The speed and cost effectiveness of new information technology has prompted many to view these innovations as a panacea for social and economic development. However, such a view flies in the face of continuing inequities in education, health, food, and infrastructure. This volume explores these issues - along with questions of access, privilege, literacy, training, and the environmental and health effects of information technologies in the developing world - arguing that a higher level of development does not always result from a higher level of technologization.

This book, based in ethnographic case studies, explores the ways in which volunteers operate in a complex development context marked by global economic crisis, natural disasters, war, and poverty. It contributes to on-going debates concerning the role of civil society organisations in development.

There is a tremendous need for community development practice in the Asia-Pacific region due to its size and prevailing diverse socio-economic, political and cultural needs and issues. Both developed and developing countries have been reemphasizing the importance of community development and have introduced several schemes or programs for overall development. Manohar Pawar familiarizes readers with the region, presents the major social, economic and political issues, looks at values and principles, and critically analyses challenges and shows opportunities for community development...

Unmasking the neoliberal paradox, this book provides a robust conceptual and theoretical synthesis of development, power and the environment. With seven case studies on global challenges such as under-development, food regime, climate change, dam building, identity politics, and security vulnerability, the book offers a new framework of a "double-risk" society for the Global South.

With apparent ecological and social limits to neoliberal globalization and development, the current levels of consumption are unsustainable, inequitable, and inaccessible to the majority of humans. Power...

The End of the Developmental State? brings together leading scholars of development to assess the current status of the "developmental state" in several developing and transitional economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Ireland, the United Kingdom, China, South Africa, Brazil and India. Has the concept of the developmental state become outmoded? These authors would suggest not. However, they do argue that the historical trajectories of developmental states in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe suggest all too clearly that the concept must be re-examined critically and creatively....

This book takes a historical approach to analyse ideologies, policy approaches and development systems that have constructed the paradigm of international social development. It aims to review the social construction of "development" by tracing the historical dynamics of the modern ideologies and political economy of industrialization, colonization, the Cold War, and globalisation; to examine the process of reconstruction of development as "social development" based on alternate ideologies and alternate policy approaches and review the roles played by the development systems; and to trace...