Development: Which Ideas Now?

The practice of development and foreign aid inevitably involves numerous languages and thus requires translation to each the meaning of terms and concepts as all ideas and the words that convey them, are born in particular locations with contextual meanings attached to them. Yet terms are imported—often from West to East, and North to South —without consideration for these contexts. This introductory chapter argues for the need to recover how local actors reinterpret, frame, reconstruct, and reproduce, foreign concepts as they migrate. It also discusses why this is important, and why now. While shifts in thinking occur from time to time, we have been less imaginative in recognizing and overcoming the dominant sources of ideas and concepts that inform our development thinking. This is the reason we focus on the apparently “natural” concepts in Japan and how such concepts travel beyond their place of birth.