You are here

Development and Social Change
Share
Share

Development and Social Change
A Global Perspective

Seventh Edition


March 2021 | 464 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc

Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective explains how development thinking and practice have shaped our world. It introduces students to four interconnected projects, and how their dynamics, contradictions and controversies have influenced development trajectories: colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development. Authors Philip McMichael and Heloise Weber use case studies and examples to help describe a complex world in transition. Students are encouraged to see global development as a contested historical project. By showing how development stems from unequal power relationships between and among peoples and states, often with planet-threatening environmental outcomes, it enables readers to reflect on the possibilities for more just social, ecological and political relations.


 
About the Authors
 
Preface to the Seventh Edition
 
A Timeline of Development
 
Acknowledgments
 
Abbreviations
 
Chapter 1. Development
What Is the World Coming To?

 
Development: History and Politics

 
Development Theory

 
Social Change

 
 
PART I. THE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT (LATE 1940s TO EARLY 1970s)
 
Chapter 2. Instituting the Development Project: Colonialism, Anticolonial Struggles, and Decolonization
Colonialism

 
Decolonization

 
Decolonization and Development

 
Postwar Decolonization and the Rise of the Third World

 
Ingredients of the Development Project

 
Framing the Development Project

 
Economic Nationalism

 
 
Chapter 3. The Development Project: An International Framework in Global Context
The International Framework of National Development Projects

 
Remaking the International Division of Labor

 
The Food Aid Regime

 
Remaking Third World Agricultures

 
 
PART II. THE GLOBALIZATION PROJECT (1980s TO 2000s)
 
Chapter 4. Instituting the Globalization Project
The Debt Crisis and Structural Adjustment Programs: Organizing Neoliberal Development

 
The Globalization Project

 
Global Governance

 
The World Trade Organization

 
 
Chapter 5. The Globalization Project: Processes, Experiences, and Implications
Neoliberal Governance of Development and Poverty: IFIs and the WTO

 
Outsourcing and the (New) Global Division of Labor

 
Global Labor-Sourcing Politics and Migration

 
Displacement

 
Informalization

 
Neoliberal Development and Extractivism: Reconfiguring International Relations

 
Agricultural Globalization

 
 
Chapter 6. Global Countermovements
Environmentalism

 
Feminisms

 
New Sovereignty Struggles: Food Sovereignty

 
 
PART III MILLENNIAL RECKONINGS (2000s TO PRESENT)
 
Chapter 7. The Globalization Project in Crisis
Social Crisis

 
Legitimacy Crisis

 
Geopolitical Transitions

 
Neo-Illiberalism and the Changing of the Guard

 
Ecological Crisis

 
 
Chapter 8. Development Climate, or The Nature of Development
Life-Worlds at Odds

 
The Challenge of Climate Change

 
Business as Usual?

 
Sustainable Intensification Proposals

 
Sustainable Intensification at Work

 
Renewable Energy

 
Conclusion: Ecosystem Priority

 
 
Chapter 9. Public and Local Green Initiatives
Public Greening Initiatives

 
Urban Initiatives

 
Circular Economy

 
Transition Towns

 
The Commons

 
Rural Initiatives

 
Agroecology

 
Conclusion

 
 
Chapter 10. Toward Sustainable Development
Ingredients of Project Coherence

 
What Is Appropriate to These Times?

 
Sustainable Development Project Implementation

 
Retheorizing Economics

 
Green New Dealism

 
Development Multilateralism

 
Conclusion

 
 
Notes
 
References
 
Index

Supplements

Instructor Resources
The Instructor Resource Site includes a test bank, tables and figures, and Lecture Spark. The resources on the site are geared toward increasing your effectiveness with this material and maximizing the potential for your students to learn.

"This book has a strong theoretical basis. It is focused on the developing world, so if you intend for the focus of your class to be international, it would be an excellent book to use."

Rachel Core
Stetson University

"I like it because it has a strong narrative and is readable rather than trying to be a comprehensive textbook. It works best for upper-level students and even then you have to spend a bit of time covering concepts, but the students seem to get more out of it because most of the material is well
contextualized and emphasizes a few critical themes. Easy to combine with other materials."

Carolyn Bassett
University of New Brunswick

"The book is very comprehensive, and uses multiple lenses to help students understand the multi-faceted aspects of development."

Jaita Talukdar
Loyola University New Orleans

"Students find the text engaging and relevant."

Alexandra Springer, PhD
University of Hawai'i at Manoa

"This text would be useful for a Social Change class. McMichael does a brilliant job of explaining to students how the modern world system changed during the 20th and 21st centuries. He provides a conceptual architecture to understand those changes, and he also provides empirical examples to illustrate concretely how social change in the world system happens."

Dr. Steven Panageotou
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

"Students find it accessible and it is a good starting point to have discussions about colonialism and development..."

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Syracuse University

"Good book for challenging students conceptually- sets up a nice framework for development studies, globalization, and food governance."

Gustavo Setrini
New York University
Key features
New co-author Heloise Weber from the University of Queensland brings her expertise on international relations and the politics of development to the text.

Ch. 1 has been revised to emphasize contemporary challenges--rising material impoverishment, struggles for racial equality and justice, ecological despoliation--and to connect these challenges to Modernization Theory

Ch. 2 incorporates recent critical revisions of the Eurocentric framing of development and notions of progress and backwardness.

Ch. 3 contains new material on Third World challenges to the colonial division of labor.

Ch. 5 has been reorganized to include aspects of Ch. 4 from the previous edition (Globalizing Developments), and contains new case studies to illustrate core political shifts.

Ch. 6 includes updates to global counter-movements: environmentalism, feminism, food sovereignty.

Ch. 7 updates a number of crises in the development project, focusing on austerity policies, associated legitimacy questions, and geopolitical divisions as the American Century winds down.

Ch. 8 and Ch. 9 have been reoriented around development in the context of the current climate emergency, and "green" initiative in urban and rural areas.

Ch. 10 now evaluates a number of emerging sustainable development paradigms, and possibilities for building a coordinated, coherent and just future for all peoples across the world.

KEY FEATURES:
  • A world-historical perspective that situates globalization in the declining fortunes of the postwar development project, and considers current global limits and possibilities.  
  • A political perspective that views development and globalization as discursive practices managed by historic elite groupings, as mechanisms of power and world ordering.
  • An ecological perspective drawing attention to the environmental consequences of development and attempts to reintegrate social life in ecological cycles.
  • An emphasis on resistance and social movements as actors shaping the meaning and direction of global development, in addition to building alternatives.
  • A series of case studies that allow in-depth examination of development/globalization as a contested historical process, not simply a taken-for-granted marker of human progress.

New co-author Heloise Weber from the University of Queensland brings her expertise on international relations and the politics of development to the text.

Ch. 1 has been revised to emphasize contemporary challenges--rising material impoverishment, struggles for racial equality and justice, ecological despoliation--and to connect these challenges to Modernization Theory

Ch. 2 incorporates recent critical revisions of the Eurocentric framing of development and notions of progress and backwardness.

Ch. 3 contains new material on Third World challenges to the colonial division of labor.

Ch. 5 has been reorganized to include aspects of Ch. 4 from the previous edition (Globalizing Developments), and contains new case studies to illustrate core political shifts.

Ch. 6 includes updates to global counter-movements: environmentalism, feminism, food sovereignty.

Ch. 7 updates a number of crises in the development project, focusing on austerity policies, associated legitimacy questions, and geopolitical divisions as the American Century winds down.

Ch. 8 and Ch. 9 have been reoriented around development in the context of the current climate emergency, and "green" initiative in urban and rural areas.

Ch. 10 now evaluates a number of emerging sustainable development paradigms, and possibilities for building a coordinated, coherent and just future for all peoples across the world.

For instructors

Select a Purchasing Option