Forging post-development partnerships : possibilities for local and regional development

The post-development agenda is not, however, anti-development. As we see it, the challenge of post-development is not to give up on development, but to imagine and practise development differently. Thus post-development thinking does not attempt to represent the world “as it is”, but the world “as it could be”. In this sense it breaks from the commitment to epistemological realism that underpins so much mainstream and radical social analysis. Accepting the inevitable performativity of language – its power to create the effects that it names (Butler 1993, 2; Law and Urry 2004) – post-development thinking attempts to perform new worlds by generating new and experimental discourses and practices of development