Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d études du développement· 2026Q2
Shaping an image of international development in the twenty-first century: the perspective of metamodernism
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- 2026year
Short summary
Metamodernist principles like metaxis, epistemic flexibility, and pragmatic idealism can help reimagine international development discourse, moving beyond modernist naivety and postmodernist cynicism.
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Key points
- International development faces challenges from dwindling public support and postcolonial critiques.
- Metamodernist principles offer a way to reimagine development discourse beyond modernist and postmodernist limitations.
- Key metamodernist concepts include metaxis, epistemic flexibility, pluriversalism, pragmatic idealism, and oscillation.
- Gender, evaluation, and climate are proposed as illustrative themes for applying this metamodernist approach.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
The world faces many global challenges, and at the same time, there is a dwindling appetite among citizens of the Global North for foreign aid and a loss of faith in grand narratives like liberalism. Simultaneously, postcolonial critics have undermined faith in development, arguing that it is an instrument of neocolonialism or, at best, misguided. We need to reimagine development as hope and articulate narratives around solving global problems without the naivety of modernism or the cynicism or skepticism of postmodernism. The paper explores how metamodernist principles such as metaxis, epistemic flexibility and pluriversalism, pragmatic idealism and oscillation could reimagine modern development discourse using gender, evaluation and climate as illustrative themes.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d études du développement, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Development
DevelopmentSocial Sciences