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The Ends of Development: Comments on an Obituary

Summary Knut G. Nustad, ‘The Ends of Development: Comments on an Obituary’, Forum for Development Studies, 1997:1, pp. 155–166. The idea of development has been challenged by an increasing number of critics in the last decade. This article examines and discusses this critique and argues that much of the confusion surrounding the concept stems from conflating two meanings of development—development as an intentional action and as an immanent process. It is argued that the continuation of development projects can be explained by looking at their instrumental and largely unintended consequences, which include the depoliticisation of poverty and the extension of bureaucratic structures. The history of development discourses in South Africa is used to illustrate this. The article ends by arguing that ‘new’ approaches that try to salvage development from the notion of trusteeship, recreate the problems they set out to solve by confusing the means and the goals of development.