Political Economy of Development
Term:
Fall 2011
Subject Code:
GPOL
Course Number:
6488
This course
offers a critical survey of key concepts, theories and paradigms in the
political economy of development since 1945.
It seeks to provide an intellectual history of the field as well as an
assessment of the power and limitations of rival explanatory approaches. The first section examines classical
developmental paradigms: modernization, planning and late industrialization;
dependency and world system theories; the neoclassical counter-revolution;
gender, feminism and development; and ‘governmentality’, high modernism and
post-development. The second part of the
course explores various attempts to reconfigure the political economy of
state-society relations and the prospects of development by analyzing the
impact of developmental states; institutions, democratization and ‘good
governance’; participation, decentralization and social capital; and ethnic
conflict and state failure. The final
section recasts the frame by examining the long-term impact of physical
geographies, colonial legacies and economic globalization on the prospects of
development. Although primarily
analytical, the course also seeks to assess rival theoretical frameworks
vis-à-vis specific cases in Asia, Sub-Saharan
Africa and Latin America.
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