Making Development Geography (review)

Victoria Lawson, a distinguished Latinamericanist and past President of the AAG, has written an intriguing and very personal book on the nature of development geography. Her perspectives are distinctly geographical and radical, with a strong infusion of Marxian scholarship, influenced by such prolific geographers as David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Richard Peet, Michael Watts and David Slater. Even more strikingly, however, her perspectives are predominantly social and feminist, focusing heavily on place-based local research on livelihood, gender, social and environmental justice, and community action movements. She frequently cites the works of such social geographers and development specialists as Gillian Hart, Sylvia Chant, Lucy Jarosz, Tom Perrault, Judy Carney, Sarah Radcliffe and Melissa Wright, and also her own publications along these lines. The outcome is a vision of development geography which is radical, critical, situated and grounded, and is closely related to works in such cognate disciplines and interdisciplinary fields as Social Anthropology, Gender Studies, Rural Sociology, and Labor Studies.

Lawson treats 'development' as a field of discourse, rather than a precise term to be defined. It is a broad and fluid concept used in discussions of global and local patterns of power, wealth, poverty, migration, capital flows, economic growth and stagnation, and the distribution and use of resources. Making Development Geography does not provide a comprehensive history of development theories, but it provides an overview of some 1950s and 1960s development theories and their generally unsuccessful applications. Lawson argues that there was a bad old development theory – Western, capitalist, hegemonic, modernist, economics-based, top-down, and closely tied to practice. Referring quite often to her own teaching and graduate mentoring on the subject, she presents development geography as a new and important alternative viewpoint – radical, post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial, and above all 'critical.' She rarely criticizes past geographical scholarship, but the World Bank and other international organizations come in for frequent criticism, as does the 1950s and 1960s practice of development economics. The new development geography that she advocates rejects the old top-down prescriptive approach of economic development theory, and instead emphasizes grass-roots movements, local social dynamics and environmental wisdom, and the need for foreign scholars to work with and for grass-roots change. It is non-governmental and locally based, but often international and sometimes global, through the medium of NGOs and the World Social Forum.

Lawson's development geography is primarily social, cultural and environmental, though its approach to cultural issues contrasts sharply with works in the Sauerian tradition because research always emphasizes power structures, gender, and political economy. It is clearly a social science, rather than a policy science, and research is often focused on how a globally applicable concept like subcontracting, debt peonage, or energy recycling may apply in specific localities and cultural contexts. Case studies of important global themes can be assembled from different parts of the world, and may serve to formulate or test major theories. Lawson's development studies focus on the interaction between prosperous and powerful 'Western' capitalist economies and corporations, especially those of the United States and Britain, and local communities in Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.

Lawson makes her case eloquently, and much of the best contemporary geographical scholarship on development is radical, critical, grounded, localized, and social. This book will inspire many young geographers contemplating fieldwork and social activism. Nevertheless, another geography cries out to be heard: the impressive work of economic, political and urban geographers who analyze the world system and its patterns of wealth, poverty, capital flows, transportation, and urban development. The scholarship of such figures as Peter Dicken, Peter Taylor, Brian Berry, Allen Scott, Gordon Clark, Ann Markusen and Paul Knox is vitally important to geography, and I would argue that it is just as much development geography as the more localized and social studies that Lawson advocates. Though often ideologically distinct, their work links to global-scale radical scholarship, notably Harvey's The New Imperialism...