Development betrayed

Modern thinking promised that science would give us command over nature, technology would bring material plenty, and rationally organized government would manage society well. The results have fallen far short. Richard Norgaard asks why the gap between those hopes and what modernity has delivered is so wide, and argues that development, built on a faith in progress rooted in modernism, has failed on each of its central promises. Efforts to dominate the natural world have pushed the planet toward environmental collapse. Western technologies often do not suit the needs of poorer, southern societies, and governments have struggled to respond to the crises that followed.

Norgaard, an economist, subjects the ideas underlying development to a detailed and vigorous critique. He then proposes an alternative framework in which development is understood as a process of coevolution between cultural and ecological systems. Rather than imagining a single future in which all peoples converge on one way of understanding and living in the world, he describes a world of many distinct cultures that can live together in balance.