Redefining development

A paper by Ha-Joon Chang (PDF), a development economist at Cambridge University, makes a valuable point about the redefinition of development: “the currently dominant discourse on ‘development’ really lacks any real notion of development in the sense of transformation of productive capabilities and structure (and the accompanying social changes”. However, to my mind he still concedes too much ground to, for example, the notion of environmental sustainability and to Amartya Sen’s “humanistic” redefinition of development.