Journal Article

Ruins and Rhythms of Development and Life After Progress

New research on life in the aftermath of development initiatives and diminishing aspirations about progress

What if our analysis of human development abandon expectations of unilinear progress? In this new innovative publication, DIIS researcher Marie Kolling with her co-authors propose that across the globe development no longer inspires the same aspirations about progress. They analyse encounters with progress, by assembling cases from countries politically defined as growth-engines in three different regions of the world (Brazil, Germany and India).

The authors unravel how development initiatives related to natural resource exploitation, social housing and employment have produced material decay and broken expectations and generated temporal experiences of being in a state ‘after progress’. This open up a fresh analytical space for interpreting life in the aftermath of large-scale development interventions and how dreams of progress are reevaluated after they are broken.

The research article is a collaboration between DIIS researcher Marie Kolling and Stine Krøijer and Atreyee Sen from University of Copenhagen. It is published in the anthropological journal Ethnos.

DIIS Experts

Marie Kolling
Sustainable development and governance
Senior Researcher
+45 9132 5503
Ruins and Rhythms of Development and Life After Progress
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2-20, 2020