Development geography I: Decomposing development geography

Abstract

Development geography is decomposing, turning away from the telos of development and moving research on the Global South into conversation with other sub-disciplines. I review development geography’s decomposition as a sub-field and use the example of recent research on financialisation in the Global South to demonstrate how this is happening. The report reflects on what is at stake in these shifts.

Keywords

development geography financialisation Global South D/d development decomposition

Introduction

Development is in crisis. The decolonial critique of development raises fundamental questions about the coloniality of development as an idea, a practice and a field of scholarship (Melber et al., 2024; Murrey and Daley 2023; Rutazibwa 2019). The development industry in OECD countries, or Big D Development (Hart 2001), faces an existential challenge amid cuts to aid budgets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and rising populist nationalisms. Hostile forces have been launched against the aims of Big D Development such as gender empowerment, civil rights, democracy and climate change (Mawdsley et al., 2025). The Sustainable Development Goals will not be met by 2030, nor are they likely to hold as a consensus on the aims and means of development (Sultana 2018; Tooze 2025; Willis 2016). The war in Gaza has exposed – again – the inadequacy of the development industry in the face of genocide (Agha et al., 2024; Brooks and Griffiths 2025; Prunier 1997).

As I worked on these Progress Reports in this broader context it was impossible not to reflect on whether development geography is also in crisis. What does the decolonial critique of development and the apparent end of Big D Development mean for the sub-field concerned with uneven geographical development in the Global South? What is development geography’s contribution to, and purpose within, the wider discipline in the current conjuncture? Where is this sub-discipline to be found thriving – in geography departments, at conference sessions, in journal debates? The more I looked for a self-identifying ‘development geography’ the more elusive it seemed. Are we witnessing the death of development geography as a major sub-field of the discipline?

In the first of three reports on development geography I take James Ferguson’s discussion of the stakes involved in ‘decomposing modernity’ (2006, p 188) as a starting point from which to consider the current state of development geography. Decomposition is both a method – of taking something apart to examine its constituent parts – and a process – of things breaking down yet living on in unanticipated ways (Ferguson 1999, 2006). For Ferguson, both meanings invite questions about what is at stake when disciplinary keywords form or fall apart. In this report I work with decomposition to make four observations about recent research in development geography. First, I argue that the disciplinary field of development geography is decomposing, not in the sense of decay or death, but in the sense of breaking down. Development geography is less visible today as a distinct sub-field as research on the Global South untethers itself from the telos of development and engages with other sub-disciplines. Second, I consider what development geography is breaking down into. I use the example of recent geographical research on financialisation in the Global South to demonstrate that explicit frameworks of development are receding into the background as geographers turn to theories and concepts from other sub-fields such as economic, feminist and migration geography, and new concerns with racialisation and racial capitalism. Third, I examine a productive thread of recent geographical research that does explicitly engage with questions of development through a renewed research agenda extending Hart’s D/d development heuristic (Hart 2001, 2010). Finally, I reflect on what is at stake in the decomposition of development geography. My reflections are limited to Anglophone geography, but I hope that the issues raised here can generate further debate within and beyond the Anglosphere.

The decomposition of development geography

Development geography today maintains many of the characteristics of a geographical sub-discipline. There is a canon of authors and ideas; there are research groups in major Anglophone geographical associations (Association of American Geographers, Institute of Australian Geographers, Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers); it is taught as a major sub-discipline in geography undergraduate programmes; numerous books have been devoted to it and it is often treated as a substantive section in state-of-the-discipline textbooks. What characterises development geography across all of these activities is a concern with the geographies of uneven development. Although it has no flagship journal dedicated to it, it is an inter-disciplinary field that straddles geography, development studies and area studies. This interdisciplinarity has brought new ideas and voices to the discipline and has made development geography a relatively outward-looking sub-field in recent decades.

Development geography is also unique in ways that raise serious questions about its standing as a sub-field that can continue to make significant contributions to contemporary geography. Its canon is dominated by white authors located in universities in the Global North. At a time when geographers are seeking ways to decolonise the discipline (Craggs and Neate 2024; Esson et al., 2017; Nayak 2025; Radcliffe 2022) and to think about the role of ‘geography in the world’ from multiple places (Cheng and Sharp 2025; McFarlane 2022), the geography of development geography is a problem. There have been productive attempts to address this, including work to reposition scholars such as Akin Mabogunje and Milton Santos in disciplinary debates (Craggs and Neate 2020; Santos 2021[1978]) and on new ways to conduct global research partnerships (McKay 2021; Raghuram et al., 2024; Vincent 2022).

Scanning the wider activities that constitute the disciplinary field, I see a gradual disengagement from development geography. Faculty job advertisements in the Anglosphere now rarely specify ‘development geography’ as a desired area of expertise. In the UK, where the Research Excellence Framework has encouraged departments of geography to distinguish themselves by their research groups, development geography has dropped out of favour as a distinct theme. And the most recent edition of the comprehensive undergraduate textbook Introducing Human Geographies (Dombroski et al., 2024) has replaced the ‘development geographies’ section (Cloke et al., 2013) with newly commissioned chapters on ‘Majority and Minority Worlds’, ‘New Economic Geographies of Development’, ‘Political Ecology’, ‘Colonisation and Colonialism’ and ‘Decolonisation’ that are integrated into sub-disciplinary sections on ‘Economic Geographies’, ‘Environmental Geographies’, ‘Political Geographies’ and ‘Collaborations with Justice’.

Development geography is also associated with an industry – the development industry or Big D Development (Hart 2001) – as an object of research and a potential career destination for students. Despite the existential threat to Development in the current conjuncture, this connection has been generative for research, providing endless ideas, policy agendas, and interventions in the name of Development that demand the scrutiny of critical academic scholarship. But this connection has also been a problem. It has skewed research in the Global South towards normative concerns defined by a narrow reading of development such as poverty, governance and sustainability. It has also shaped the geographical remit of the field of development geography to parts of the world where Development seeks to intervene. Recent years have seen robust debate about whether the study of development should be global or whether it should continue to focus on countries of the Global South (Hope et al., 2022; Horner 2020; Kumar et al., 2024; Patel and Sanyal 2024), echoing a long-standing debate about how Anglophone geography divides the world into regions according to a concept of development defined by the world’s major economies (Sidaway 2012). This question has prompted an existential crisis in the inter-disciplinary field of development studies, which heavily invested in the ‘Third World’, ‘Developing Countries’ and the ‘Global South’ as its field of expertise (Behuria 2025, Sud and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2022). In geography, the Developing Areas Research Group (DARG) of the RGS-IBG was renamed the Development Geographies Research Group (DevGRG) in 2019. The change, which had long been debated, rejected the implication that the study of development was geographically confined to ‘developing areas’, or that ‘developing areas’ should be studied through the lens of development. DevGRG was responding to shifts in the wider discipline. For example, compared to the RGS-IBG conferences of three decades ago, research on the Global South is now neither corralled into DevGRG-sponsored sessions nor contained within the framework of ‘development’. These broad shifts are very welcome and long overdue. But they also raise the question of what constitutes the distinct sub-field of development geography today if ‘development’ is in question both as a geographical signifier and as a framework for research.

One answer is that development geography is decomposing. Research on the economic, political and social geographies of uneven development is increasingly taking place in sub-fields other than development geography, such as in climate (Bigger and Millington 2020), economic (Iddris et al., 2025; Murphy and Carmody 2024), feminist (Brickell 2020; Brown et al., 2022; Natarajan and Brickell 2022; Sultana 2020), finance (Green 2022a), migration (Bastia 2013; Bastia et al., 2022), political (Mohan 2020), rural (Gillen et al., 2022; Rigg 2020) and urban (Carmody et al., 2024; Robinson et al., 2025) geographies, as well as in area studies (Atia, 2013; Yeh, 2013), geopolitics (Gonzalez-Vicente and Han 2024; Power 2019; Woon and Sidaway 2025) and political ecology (Hope et al., 2025; Paprocki 2021). Development geographers are also working in collaboration with scholars in other disciplines across the social and physical sciences to develop new inter-disciplinary research on climate, energy and infrastructure (e.g. Laurie et al., 2024; Power et al., 2026). Some of this work is being published outside of geography, for example, on infrastructure corridors (Kirshner and Baptista 2023), large dams (Siciliano et al., 2018) off-grid energy (Gebreslassie et al., 2022), sustainable environmental management and domestic energy (Bhakta et al., 2024; Leary et al., 2021; Wheeler et al., 2025). As noted above, development geography has long been inter-disciplinary. What is new is that collectively, these collaborations seem to be having the effect of hollowing out development geography as a sub-field. I explore this below through recent work on financialisation in the Global South.

The financialisation of everything?

Since Mawdsley’s progress report on development geography in which she highlighted ‘the deepening nexus between financial logics, instruments and actors, and intentional “development”’ (2018a, p 265), the intertwining of financialisation and development in the Global South has intensified. Mawdsley (2018a) noted two significant areas of research: tracking the shift from foreign aid to development finance; and examining the ‘scalar assemblages’ that link global financial interests to households through the microfinance industry (Roy 2010). Recent research has begun to analyse new financial products and practices, for example, on the governance of climate finance (Bracking and Leffel 2021) and green bonds (Bigger and Millington 2020). While explicit questions of development are relevant to this work, they have nevertheless retreated to the background. Geographers working on financialisation in the Global South are asking questions about racialised finance and the politics of risk, remittances, debt and household relations: questions that development geography has either moved away from (e.g. Chant et al., 2015; Corbridge 1992) or has not adequately addressed, including in its own disciplinary formation (e.g. on race: see Murrey and Daley 2023; Kothari 2006; Patel 2020). They are turning instead to ideas from economic, urban, migration and feminist geography, political economy and racial capitalism.

There is a growing body of research in geography that shifts attention from financialisation in the Global North to examine the geographies of financialisation in the Global South. A significant theme in this work draws out the racialisation of finance as it intersects with Development. Alami and Guermond (2023) argue that the extension of financial products and practices to ‘frontier’ and ‘emerging markets’ in the Global South both relies on, and reproduces, racialised difference (Alami 2024). A barrage of techniques simultaneously frame the racialized poor and poor countries as development problems and potentially lucrative, highly risky financial subjects. Techniques include political risk assessments, credit ratings, benchmark indexes, portfolio management and joint-liability micro-lending, methods for risk valuation, standards for ‘good’ financial governance, monitoring solvability, legal frameworks for investment and lending and mechanisms to ensure repayments and debt servicing. The overall effect is to make credit more expensive for the poor while generating profits for investors (ibid.). In the Caribbean, Mullings (2022) critiques the racializing logics of financial products aimed at the diaspora, who are targeted to invest in diaspora bonds to provide capital for Development at home. These products, which carry what is termed a ‘patriotic discount’ in Development discourse, reveal ‘the instrumentality of racializing discourses that construct diaspora populations as non-rational actors, inured to loss’ (Mullings 2022, p 752).

A second theme in work on financialisation in the Global South focusses on remittances and sits at the intersection of migration, urban and financial geographies. The financialisation of remittances refers to a shared agenda to formalise, digitise and securitise remittances across a coalition of development actors that includes governments, the private sector and the development industry (Kunz et al., 2022, p 694). For example, Menon’s (2025) work on migrant workers in Dubai who come from Kochi, India, examines how Kochi-based real estate actors and banks come together to create new joint products to market new homes and new mortgages to this consumer base. These real estate-bank products mitigate the investment risks to them, while transferring them to migrant workers. In Cambodia, Guermond et al. (2026) show that microfinance institutions treat migrants’ remittances to rural households as ‘translocal collateral’ to justify the expansion of their lending portfolio. Yet this growing body of research also shows that the financialisation agenda does not simply roll out in the Global South, as remitters and their families do not fit neatly into the economistic models of remittance behaviour on which financial subjects are premised (Page and Mercer 2012). For example, Cirolia et al. (2021) show how Congolese migrants in Cape Town utilise ‘emergent migrant infrastructures’ that blur the boundaries between formal and informal remittance systems (e.g. using the physical and financial infrastructure of a logistics company to send money), enabling them to effectively circumvent the more expensive technological and financial systems that seek to ‘tap’ and ‘leverage’ their transactions. In Oaxaca, Smyth (2022) demonstrates that remittance recipient families manage remittances by incorporating them into already existing economic strategies within the household rather than investing them in new activities deemed more ‘productive’ by Development actors. Guermond (2022, 2024) examines how households in Ghana and Senegal that receive remittances via mobile money apps are targeted by banks and microfinance institutions that seek to enrol them as customers in new retail banking products using remittances as collateral; but he also shows how these strategies intersect with embedded histories of local financial practices. Remittance receivers may become reluctant customers who see no choice other than to take out these new forms of microloan to juggle multiple debts to multiple creditors, but they may also avoid microloans in preference for already existing savings and credit associations and established social practices that generate value in the community through care and reciprocity. Others simply reject microloans outright because of their high interest rates and hidden fees. This work reminds us once again of the structural geographies of uneven development that cannot be papered over with remittance flows, and questions unspoken assumptions about migrants’ responsibilities towards development (Lindley et al., 2024; Raghuram 2009).

A third theme on financialisation in the Global South focuses on the geographies of debt (Harker 2020), dominated by recent research in Asia, where household debt is being driven by the costs of migration, fragile agrarian livelihoods in the context of climate change and the aggressive expansion of microfinance (Brickell et al., 2022; Matthan 2023). Developing feminist, transnational and financial geography research, this work has examined the relationship between the expanding microfinance industry and household debt. For example in Nepal, Paudel and Kunz (2022) show how financial literacy education programmes encourage households to take on debt to finance economically productive activities, but discourage debt incurred to finance households’ social reproduction. Guermond et al. (2026) examine the relationship between remittances and debt in Cambodia, where rural households regularly use remittances to repay loans. Cambodia has received almost 10% of global investments through microfinance funds. Green (2022a, 2024) argues that the social impact industry that fuels microfinance in Cambodia operates as a kind of anti-politics machine, turning the political economy of debt into a series of technical issues to be managed – or ignored – through self-regulation by the microfinance industry itself. Further research in Cambodia has demonstrated the devastating effects of over-indebtedness on the environment, agrarian production, social reproduction and health (Green 2022b; Green 2025; Guermond et al., 2023; Iskander et al., 2025).

While the geography of financialisation in the Global South is clearly a rich seam of research, work by geographers at the intersection with area studies reveals other geographies of finance and money that are worth exploring in more detail. Research on modes of house-building that rely on savings and socially embedded forms of finance in Africa (Mercer 2024; Page and Sunjo 2018), creative modes of housing finance that reproduce military state power in Lahore (Sajjad 2025), circuits of ‘cash, clothes and construction’ that shape new indigenous and gendered bourgeois subjectivities in Bolivia (MacLean 2023) or the ‘outlaw capital’ that flows through contraband trading in Paraguay (Tucker 2023) all suggest productive directions for further research that reveals the limits of financialisation frameworks. My aim in this section has been to demonstrate how development geography is being decomposed as geographers turn away from development’s normative agendas and towards frameworks that foreground the racialised, colonial and gendered socio-spatial relations that produce financial geographies in the Global South. That turn can only be strengthened to the degree that research on financialisation explores the wider geographies of money, value, savings and investments.

D/d developments

In a highly influential set of publications, Gillian Hart set out an earlier decomposition of development into Big D Development (‘the multiply scaled project of intervention in the “Third World” that emerged in the context of decolonization struggles and the Cold War’) and little d development (‘the development of capitalism as geographically uneven but spatially interconnected processes of creation and destruction’ (Hart 2010 p 119; 2001). Her purpose was to demonstrate how the two were dialectically interconnected in twentieth century geographical political economy, with Big D Development enrolled in the service of shifting conjunctures in capitalist development from the 1940s. Picking up Hart’s decomposition of development into D/d development, a particularly productive strand of inter-disciplinary work has developed at the intersection of development geography, geopolitics and international political economy, situated in debates on the new conjuncture (Hart 2024; Sheppard 2022), interregnum (Taggart 2022) or polycrisis (Albert 2024; Ang 2025). This research has examined the shifts in D/d development since the turn of the 21^st century as South-South Cooperation has become more influential in Development (Mawdsley 2012, 2020). Research has analysed new configurations of Big D Development, examining the micropolitics of aid and Development expertise in the Global South (Sou 2022) and Global North (Mawdsley et al., 2017; Whitty 2024; Whitty et al., 2023) and the anti-politics of the SDGs (Hope 2022). Questions of sovereign debt should also be high on this agenda.

Research has returned to Hart’s D/d formulation to make sense of the ways in which Development, far from being in crisis, is being reconfigured in the current conjuncture as forms of state capitalism assume greater prominence in development and increasingly occupy Big D Development (Alami et al., 2021; Mawdsley and Taggart 2022; Taggart and Power 2024). The D/d dialectic thus continues to place Development in the service of development, as in Hart’s original formulation, but the actors, goals and logics of D/d development are now less easily distinguished from one another (Mawdsley and Taggart, 2022). In the era of ‘development finance’, Development actors (principally OECD bilaterals, multilaterals and NGOs) increasingly work with actors associated with forms of state capitalism (state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds, policy and development banks) to leverage investment capital (bonds, loans and private finance; Alami et al., 2021; Gabor 2021; Mawdsley 2018b; Taggart and Power 2024). This is partly driven by the ‘Southernisation of Development’ (Mawdsley, 2018c), in which a more assertive narrative about Southern development cooperation as win-win for both parties has precipitated a ‘normalisation’ of state-capital hybrids in Development (Alami et al., 2021).

Conclusion

Development geography is decomposing as geographers turn to literatures on coloniality, racialisation, feminism and financialisation to make sense of the geographies of uneven development in the current conjuncture. This does not necessarily mean the end of the study of development by geographers: as recent work at the intersection of development geography and political economy shows, critical analyses of the new configuration of D/d development through finance, debt and new state capitalisms points to a significant new agenda for geographical research on uneven development and global inequality. But the broader trend away from development as question or framework in research on the Global South raises questions about what is at stake in development geography’s constitution as a major sub-discipline of geography. Development geography’s decomposition is welcome insofar as it cannot adequately contain geographical research on the Global South. The geographies of the Global South are not only about development, and development is not only about the Global South. Yet, given the stubborn EuroAmericanism of the discipline of geography, the geographies of in the Global South may struggle to be heard and to shape what is considered to be ‘progress’ in human geography (Jazeel 2016). Perhaps the decomposition of development geography can pave the way for a less Eurocentric discipline.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to many colleagues with whom I have discussed this draft: Emma Mawdsley, Katie Willis, Austin Zeiderman, Kasia Paprocki, Siddharth Menon, Romola Sanyal and the members of the Writing the World seminar in the Department of Geography and Environment at the LSE.

ORCID iD

Claire Mercer

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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