TY - JOUR
T1 - The Emperor's new clothes
T2 - A moral tale for development experts?
AU - Hintjens, Helen
PY - 1999
Y1 - 1999
N2 - While global problems of poverty, inequality, and social upheaval are on the increase, the language used by development agencies and development experts sounds increasingly radical and idealistic. New socio-political conditions have been borrowed from real contexts in the South, only to be re-imposed on Southern 'partners'. Notions like empowerment, participation, and governance are paradoxically enforced through top-down, external intervention. Hans Christian Andersen's parable of the Emperor's new clothes highlights the illusory nature of this re-packaging of development policies in the 1990s. One major difficulty is that micro- and meso-level socio-political conditionalities remain subordinated to macro-level economic liberalisation.
AB - While global problems of poverty, inequality, and social upheaval are on the increase, the language used by development agencies and development experts sounds increasingly radical and idealistic. New socio-political conditions have been borrowed from real contexts in the South, only to be re-imposed on Southern 'partners'. Notions like empowerment, participation, and governance are paradoxically enforced through top-down, external intervention. Hans Christian Andersen's parable of the Emperor's new clothes highlights the illusory nature of this re-packaging of development policies in the 1990s. One major difficulty is that micro- and meso-level socio-political conditionalities remain subordinated to macro-level economic liberalisation.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/0032748996
U2 - 10.1080/09614529952873
DO - 10.1080/09614529952873
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0032748996
SN - 0961-4524
VL - 9
SP - 382
EP - 395
JO - Development in Practice
JF - Development in Practice
IS - 4
ER -
