Lost principles of a ‘sustainable developmentalism’

This article discusses the advent, in the 1970s and early 1980s, of a critical turn in developmentalist thinking. This ideational shift was defined by the aspiration of classical development scholars to identify the conditions of possibility for ecologically sustainable and emancipatory forms of development in the periphery. Notably, it resulted in the formulation of Ignacy Sachs’s concept of eco-development—i.e. the developmentalist precursor to the notion of sustainable development. More than a simple effort to add an environmental dimension to development theory, eco-development expressed the search for another development, endogenous rather than mimetic, and oriented towards human needs. As such, it converged with the attempts of other major figures of classical development theory, such as Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, to radically reconsider, over the same period, the nature of the transformations needed in the periphery. These contributions, however, have largely been forgotten, and their potential for critically thinking about development in the Anthropocene remains untapped. This article recovers the main conceptual innovations of this moment of theoretical transformation and argues that they formed the foundations of a sustainable developmentalism: an approach to sustainable development from and for the global periphery.