"Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective explains how development thinking and practice have shaped our world. It introduces students to four interconnected projects, and how their dynamics, contradictions and controversies have influenced development trajectories: colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development. Authors Philip McMichael and Heloise Weber use case studies and examples to help describe a complex world in transition. Students are encouraged to see global development as a contested historical project. By showing how development stems from unequal power relationships between and among peoples and states, often with planet-threatening environmental outcomes, it enables readers to reflect on the possibilities for more just social, ecological and political relations. New to the Eighth Edition: We have revised Chapter 1 (introduction) foregrounding contemporary challenges from rising material impoverishment and legitimacy questions regarding globalizations evident inequalities, to struggles for racial equality and justice and ecological sustainability. Chapter 2 has been revised to incorporate recent critical revisions of the Eurocentric framing of development, and notions of progress and backwardness. Chapter 3 has been revised to draw out Third World challenges to the colonial division of labor and how this was countered in ways that prefigured the neoliberal globalization project.
Chapter 4 re-emphasizes the construction of the institutional architecture of the globalization project, updating developments of institutional policy frameworks. Chapter 5 refocuses on the "Janus-faced" workings of neoliberal, market-based development, with its socio-ecological devastations. The long-standing chapter 6 on Counter-movements has been eliminated to maintain the temporal progression of the book, simply moving previous chapter 7 on the austerity and legitimacy crises of the globalization project to chapter 6, now including the rise of nationalist protectionism and right-wing populist authoritarianism, the role of southern debt encouraging extractivism by the global North, alongside de-globalization stirrings. Chapter 7 is now a new chapter, entitled Global Re-orderings, addressing the rise of multipolarity, Chinas Belt and Road Initiatives, Indias enigmatic rise, and the deepening of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and new forms of green transitioning. Chapter 8 uses the double entendre of the "development climate" to address, and update, how conventional developmentalism attempts to manage and/or take advantage of the climate emergency, noting the shortcomings of net zero policies, including carbon colonialism, and of governments and financial and corporate interests. This contrasts with Chapter 9 on public and local attempts to build forms of sustainable development in both urban and rural settings, alongside shortcomings of corporate "green technologies". Chapter 10 is an exercise in evaluating a range of emerging ideas pointing toward a sustainable development project, and the institutional limits to and possibilities for building a coordinated multilateral and just future for all peoples across the world"-- Provided by publisher.