Disentangling the meanings of development

Development is a powerful but hopelessly slippery and evasive concept, yet scholars keep on defining and redefining it. Lately, it has been suggested that it is not possible to grapple with all the meanings of development and it is better to be understood as a temporary (assemblage'. This article takes issue with this suggestion. It argues that development is a historically evolved concept which has acquired many meanings in the course of its own development. Ambiguity and polyvalence are its integral features: without them it could not work as a concept. Yet it has meanings - even a core meaning. Concepts are words and the meanings of words are in the ways they are used. In practice, development is understood simultaneously as (1) a goal; (2) a process leading to that goal; and (3) an intervention triggering such a process. This composite meaning has been there since colonialism and seems to carry on despite all the announcements of its death. With it development continues to retain much of its evocative power. As long as this is the case we need development studies to sort out its intricacies. © 2014, Finnish Anthropological Society. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Growth and equity in Finland 1

as a background paper for the World Development Report 2006