Contemporary concerns in development studies: Perspectives from Tanzania and Zambia

Abstract

As part of the institutionalization of "development" after the Second World War, academia has witnessed emergence of the discipline of development studies. The five decades of the discipline have testified a number of theoretical shifts in considering how to conceptualize the very notion of development, and how to make sense out of the global processes and inequalities. Additionally, the place of development studies within the disciplinary landscape of academia has been continuously debated. Moreover, as a discipline, development studies have had more or less close connections with development policy and practice. Many strands of development studies have contributed to defining the pertinent development problems, and generating suggestions on the ways in which to address these problems.In this edited volume we would like to take some distance from on one hand, the development problems, and on the other, the abstract theoretical discourses of development. That is why we have selected to address the "concerns" of development studies. We are inspired by development studies being both embedded in theory and having concern on the societal and natural phenomena that contribute to inequalities and human well-being. Concerns, in this volume, refer to development-related puzzles that call for theoretically-informed investigation, and empirically-grounded ideas on how to address these concerns.Without doubt, the concept of development is a point of departure for the discipline. The central concern in development studies has been to research development processes as affected by array of factors in order to understand the underlying forces. Regardless of time and resources spent so far in development aspects, development studies is still experiencing unsolved challenges, which we refer as "concerns" including: rapid urbanization, political instability, gender inequality, food insecurity, poor governance, global technological gaps, spiraling levels of poverty and unequal distribution of financial and other resources.These concerns still exist partly because they are addressed in isolation with individual disciplines. For example, the economists deal with poverty in economic point of view i.e. following economic growth standards as their main concern. On the other hand, sociologists address development concerns using sociological lenses without considering other areas like political science, geography and rural development, while all these are areas in development studies. Anthropology has had an ambiguous relationship with development and its interventionists pursues. The agricultural sciences, 8 forestry, geology, biology and the like add to the complexity of approaches, not to mention the computer sciences and its possibilities in dealing with so-called big data now increasingly available also in developing world.The contemporary concerns in development studies in this volume are identified and discussed mainly by development scholars with first-hand experience of development. Too often, development studies publications pr...