Managing International Development: (Re)positioning Critiques

Despite earlier neglect, International Development (ID) has begun to receive some attention from the Critical Management Studies (CMS) community over the last two decades. This paper reviews existing CMS work that engages with ID and outlines directions for future research. Building on extant research and scholarship that has focussed on linkages between managerialism and ID, we identify and discuss in some depth three emerging areas within ID – financialization, evaluation and projectification–that, we argue, merit further critical scrutiny from CMS scholars. We call for a programme of theoretical and grounded empirical research into these three areas in the hope of reinvigorating CMS’s engagement with ID; a programme that would seek to expose the fallacy of the universalizing managerialism that increasingly informs ID projects and organizational practices. In operationalizing this research programme, we draw attention to problems of positionality, drawing on methodological and epistemological debates in Anthropology to inform our argument. We thus highlight the need for grounding CMS research practices in reflective trans-disciplinarity.