Yearbook for the History of Global Development
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Herausgegeben von:
Iris Borowy
The Yearbook for the History of Global Development (YHGD) aims to bring together scholars from a range of regional and academic backgrounds and to facilitate dialogue among the different fields and approaches.
The YHGD is centrally dedicated to the study of past developmental theories, policies and practices, including those with a direct bearing on present-day challenges, making historical insight into the challenges and opportunities of development work in the twenty-first century more readily available to practitioners interested in earlier experiences with development. Furthermore, the yearbook provides a forum for a variety of historical perspectives on and understandings of development. It integrates scholarship that conceives of development as a long-term process of different countries that determined their trajectories in world history; as a field of international and global political, economic, technological, cultural, and intellectual interaction; as an aspect of North-South and East-West relations in the context of imperialism, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization; as a significant domain of international, non-governmental, and research organizations; and, most generally, as the study of the entire spectrum of concepts, discourses and policies related to ways in which countries or regions could and should evolve. This scholarship includes approaches as divergent as Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism, as well as alternative frameworks such as sustainable development, green growth or degrowth. While the central discipline is history, contributions from neighboring disciplines will also be relevant. These include sociology, anthropology, law, area studies, cultural studies, public health, science and technology studies, and economics.
The YHGD provides a forum for academic studies that integrates all of these approaches as components of the overriding question of how various observers and stakeholders have imagined the world to develop and how they have acted on those ideas, and with which consequences.
Within this general framework, the yearbook addresses the following range of issues:
- The actors of development, including governments, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, social movements, individuals, and others;
- The concepts of development, including modernization theory, redistributive approaches, basic needs, development as freedom, sustainable development, degrowth, etc. Discussions of the concepts also include ways in which concepts changed through adaptation to evolving circumstances or new ideas, through hybridization and/or through selective adoption;
- The practices of development, including industrialization, infrastructure projects, rural development, agricultural improvement, grassroots approaches, technical development assistance programs, etc.
- The role of knowledge in development debates, including the relevant input of science and technology and the transregional and transnational circulation and adaptation of different types of knowledge;
- The underlying norms and values of developmental thinking, including perceived prosperity, justice, equality, freedom, democracy, happiness, or lack thereof;
- Seeming winners and losers of developmental processes, unequal access to developmental resources and promises, unexpected or unintended side-effects of development projects, and the use of coercive and violent practices in the name of development as well as trade-offs between different, potentially contradictory effects on different groups, or the same groups at different times.
Editorial Board
Michele Alacevich – University of Bologna
Nitsan Chorev – Brown University
Frederick Cooper – New
Fachgebiete
Developmental policies frequently have contradictory effects. These typically play out in different sectors of life and are analyzed in different academic disciplines, using different assumptions, methods and bodies of literature. The results translate into conflicting political demands. This volume argues that keeping two separate narratives distorts reality and prevents a full understanding of development and its challenges.
Over the last 200 years, life has become better. People around the world have grown taller and lived longer, benefitting from growing wealth, better nutrition, better housing, better clothing, more tax revenues and better healthcare policies. Life has also become worse: two centuries of industrialization have caused pollution, wasteful consumerism and climate change threatening predominantly the livelihoods of those least responsible, exacerbating global inequality. But these narratives describe different but inseparable elements of the same history.
13 papers explore ways to integrate the "good" and "bad" narratives into coherent, intertwined histories, using theoretical analyses and case studies from five continents. It is the first publication to centrally focus on this question and its repercussions.
The third issue of the Yearbook on the History of Global Development aims at collecting contributions about the role of international organizations in shaping the global system of development throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International organizations – both intergovernmental and NGOs – have played a crucial role, shaping the global system of development by setting agendas, mobilizing people, and framing ideas and practices regarding development on local, national, regional, and global scales.
Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy to do whatever it takes for development to occur, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments that enable standards of health to be maintained or improved. However, the ways in which health and development interact are complex and contested.
This volume unites eleven case studies from nine countries in three continents and two international organizations since the late-nineteenth century. Collectively, they show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the sometimes contradictory nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.
What is development, what has it been in the past, and what can historians learn from studying the history of development? How has the field of the history of development evolved over time, and where should it be going in the future?
