Paradigms of Development and Their Power Dynamics: A Review

Abstract

Development and power are two most fundamental ingredients and processes of social life. While the pervasiveness of power in the discourse of development has largely been obscured and camouflaged by paradigms of modernization and neo-liberalism, dependency theory has actually discovered that power-relations. Recently, with the emergence of post-modern critique of development, power has become an important subject in the discourse of development. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of the relations between power and development is still in its nascent stage. Though highly apparent in human societies, social power per se is a polylithic discourse with no unified definition and implication, which led different proponents of development paradigms to understand power differently. This paper is a comprehensive survey of how power is understood in different paradigms/schools of development.