Acknowledgements

How do we know the right direction of ‘development’ for a society or its people? And how does this perceived ‘right’ direction of development become a consensus among those working in international development? These questions have been with me from the early stages of my career as a consultant for educational development in the 1990s. Fashionable approaches, such as human resources planning, cost sharing of social services including education, decentralization, vocationalization of education and so on, have come and gone, regardless of whether societies were ‘developing’ as intended. When one prescription failed to create positive results, policymakers promoted the next trend as the solution. Such was the case when the poverty reduction paradigm emerged after the era of neoliberal structural adjustment of the 1980s had slashed public expenditures on social services and was said to have increased disparities.