A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development

Citation

Sheppard, E., Porter, P. W., Faust, D. R., & Nagar, R. (2009). A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Chapter Summary

The book has 24 chapters in three parts and about 665 pages. The second edition adds two authors, David Faust and Richa Nagar, to the first edition's pair, Eric Sheppard and Philip Porter, and brings feminist and postcolonial perspectives alongside the political economy of the first edition. The authors say the book starts with the excluded spaces, subjects and scales of global capitalist development before turning to the dominant ones, and that they do not always impose a sense of flow or sequence on the chapters.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The opening chapter begins with an imagined visit to a village in Kenya, where a young man who has been to college and talks to his sister on a cell phone shows that local conditions are not purely local. It then questions the labels "first world" and "third world", sets the Enlightenment against its critics (with the pairing of "cosmos" and "hearth" taken from Yi-Fu Tuan), and turns to postcolonial thought and the problem of representing cultures from unequal positions. A section on "tropicality" argues against explaining poverty by climate alone, and a section on "affect hunger" discusses how culture emerges from human relationships. The chapter closes by explaining how the four authors worked together and how the book is framed by body, community and globe.

Chapters 2-5: Differentiated Ways of Knowing (rest of Part I)

Chapter 2, "Measuring, Describing, and Mapping Difference and Development", covers how difference and development are quantified and mapped. Chapters 3 and 4, "Knowing the Third World: Colonial Encounters" and "Knowing the Third World: The Development Decades", trace how the third world was constructed as a knowable entity, first by colonialism and then by state-led development. Chapter 5, "The Third World and Neoliberal Globalization", brings the account to the present. According to the authors, the five chapters of Part I, the Introduction included, set out a historically specific account of how the third world is constructed as knowable.

Part II, Chapters 6-12: Differentiated Livelihoods and the Nonhuman World

This part joins social relations to biophysical processes. Chapter 6, "Geographies of Population: Discourse and Politics", and Chapter 7, "Contested Environments: The Entanglements of Environment, Development, and Globalization", address population and environment as contested ideas. Chapter 8, "Disease and Health", turns to health. Chapters 9 to 11, "Uncertain Rains: The Atmospheric Energy Cycle and the Hydrologic Cycle", "Other Challenges to Rural Livelihood: Soils, Vegetation, and Pests" and "Nature as Latitudinal Trickster: The Carbon Cycle and Plant Growth", explain climate, water, soils and plant growth as they bear on rural livelihoods in the tropics. Chapter 12, "The Management of Tropical and Subtropical Ecosystems: The Pokot of West Central Kenya-An Indigenous Knowledge System", offers a case of local knowledge. The Introduction ties Chapters 8 to 12 to the particularities of tropical environments while rejecting the idea that the tropics alone cause underdevelopment.

Part III, Chapters 13-24: Differentiated Social Relations Encountering Global Strategies

The longest part moves through the large-scale processes of the world economy. Chapters 13 to 15 deal with colonialism: "The Historical Geography of Colonialism and the Slave Trade", "Colonialism as Spatial and Labor Control System" and "The End of Colonialism and the Promise of Free Trade". Chapters 16 to 18 cover resources and production: "Trading Primary Commodities", "Peripheral Industrialization: Paths and Strategies" and "The Earth's Crust as Resource". Chapter 19, "Urbanization, Migration, and Spatial Polarization", takes up cities and movement. Chapters 20 and 21, "Transnational Production" and "Foreign Branch Plants and Economic Growth", discuss multinational firms. Chapters 22 and 23, "Money and Global Finance Markets" and "Borrowing Money: Aid, Debt, and Dependence", both written with Bongman Seo, cover finance, aid and debt. Chapter 24, "Toward Different Worlds", closes the book. The publisher lists a chapter on the promises and pitfalls of sustainable development among the additions to the second edition.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1 and Part I: Ways of knowing

• Difference and knowledge: the book's central pairing, in which material differences are produced and justified through different knowledges.
• "First world" and "third world" as constructed categories: labels that the authors keep in order to question them.
• Cosmos and hearth: Tuan's contrast between a universalizing modern project and a reaction that prizes the local.
• Postcolonial and feminist perspectives: the added viewpoints of the second edition, which question who speaks for whom.

Part II: Livelihoods and the nonhuman world

• Tropicality: the claim that tropical environments cause poverty, which the book challenges by showing that society and environment are mutually constitutive.
• Indigenous knowledge: local ways of managing ecosystems, illustrated by the Pokot of Kenya.
• Climate, hydrologic and carbon cycles: the physical processes that shape rural livelihoods.

Part III: Global strategies

• Colonialism as spatial and labor control: how colonial systems organized territory and work.
• Peripheral industrialization and transnational production: routes of industrial growth outside the core, and the role of multinational firms.
• Aid, debt and dependence: the finance relations between rich and poor countries.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Natural and social worlds in one text. Chapters 8 to 12 deal with disease, atmosphere, water, soils, plant growth and tropical ecosystems, so a student can see the biophysical side of development without dropping the social argument.
• Historical depth. The first five chapters trace how the third world was made knowable through colonialism, the development decades and neoliberal globalization, before the later chapters turn to specific processes.
• Plural theoretical lenses. The European Planning Studies reviewer noted that the two added authors bring feminist and postcolonial analyses to the first edition's political economy, and the Human Geography reviewer wrote that the book far exceeds what one expects of a new edition, with abundant concrete examples and complex theory explained in simpler terms.
• Rich material. The Canadian Geographer called the book a 600-plus-page tour de force and counted more than 50 sidebars, more than 100 graphs and figures, and 50-plus tables and maps. The publisher adds that the many examples show how people in the Global South experience and contest globalization.
• A candid account of the authorship. Chapter 1 explains the tensions among the four authors, so the book models the reflexivity it asks of readers.

Limitations

• Very long. At about 665 pages, no course will cover all 24 chapters; the three parts have to be sampled.
• Deliberate disjunctures. The authors say they do not always impose a sense of flow or sequence, and that chapters and sidebars may offer competing arguments. They invite readers to read the empirical chapters against the theory of the early ones, which asks more of the reader than a smoother textbook would.
• Physical geography demands. Chapters 9 to 11, on the atmospheric energy and hydrologic cycles, soils and the carbon cycle, bring in physical science that may be unfamiliar to students from social science backgrounds.
• Published in 2009. The publisher describes the edition as updated to reflect a decade of change, and a further edition is announced; data in the later chapters, for example on finance and trade, will be dated.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is a substantial development text built on political economy and on postcolonial and feminist critique. Potter and colleagues' Geographies of Development is a geography-led introduction that links development theory with colonial histories, globalization, inequality, institutions and the environment, and is suited as a first text. Willis's Theories and Practices of Development is a concise account of the main theoretical traditions from modernisation to neoliberalism, structuralism and grassroots approaches, and works as a short primer on the theory that Sheppard and colleagues critique. Sen's Development as Freedom is an influential argument, written for a general audience, for judging development by real freedoms, and Sachs's The Age of Sustainable Development is an economist's illustrated introduction; both offer perspectives the book can be read against. Dauncey, Desai and Potter's The Companion to Development Studies is a large reference of short chapters that is useful for looking up a concept.

A World of Difference works best as the main text for a course that takes a critical, political-economy and postcolonial view, or as a second book for a student who has already met the basic ideas in one of the shorter introductions.

How to Use This Book

The book is for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in geography and development studies, ideally with an introductory course in development behind them. It reads as a text for courses on globalization and development.

A practical plan:

• Core: the Introduction and Chapters 2 to 5, which supply the framework of difference and knowledge on which the rest depends.
• Select by theme: for environment and livelihoods, Chapters 6 to 12; for the history of the world economy, Chapters 13 to 15; for production, trade and finance, Chapters 16 to 23. Chapter 24 gathers the argument.
• Read against each other: following the authors' suggestion, pair an empirical chapter in Part III with a theoretical one in Part I and note where they disagree.
• Use the sidebars and figures: they carry many of the examples and are a good starting point for seminar discussion or essays.