Author: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Kitchin Rob, Thrift Nigel.

Along with ‘antidevelopment’ and ‘beyond development’, postdevelopment is a radical reaction to the dilemmas of development policy and thinking. Postdevelopment combines these critiques with a Foucauldian methodology of discourse analysis and post-structuralism. These radical critiques typically problematize poverty, view development policies and paradigms as Westernization, and question modernism and science. They also object to development policy because it is inherently antidemocratic. Adherents of postdevelopment are not interested in alternative development approaches but rather in alternatives ‘to’ development. Antimanagerialism and dichotomic thinking are other common features of postdevelopment views. There is an affinity between the development agnosticism of neoliberalism and postdevelopment in that both critique the role of the state. Postdevelopment also parallels postmodernism, both in its acute intuitions and in being directionless in the end. Since most insights in postdevelopment sources are not specific to postdevelopment, what is distinctive is the rejection of development. Yet the rejection of development does not arise from postdevelopment insights as a necessary conclusion, so there is no compelling logic to postdevelopment arguments. A major weakness of postdevelopment is that the experience of East Asia and newly industrializing countries is typically not discussed, even though they are the current trendsetters of development.