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Concept
Underdevelopment
Summary
Underdevelopment, in the context of international development, reflects a broad condition or phenomena defined and critiqued by theorists in fields such as economics, development studies, and postcolonial studies. Used primarily to distinguish states along benchmarks concerning human development—such as macro-economic growth, health, education, and standards of living—an "underdeveloped" state is framed as the antithesis of a "developed", modern, or industrialized state. Popularized, dominant images of underdeveloped states include those that have less stable economies, less democratic political regimes, greater poverty, malnutrition, and poorer public health and education systems.
Underdevelopment per Walter Rodney is primarily made of two components, a comparative aspect as well the relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country by another.
In critical development and postcolonial studies, the concepts of "development", "developed", and "underdevelopment" are often thought of to have origins in two periods: first, the colonial era, where colonial powers extracted labor and natural resources, and second (most often) in referring development as the postwar project of intervention on the so-called Third World. Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva asserted that underdevelopment began when American president Harry Truman delivered his inaugural address in 1949 since, after the second world war, poverty on a mass scale was suddenly "discovered" in these underdeveloped regions of the world. Esteva stated: "On that day two billion people became underdeveloped." More than half of the world's nations were categorized by what they lacked. The Euro-centric development discourse and its aura of expertise often conflated development with economic growth. When the world began to categorize nations based on their economic status, it narrowed the issue of underdevelopment to an economics problem. As a result, the solutions brought forth by development experts and practitioners were squarely economic—failing to address the profound political and social contexts such as colonial legacies and Cold War geopolitics.
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