An Orthodoxy of 'The Local': Post-colonialism, Participation and Professionalism in Northern Thailand

Katharine McKinnon

The emergence of a participatory orthodoxy in the development industry has had enormous positive impact, however discourses of participation are also being used in surprisingly political ways. This paper explores how a “pro-local” discourse amongst development professionals in northern Thailand is being deployed in ways that undermine the goals of empowerment and emancipation that are central to the aims of participatory approaches.

Seeing Diversity, Multiplying Possibility: My Journey from Post-feminism to Postdevelopment with J.K. Gibson-Graham

Kelly Dombroski
An image of the book cover, the palgrave handbook of gender and development

As a graduate student I first came into contact with the work and persons of JK Gibson-Graham. As I was mentored and supervised by Katherine Gibson, the piece, Building Community Economies: Women and the Politics of Place became part of my journey into feminism and feminist postdevelopment research. In this chapter, I highlight three principles I have carried with me from that time until now: starting where you are, seeing diversity, and multiplying possibility.

Beyond the Business Case: A Community Economies Approach to Gender, Development And Social Economy

Suzanne Bergeron
Stephen Healy

In this paper we explore how international development discourse has placed women at the center of a "smart economics" approach to economic development. While we are heartened by development discourse's new found interest in economies of care and social reproduction, we are troubled by the way that an essentialized conception of gender is attached to a economic growth as usual agenda.

Mapping Economic Diversity in the First World: The Case of Fisheries

Kevin St. Martin

This paper challenges the ways in which the First World/Third World binary, coupled with a "capitalocentric" discourse of economic development, limit possibilities for economies of community, cooperation and participation. Fisheries are used as an example to argue that undermining the presence of capitalism in the First World and making space for that which has been excluded (for example, community-based and territorial fisheries) requires a new economic and spatial imaginary.