Introduction

Abstract

The question has been asked but, to date, not adequately answered: if international development works, then why, after six decades, are so many of the world’s people still so poor? While the proportion of the world’s population living on $1.25 a day or less declined by almost half, to 22 per cent in the two decades from 1990, the proportion of the world’s population living on $2.50 a day or less remained at almost half, or more than three billion people. Moreover, as the earth begins to strain under the weight of development’s growth paradigm, both in terms of pollution as well as depleting non-renewable resources, it appears increasingly obvious that this paradigm cannot be sustained.