Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

Philip McMichael describes a world undergoing profound social, political, and economic transformations, from the post-World War II era through the present. He tells a story of development in four parts - colonialism, developmentalism, globalization, and sustainability - that shows how the global development "project" has  taken different forms from one historical period to the next.  Throughout the text, the underlying conceptual framework is that development is a political construct, created by dominant actors (states, multilateral institutions, corporations and economic coalitions) and based on unequal power arrangements. While rooted in ideas about progress and prosperity, development also produces crises that threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, and sparks organized resistance to its goals and policies. Frequent case studies make the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Development: Theory and Reality 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 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: International Framework The International Framework Remaking the International Division of Labor The Food-Aid Regime Remaking Third World Agricultures Chapter 4: Globalizing Developments Third World Industrialization in Context Agricultural Globalization Global Finance Part II: The Globalization Project (1980s to 2000s) Chapter 5: Instituting the Globalization Project Securing the Global Market Empire The Debt Regime The Globalization Project Global Governance The World Trade Organization Chapter 6: The Globalization Project in Practice Poverty Governance Outsourcing Displacement Informalization Global Recolonization Chapter 7: Global Countermovements Environmentalism Feminism Food Sovereignty Part III: Millennial Reckonings (2000s to Present) Chapter 8: The Globalization Project in Crisis Social Crisis Legitimacy Crisis Geopolitical Transitions Ecological Crisis Chapter 9: Sustainable Development? The Challenge of Climate Change Responses to the Sustainability Challenge Business as Usual Public Interventions Grassroots Developments Chapter 10: Rethinking Development Development in the Gear of Social Change Paradigm Change

About the Author :
Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, completing undergraduate degrees in economics and in political science at the University of Adelaide. After traveling in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and doing community work in Papua New Guinea, he pursued his doctorate in sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has taught at the University of New England (New South Wales), Swarthmore College, and the University of Georgia, and he is presently Emeritus Professor of Global Development at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Other appointments include Visiting Senior Research Scholar in International Development at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) and Visiting Scholar, School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland. His book Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (1984) won the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial Award in 1985. In addition to authoring Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), McMichael edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005) with Frederick H. Buttel, Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010), The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change (2011) with Jun Borras and Ian Scoones, and Finance or Food? The Role of Cultures, Values and Ethics in Land Use Negotiations, with Hilde Bjørkhaug and Bruce Muirhead (2020). He has served twice as chair of his department, as director of Cornell University’s International Political Economy Program, as chair of the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the World-System Section, as president of the Research Committee on Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. He is also an active member of the International Studies Association. He has also worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Civil Society Mechanism of the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the international peasant coalition Via Campesina, and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.

Review :
"The book does a fantastic job of laying out the history of development, and does so by dividing up different development eras into projects. It is packed with excellent and important information. The "case studies" in the book bring occasionally dry issues to life. And I value the book′s overarching attention to inequality at all levels as a way to understand the world." "I wanted one book that contained everything that I want my students to know. This book contains it all. The historical continuity woven across chapters allows me to teach development exactly like I want to…I like the emphasis on the environment and climate change, and land grabs / land-based investment." "The book is very well structured. Difficult concepts are well explained. McMichael makes it very clear what the stages of development are, and brings examples that help students recognize those stages in their own social environment.  While reading, students easily find connections between the theory and their observations."