Paper short abstract:

We scrutinize two prominent research agendas in contemporary development economics and delineate the forms of silencing, disavowal and pathologizing of economic difference, which legitimates and facilitates practices that instigate and/or extend a particular understanding of human betterment.

Paper long abstract:

One way in which colonial practices continue to constitute social reality and knowledge production is through their representation of the “other” as pathology. This can be traced within the context of development, where categories of development and underdevelopment were constructed and reconstructed, and informed how the latter is represented, pathologized, and silenced within development economics. We approach the task of decolonizing development economics from this entry point and delineate the particular forms of silencing, disavowal and pathologizing of economic difference. We first trace the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of neoclassicism in a particular (colonial) worldview, highlighting how its individualistic and mechanistic nature implicates the discipline in general, and contemporary development economics in particular. We then unpack the current state of mainstream development economics after the late neoclassical turn in the discipline by focusing on two of its prominent research agendas: new institutional economics of development divergence, and the poor economics of development. We demonstrate that contemporary development economics silences, disavows and pathologizes the plurality of situated knowledges, behavioral modalities and institutional constellations as a byproduct of its claim to universality. As such it also reproduces a colonial world reordering as it legitimates and facilitates practices that instigate and/or extend this particular, yet universalized, understanding of human betterment, in particular through privileging a particular form of rationality and institutional that renders things commensurable, ownable, exchangeable, and objects of cost-benefit calculations. Finally, we formulate some perspectives for a decolonial development economics.