How Change Happens
Has development thinking become too narrow and specialised? Does it fail to draw on learning from outside the realm of development studies about how social change happens? 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 summarised 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 inequalitylargely ignore environmental issuesoverlook the importance of personal relationships and promoting mutual understanding as a strategy for changefail to appreciate fully the contextual factors that limit changelack a multidisciplinary agility to draw on the broad range of approaches to change that exist outside the confines of development studies. There is a need for broader thinking about how change happens, so that we can be more creative in devising strategies and more adept at facing the huge challenges that confront our societies and planet.
Published: 2007
Pages: 59
eBook: 9780855987688
Paperback: 9780855985974
| Contents | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Overview | |||
| Introduction | |||
| 1. Disciplinary approaches to how change happens | |||
| History | |||
| Politics | |||
| Sociology | |||
| Social anthropology | |||
| Psychology | |||
| Economics | |||
| Management and organisational studies | |||
| International relations and globalisation | |||
| Geography | |||
| Legal studies | |||
| Technology and science | |||
| Philosopy | |||
| Ecology | |||
| Cross-disciplinary approaches to how change happens | |||
| 2. The rough guide to how change happens | |||
| The rough guide to how change happens | |||
| The abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain | |||
| 3. Approaches to change in contemporary development thinking | |||
| Market liberalisation | |||
| Managed markets | |||
| Corporate social responsibility | |||
| International aid | |||
| Empowerment | |||
| Grassroots participation and social organisation | |||
| Reforming the state | |||
| Land reform and securing private property | |||
| Changing attitudes and beliefs | |||
| Endnotes |
Roman Krznaric
Roman Krznaric is a cultural thinker and founding faculty member of The School of Life. He advises organisations including Oxfam and the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change, and has been named by The Observer as one of Britain's leading lifestyle philosophers.
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