Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
In this concluding chapter, we return to the core themes of the book. We situate these themes around the dangers and opportunities of planetary thinking about environment and development in relation to significant contemporary processes, including the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in both North and South, continued ecological breakdown, and the emergence of technological innovations like artificial intelligence. We present a critique of the vision of decolonization presented within development studies. A planetary perspective on development should not be universalizing but rather pragmatic and pluralist, recognizing the diversity of possibilities and commitments, attitudes, and knowledges mobilized in situations where people confront problems of pressing public concern in the world.
This chapter demonstrates that infrastructure corridors are transforming the geographies, political economies, and geopolitics of global development. Megaprojects like China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) represent new geographical imaginaries of development that disrupt many of the spatial categories of traditional international development thought. They also entail novel geopolitical realignments and interregional patterns of competition and cooperation that move beyond the simple dualisms of Global North–South or developed–developing contexts. The chapter considers what this emerging state-capitalist model means for global development, illustrating this with several examples, including the BRI and LAPSSET.
Chapter 5 focusses on the diversity of demographic changes unfolding globally with their implications for economic and environmental transformation. The aim is twofold: first, to move our understanding of the demographic–development–environment nexus beyond a narrow focus on changes in total population change rate, whether growing or decreasing, measured at the national or international scale; and second, to critique the notions of temporality that underpin models of transition – like the demographic transition – that are foundational to development theory. Instead, a globalized perspective on demographic change should encompass the full complexity of shifts in population size, structural composition, and their geographic distributions. Demographic change is better understood as a set of dynamic, transformative, and spatially uneven processes comprising multiple and emergent trajectories of change. However, governmental engagements with demographic challenges, possibly more than other problematic domains, remain haunted by the past: by memories of coercive population control and more broadly by the paradigmatic Malthusian anxieties surrounding possibly catastrophic futures. Global development should embrace the transformative power of emergent demographic changes while consciously diagnosing how revenant pasts affect our political and ethical choices in the present.
In this chapter, we explore emerging debates on how finance is increasingly influential in shaping the practices and possibilities of development. We refer to this process as the financialization of development. Finance provides an illuminating lens through which to explore the shifting landscape of uneven development and the ways in which societal relationships to and within nature are being transformed. The chapter provides an in-depth definition of financialization and discusses how countries in the Global South are increasingly framed by powerful multilateral and financial organizations as ‘emerging economies’ or ‘frontiers’ for investment and accumulation. We also show how such processes are increasingly focussed on inserting commercial and financialized logics of governance into different forms of nature. We illustrate these processes through a case study of the financialization of water services in Kenya.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
This introductory chapter sets out our motivations and aims in writing this book. The chapter outlines the main ideas underpinning the calls for a ‘global’ theory of development. We also outline some of the criticisms of this framework, including the peripheral way in which environmental challenges have been treated in the debate so far. The chapter outlines our approach to critique, which we aim to be productive and generative of debate, rather than subtractive. We then make the case for our mid-level theory of development, which does not seek to resolve the tension between global and situated forms of knowledge, and we outline our core distinction between ‘global’ and ‘planetary’.
In this second of two conceptual chapters, we turn our attention to planetary environments. We make two core arguments. First, that ecology and environmental studies have a rich intellectual tradition of thinking about and theorizing global and planetary-scale processes and their multiple and complex interconnections with processes unfolding at smaller scales. As a result, planetary environments are an important way of thinking through key conceptual debates within the global development shift. Second, we argue that the global development framework has to date treated environmental challenges as peripheral, downplaying both the historical fusing of environment and development challenges and the scale and severity of environmental change captured by concepts like the Anthropocene.
Empirical trends in international health, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been core to arguments in favour of the global development shift. The chapter considers how health problems and the pandemic illustrate emerging rationalities and techniques of government and development. The focus is on the relationship between health and ‘apparatuses of security’, moving beyond conventional discussions of ‘health security’ to consider the ‘temporal imaginaries’ of social and environmental change. The pandemic demonstrates not only growing enthusiasm for various techniques of prediction but also how such techniques co-exist with notions of the future as being radically uncertain, presenting devastating and unavoidable threats that should be anticipated and managed through greater individual and systemic preparedness and resilience. The crisis illustrates how development and environmental problems are increasingly addressed in the name of a ‘security’ that can withstand unpredictable future threats, even if its specific dimensions and ambitions are shaped by regional, national, and local context.
The first of two conceptual chapters, we examine in detail the calls for a ‘conceptual shift’ from international to global development and interrogate the underpinning arguments for that shift. We present six key lines of critique of the global development shift as it has been articulated. The chapter situates this debate within a broader planetary turn unfolding in multiple disciplines and domains of practice. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including Marxism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, decolonialism, pragmatism, and geography, we argue for a planetary, rather than global, theoretical perspective on development.
Urbanization is a central narrative framing global development and environmental challenges of all kinds and is increasingly understood as a dynamic, complex, and emergent process that is global in its extent and consequences. Accordingly, urban scholars face the challenge of analysing urban-related processes across multiple scales and of theoretically reconciling the general with the specific, the universal with the particular. Recent debates in urban theory are centred on this enduring tension. We discuss urban scholarship and the emerging ‘urban science’ as instructive cases of how some researchers are grappling with problems of scale, generalization, process, and difference. Urban inquiry illustrates opportunities and challenges for capturing processes in high granularity while providing a coherent planetary account of transformation. We suggest that scholars of global development and environment, like those of urban processes, could profitably follow a pragmatist-inspired approach to theoretical concepts, broadening their sources of inspiration for theorization while recognizing the ‘problematic’ quality of cases as promoters of analogical reasoning and generalization. Doing so would ensure that critical theoretical engagements with the global development shift include more than a pursuit of conceptual coherence and an assumption that the normative force of concepts lies in the validity of their claims to universality.
