject / Elyachar (2005), intro. and chaps. 3-5
8 September 21 Who wins and who loses in a war on poverty? / Ansell (2014), intro. and chaps. 4-5
B September 28 Classes cancelled for seasonal festivals
9 October 5 Model citizens in a developmentalist socialist state / High (2021), intro. and chaps. 3-4
10 October 12 Development as anti-urbanism / Ng’weno (2025), intro. and chap. 8; Mamdani (1996), chap. 7 / Rooney (2021)
11 October 19 Stop development, I want to get off: Has growth gone too far? / Rivero (2019), intro. and chap. 6
12 October 26 Reparations as a new global politics of inequality / Beckles (2025); Beckles, Chitre, and Richardson (2026); Bell and Biholar (2026) / Morena, Krause, and Stevis (2019); Táíwò (2025)
13 November 2 Student presentations

References

Ansell, Aaron. 2014. Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil. Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.
Beckles, Hilary. 2025. “The Struggle for Reparations in the Caribbean.” In The Black Atlantic’s Triple Burden, edited by Adekeye Adebajo, 383–93. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Beckles, Hilary, Smit Chitre, and Eugene T Richardson. 2026. “Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and the Potential Impact on Human Well-Being.” BMJ Global Health 11 (Suppl 1): e017217. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-017217.
Bell, Karen, and Ramona Biholar. 2026. “The Role of Reparations for a Decolonized Just Transition: Perspectives from the Anglophone Caribbean.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 22 (1): 2681709. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2026.2681709.
Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Escobar, Arturo. (1995) 2012. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb31025.0001.001.
Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Getachew, Adom. 2019. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
High, Holly. 2021. Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Illich, Ivan D. (1970) 1973. “Planned Poverty: The End Result of Technical Assistance.” In Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution, 129–43. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Education.
Lal, Priya. 2015. African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lorenzini, Sara. 2019. “Development as an Ideology for Empire.” In Global Development: A Cold War History, 9–21. Princeton University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691185569-003/html?lang=en.
Lugard, F. D. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and Sons. http://archive.org/details/cu31924028741175.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2014. “Between Activism and Science: Grassroots Concepts for Sustainability Coined by Environmental Justice Organizations.” Journal of Political Ecology 21: 19–60. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1259/e240225ad5367058eb06071efb4bbeb7f1f9.pdf.
McMichael, Philip. 2014. “Historicizing Food Sovereignty.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (6): 933–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876999.
Morena, Edouard, Dunja Krause, and Dimitris Stevis. 2019. Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World. London: Pluto Books.
Ng’weno, Bettina. 2025. No Place Like Home in the New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi. Oakland: University of California Press.
Pedersen, Susan. 2015. “Of Covenants and Carve-Ups.” In The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, edited by Susan Pedersen, 0. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199570485.003.0002.
Rist, Gilbert. 2007. “Development as a Buzzword.” Development in Practice 17 (4–5): 485–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520701469328.
———. 2014. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. Translated by Patrick Camiller. 4th ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5915284.
Rivero, Oswaldo de. 2019. The Myth of Development: Non-Viable Economies and the Crisis of Civilization. London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5915282.
Rooney, Michelle Nayahamui. 2021. ““We Want Development”: Land and Water (Dis)connections in Port Moresby, Urban Papua New Guinea.” The Contemporary Pacific 33 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2021.0001.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
Táíwò, Olúfẹmi O. 2025. Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
“Text of the Final Communiqué of Asian-African Conference.” 1955. In Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference: Texts of Selected Speeches and Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 18-24, 1955, 29–35. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations. http://archive.org/details/selecteddocument00asia.
United Nations General Assembly. 1974. “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.” Resolutions of the 6th special session, Resolution no. 3201. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/218450.