This report presents an overview of approaches used to explain social change from a wide range of academic perspectives, from history, politics, and economics to psychology and geography. These are summarized in a useful table, which presents a series of questions as a flexible tool for thinking about how change happens.

The author argues that current development thinking uses only a narrow range of approaches to change and the result is that most development strategies are limited. They are: excessively reformist and insensitive to underlying power and inequality; largely ignore...