Description:
<jats:p>‘Development’ as a ‘process of enlarging people's choices’ is omnipresent. Constituents of global society – governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational corporations, the media and individual actors – are deeply involved in its practices and discourses. At universities around the world, development studies mushroom, and development research has become a darling of the social sciences. In particular, development assistance has become big business, involving the flow of $136 billion dollars in 2009. But more significantly than before, development issues and especially development assistance have become contested terrain, too. While the millennium development goals defined by the United Nations in 2000 and designed to halve global poverty by the year 2015 call on donor and recipient countries to increase their efforts, critics of development assistance are multiplying.</jats:p>