Alternative Development is no longer an alternative – Post-development could be

In the early 1970s, Alternative Development proposals offered new insights based on new concepts, discourses and practices that purported a paradigm shift away from the economic emphasis of development. In this context, multiple alternative development proposals emerged and, despite some of them having reached a central place in the global agenda, this paper argues that they went through a co-optation process which drove them to lose the opportunity for being a counter-paradigm to economic development. At this point the challenge is decisively to move from ‘Alternative Development’ to ‘Alternatives to Development’. On these grounds, and from a post-development point of view, new options are being imagined and designed outside the “development box”, which seem to be overcoming the narrowness of the linear economic development concepts and the naiveté of the alternative development proposals.