SOAS Research Online

Abstract

There are continuing disagreements regarding aspirations and processes in development and appropriate policies for promoting these. This paper proposes a dialogue around a conceptualisation of development as involving three complementary processes: ‘hanging in’, ‘stepping up’ and ‘stepping out’. It argues that these can describe different types of structural change operating at different scales and affecting national and sub-national societies and economies, different sectors within these economies, and people’s evolving livelihoods. The simplicity of this conceptualisation and its strong theoretical, empirical and experiential content make it a powerful framework both for inter-disciplinary, inter-sectoral, multi-scale analysis of dynamic development processes, and for structuring dialogue about contested aspirations, assumptions, modalities and constraints among development analysts and stakeholders with different interests and paradigms.