Dezvoltare economică, dezvoltare social-politică sau dezvoltare umană? O retrospectivă asupra gândirii consacrate despre dezvoltare (Development Thinking)

Abstract

For the last half a century, development was one of the keywords of the international economic and political discourse. The variety of contexts in which one can find the idea of development can pinpoint in fact to a lack of a unique definition and, therefore, a lack of a common understanding of the term. This is why the present article attempts to build a very broad overview of the development thinking, as it has emerged as a special field of huge (inter)national interest, beginning with post-war keyneasian thinking about development, that could only be economic development, picking up on the theory of modernization, then on dependency school, in order to evaluate the discourse of the Washington consensus and its heritage on current development communities and visions. The usefulness of the inquiry is better understood in the Romanian context, where I believe there is no genuine public debate (nor is there any academic one) about what development could mean for Romania, what it brings to the society and what the society could bring to the practice and research of this process. This article is a first theoretical step into understading how development thinking has evolved in time, under the influence of academic, political and eocnomic environments and what it means nowadaya, when Romanian society is yet again in its history attempting to follow a path towards development and modernity.