Decolonising Development Studies: Why It Matters

By Devika Dutt

Calls to decolonise Development Studies have gained increasing visibility across universities, research institutes, and policy spaces. Yet despite its growing popularity, decolonisation is often treated as a loosely defined aspiration rather than a substantive intellectual and political project. In many cases, it is reduced to efforts to diversify reading lists or improve representation within existing frameworks. While such initiatives are important in their own right, they do not address the deeper structural and epistemic foundations of the field.

As I argue in my recent article in The European Journal of Development Research, which is based on my book with Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, and Ingrid Kvangraven, Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction, Development Studies cannot meaningfully understand development without confronting its Eurocentric origins and its entanglement with colonial and imperial power.

At the heart of Development Studies, lies an implicit assumption about what development is and how it occurs. Dominant framings of development usually see development as a surrogate for the development of capitalism. Consequently, a successful development experience is seen as one in which the structure of production, employment, and economic activity is transformed from one based on a traditional, low-productivity family-based agricultural sector to a modern wage-based profit-led high-productivity industrial sector. Other development indicators and living standards are expected to improve alongside this transformation, either through state intervention or otherwise. The dominance of this conceptualization is partly a result of how ideas from development economics have become hegemonic within development studies, as have its methodologies.

These dominant theories continue to treat the historical experience of Western Europe as the benchmark against which all other societies are measured. Development is framed as a process of “catching up” to a path already travelled by the global North, typically associated with industrialisation, free markets, and liberal institutions. This framing is Eurocentric and suggests that Europe’s development was the result of internal factors such as technological innovation, efficient institutions, or cultural attributes, while the underdevelopment of much of the global South is seen as a consequence of domestic failures or policy shortcomings.

Development as extractivism

This narrative obscures a crucial historical reality. Europe’s development did not take place in isolation, nor was it the outcome of purely endogenous processes. It was profoundly shaped by colonialism, slavery, and imperial domination, and depended on the large-scale extraction of labour, land, and resources from colonised regions. Ignoring these histories produces a distorted understanding of global inequality and reinforces narratives that place responsibility for underdevelopment squarely on the shoulders of formerly colonised societies. Within this framing, mainstream development analysis is reduced to identifying the appropriate technocratic or policy “fix” that will remove obstacles to capital accumulation. Poverty and inequality are thus explained through insufficiently free markets, weak or undemocratic institutions, corruption, or culturally irrational behaviour, rather than through historically rooted relations of extraction, dependency, and unequal power. As a result, Development Studies often ends up reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to explain.

This Eurocentric framing has significant consequences for both theory and practice. When development is defined in terms of deviation from this Eurocentric norm, countries in the global South are positioned as perpetually lacking or incomplete. Their economic and political trajectories are interpreted as failures to replicate a fictional path of development, rather than as an outcome of the very path of development that produced prosperity in what is the global North today. This perspective also limits the kinds of questions scholars ask. Policy debates tend to focus on institutional reform, governance quality, or market efficiency while paying insufficient attention to global power relations, historical extraction, and contemporary forms of dependency.

Decolonising Development Studies must necessarily be an anti-imperialist endeavour

Importantly, decolonising Development Studies should not be understood as a call for inclusion alone. It is not simply about adding marginalised perspectives to an otherwise unchanged field. Rather, it is about transforming the field’s core assumptions and confronting the power relations that underpin them. This includes recognising the ways in which development scholarship has historically legitimised interventionist policies and hierarchies between “developed” and “underdeveloped” worlds. This involves interrogating the categories, theories, and assumptions that have become taken for granted, as well as recognising that knowledge production is never neutral. Decolonisation operates at both a discursive and a material level. Discursively, it calls for discarding any theoretical framework that considers as its starting point an idealized experience of endogenous capitalist development in the global North and that makes sense of reality only in relation to it. This requires questioning the primacy of Eurocentric theories and methods in Development Studies and addressing the structural exclusions through which Eurocentrism—and ultimately imperial power—are reproduced.

At the same time, decolonisation has a material dimension that concerns the structures through which development knowledge is produced and circulated. Academic publishing, research funding, and professional recognition remain heavily concentrated in institutions based in the global North. Scholars working in or on the global South often face barriers to visibility, resources, and influence, particularly when their work challenges dominant paradigms. These asymmetries shape whose voices are heard, which questions are prioritised, and what counts as authoritative knowledge. Yet efforts to decolonise economics cannot succeed in isolation from wider struggles over global power, as systems of knowledge production are deeply embedded in—and help sustain—existing hierarchies. From this perspective, decolonising Development Studies necessarily becomes an anti-imperialist endeavour, rooted in a fundamental critique of power across its many forms.

Devika Dutt is Lecturer in Development Economics at King’s College, London. Her research is focused on the political economy of foreign exchange intervention, central bank swap agreements, the political economy of development policy (especially as it relates to international financial institutions), and macroeconomic policy in developing economies.

Image: cactusbones under a creative commons licence on Flickr

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes