Development Metrics
This economic adjustment converts national statistics to reflect the actual buying power of a dollar and the local cost of living across different countries.
What is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)?
This rapid late-19th-century push saw European powers partition nearly the entire African continent.
What is the Scramble for Africa (or High Imperialism)?
According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this phenomenon occurs when repeating a single, flattened narrative creates incomplete cultural caricatures of a group.
What is the Single Story?
In his 1949 Inaugural Address, this U.S. President introduced the term "underdeveloped areas" to the global development vocabular
Who is Harry S. Truman?
This ethical perspective argues that national borders have no moral significance and that we hold a moral obligation to relieve poverty for all human beings regardless of citizenship
What is Cosmopolitanism?
Expressed as a number between 0 and 1, this mathematical index measures the degree of income inequality within a nation.
What is the Gini coefficient?
This paternalistic ideology claimed European conquest was a moral duty to elevate non-Western societies through Western culture, religion, and governance.
What is the Civilizing Mission?
In Antonio Gramsci’s political theory, this term refers to uncritically accepted, everyday assumptions that preserve dominant power arrangements by making them seem natural.
What is "Common Sense"?
Coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy, this term originally drew a parallel to the "Third Estate" of pre-revolutionary France to describe countries outside the two major Cold War power blocs
What is the "Third World"?
In the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe story of Skywoman, this small creature succeeded where others failed by diving into the deep water to bring up a handful of mud for Turtle's back
What is the muskrat?
Living below $1.90 per day; the minimum income required for basic physical survival.
What is absolute poverty?
A former colony gains formal political independence but remains economically controlled by foreign powers through debt and resource extraction.
What is Neo-colonialism?
In bell hooks' analysis, this institutionalized social system damages both men and women by enforcing dominator models, emotional detachment, and rigid gender roles.
What is Patriarchy?
This term has gained favor in international development because it highlights historical and contemporary patterns of wealth and power rather than just geographic location
What is the "Global South"?
Unlike English—which often treats nature as inanimate objects or property—Indigenous languages like Potawatomi use this linguistic framework to recognize plants, animals, water, and mountains as living relatives
What is the grammar of animacy?
This metric measures total income earned by a country’s residents and enterprises regardless of location.
What is Gross National Income (GNI)?
Held in 1955, this historic conference brought together Asian and African delegates to foster anti-colonial solidarity and resist Cold War superpower domination.
What was the Bandung Conference?
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, this framework examines how overlapping identity categories like race, class, and gender interact to create unique forms of discrimination.
What is Intersectionality?
Derived from the work of Canadian Indigenous leader George Manuel in the 1970s, this term refers to Indigenous nations subjected to internal colonization within dominant nation-states
What is the "Fourth World"?
Known in Potawatomi as Wiingaashk, this fragrant plant is considered the hair of Mother Earth and is traditionally braided in three strands to show kindness, compassion, and gratitude
What is sweetgrass?
Amartya Sen: Human development as expanding people's substantive freedoms to lead lives they value.
What is the Capability Approach?
Under this imperial concept, European powers treated colonized populations as "primitive" subjects requiring foreign governance until deemed capable of self-rule.
What is Trusteeship?
This concept refers to an individual's social background and location relative to power structures, which shapes how they perceive and interpret the world.
What is Positionality?
Critical theorists point out that development labels serve two primary functions: legitimating existing practices and doing this to future policy-making
What is shaping (or framing) future policy-making?
Instead of relying on globalized trade and endless market growth, this economic approach focuses on rebuilding community-scale networks to protect local ecosystems, rebuild social connections, and improve human well-being
What is economic localization (or localization)?