Publisher's Synopsis
This book offers a hermeneutic?critical discussion of different strategies for the analysis of complex change in the Third World, and is ordered around development discourses centred on state, market and polity. Preston argues against both the technocratic?paternalist schemes of the development orthodoxy which are a variant of the wider post-Second World War Keynesian approach to policy making, and against the atavistic celebrations of the market recently offered by the neo-liberal theorists project of the pursuit of progress. In this way development theorists and practitioners can begin to move forward from the gloom and pessimism of the post-1980s period and reaffirm a modest confidence in the power of collective action to solve pressing human development problems.
