by Gilbert Rist
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Product Description
With all its hopes of a more just and materially prosperous world, development has fascinated societies in both North and South. Looking at this collective fancy in retrospect, Gilbert Rist shows the underlying similarities of its various theories and strategies, and their shared inability to transform the world. He argues persuasively that development has always been a kind of collective delusion which in reality has simply promoted a widening of market relations despite the good intentions of its advocates.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Failures of Western development models, explained, 2008-06-12
Why can't "we" help others? What is wrong about the western view of "progress"? Why can't United Nations asure safety for civilians anywhere? The greatness of Rist's work is to make evident the unseen: western thought has always pointed at directed development models, instead of taking into account bottom-top proposals. However, when bottom-top proposals have been used for modelling development, other flaws make the model fail (i.e. personal interests of developing country governors). How can we pursue to take out of poverty billions of people, then? The answer is tricky and sums up to this: there are no general solutions for particular problems. Rist's work is a masterpiece in strongly giving historical evidence to these matters. It's a must for anyone willing to understand the world.
ps. Rist is not a pesimist. We, as development students, had the luck to meet him personally in Geneva in 2008, and hear him discuss his own work. He talks about the book and it's content with dry realistic words. His task, making people conscious, is efficiently carried out. What a man.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A concise and penetrating history of "development" practice, 2007-09-03
Rist's clear-eyed history of the development enterprise as practiced by the West is a graduate-level dose of reality about a field that chronically underperforms in relation to its goals. Rist isn't pessimistic, but simply realistic about the failures of the standard development models. Development as Truman and others envisioned it was a noble enough enterprise, but clearly it hasn't worked, even in its own terms. This is not so say, however, that it hasn't had major impacts on rich and poor alike. Rist teases out the implications of development (or should we say, "development"?) as practiced and suggests that a complete rethinking is in order to reach anything like the goals developers say they want to achieve. The writing style is a bit windy (primarily because the book is translated from an apparently rather poetic original) but clear enough if the reader is patient. Any advocate of "straightforward," "standard" development in the South would benefit from a few hours working through the arguments here before taking on another "development" project.
10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
 Good for "Beginners", 2000-04-23
This book was chosen as a required reading for a course I took about Globalization and Development. Having no prior knowledge about this topic, I felt that the Rist book provided a good introduction to the topic for "beginners". However, the tone tends to offer a pessimistic view of the situations presented.
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