Post‐pandemic Transformations and the Recasting of Development: A Comment and Further Reflections

This Comment is both a response to critique and a wider contribution to renewed debate on the politics of development and development studies amidst multiple, intersecting challenges. In an article published in World Development in 2021, Leach et al. proposed that COVID‐19 and earlier epidemics provided fundamental lessons for post‐pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. In an article published in this journal in 2023, Wiegratz et al. critiqued Leach et al., arguing that their universalist framing effaces structural inequalities between the global North and the global South, and that the analysis underplays the importance of historically embedded political‐economic inequalities. This Comment shows how elements of the article by Wiegratz and colleagues point to ways to extend and elaborate Leach et al.’s overall argument — not to refute it — but that it is also based on a highly selective reading of the latter's work and its implications. Focusing first on the core question of universality, and then more briefly on the themes of inequalities and of uncertainty, it resurfaces parts of the authors’ work that Wiegratz et al. selectively ignore, and reflects on further recent evidence of pandemic impacts and inequalities amidst structural violence and contemporary capitalist dynamics. These are relevant across all geographies and polities, although in different ways, as shaped by particular contexts and histories that include, but also cross‐cut and complicate, dichotomies between the so‐called global North and global South. This Comment thus clarifies and extends the argument for a recasting of development around a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics, relevant to all settings across the world.