In the last decade or so, the major development agencies have explicitly turned the spotlights on ‘knowledge for development’, ‘ICT for development’, or the ‘knowledge economy’ as new panacea to prompt development. This article argues, first, that knowledge and technology have always been integrally part of the very idea of ‘development’ since its emergence during Enlightenment. Recent appeals to knowledge or technology for development should be placed in an age-long genealogy of similar rationales. Second, the article elucidates that discourses about the roles of knowledge and technology in development have always varied widely, with deterministic and less deterministic interpretations often existing along each other. In this article, the many different interpretations are unravelled. Even today, very opposing roles are ascribed to knowledge and technology in development. Whereas strong versions of technological and epistemic determinism still reverberate in some present-day development discourses, they are simultaneously countered by discourses focusing on ‘capacity building’
