Antidevelopment

Antidevelopment is a critical perspective within development studies that questions the assumptions, methods, and aims of conventional development as pursued by governments, international agencies, and aid organizations. It challenges the idea that modernization through growth, infrastructure, and market-oriented reforms inherently leads to improvements in well-being and freedom, and it emphasizes the complexities and often unintended harms of development projects.

The term and its associated critiques gained prominence in late 20th century scholarship, notably through the work of James Ferguson, Arturo Escobar, and Wolfgang Sachs, and are closely linked to post-development thought. Antidevelopment arises from observations that aid, planning, and policy interventions can reproduce dependency, reinforce elite power, and disrupt local social and ecological systems even as they claim to promote progress.

Core ideas include a critique of development as a Western-centric project that universalizes a specific set of values and timelines; suspicion of technocratic, top-down planning and conditionalities tied to aid; and attention to power relations, governance, and the political economy that shape who benefits. Proponents stress local knowledge, rights, ecological limits, and long-term sustainability, arguing that improvements in welfare are not guaranteed by growth alone and that metrics used by donors can misrepresent realities on the ground.

Antidevelopment is often discussed in relation to post-development, degrowth, Buen Vivir, localization, and indigenous rights movements. Some advocates seek to replace the term development with more context-specific concepts, while others pursue alternatives to Western models of progress that emphasize solidarity economies, resilience, and participatory approaches. Critics contend that antipathy toward development can romanticize traditional ways or overlook the humanitarian goal of reducing poverty, highlighting the need for careful, context-sensitive analysis.