Their Future

A compelling examination of how economic development projects ignore local history, and the effects of this shortsightedness Foreign aid planners rarely consider the history of the societies in which they work, an oversight noted in the development literature but rarely examined. Aid programs costing billions of dollars operate largely in a historical vacuum, divorced from the knowledge of what succeeded or failed in the past. This ahistoricism is not new. Not only were development programs in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America frequently conceived in Western institutions, but they also took European and American modernity as normative, mapping the patterns of Western industrialization onto poorer countries seeking to catch up. In this book Michael Gubser chronicles the varieties of ahistoricism in international development theory and practice since 1945. He traces the history of development ideas, analyzing key theoretical and policy statements to highlight the marginalization of history in favor of technical solutions to economic and social problems; and he examines aid programs in several developing countries to show how Western models of social and economic development have been applied and misapplied.