Midterm exam

Topic 1: Understanding Development

1. What is development?
Development is the process of improving people’s quality of life, opportunities, freedoms, and access to basic needs.

2. What is economic growth?
Economic growth is an increase in the goods and services a country produces, usually measured by GDP.

3. What is the difference between development and economic growth?
Economic growth measures increases in production and income. Development is broader because it also includes health, education, equality, and well-being.

4. What is sustainable development?
Sustainable development meets people’s needs today without preventing future generations from meeting their own needs.

5. What is modernization theory?
Modernization theory argues that societies develop by moving from traditional ways of life toward modern industrial economies.

6. Who was Walt Rostow?
Rostow argued that countries pass through stages of economic growth, eventually reaching an age of mass consumption.

7. What did Dudley Seers say about development?
Seers argued that development should reduce poverty, unemployment, and inequality. If these problems increase, a country may not be truly developing.

8. What are Denis Goulet’s three core values of development?
Life-sustenance, self-esteem, and freedom. These mean meeting basic needs, having dignity, and having the ability to make meaningful choices.

9. What is Paulo Freire’s banking model of education?
It describes education where teachers deposit information into students, who are expected to memorize it rather than question it.

10. What is conscientization?
Freire’s idea of developing critical awareness of social problems so people can understand and challenge oppression.

11. What is participatory development?
It involves communities in decisions about their own development instead of having outsiders make every decision for them.

12. What did Michel Foucault mean by knowledge and power?
Knowledge and power influence each other. The people and institutions that control what counts as knowledge can also influence how society is governed.

Topic 2: Measuring Development and Poverty

13. What is GDP?
Gross Domestic Product is the total value of final goods and services produced within a country’s borders during a specific period.

14. What is GNI?
Gross National Income measures income received by a country’s residents, including net income from abroad.

15. What is GNI per capita?
It is a country’s GNI divided by its population. It estimates average income per person but does not show how income is distributed.

16. What is purchasing power parity, or PPP?
PPP adjusts income comparisons for differences in the cost of goods and services between countries.

17. What is the Human Development Index, or HDI?
HDI measures development using three dimensions: health, education, and standard of living.

18. What does the Gini coefficient measure?
It measures income or wealth inequality. A lower value generally means greater equality, while a higher value means greater inequality.

19. What is the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI?
MPI measures overlapping disadvantages in areas such as health, education, and living standards.

20. What is absolute poverty?
Absolute poverty means lacking the resources needed to meet basic needs, such as food, shelter, and essential clothing.

21. What is relative poverty?
Relative poverty means having significantly fewer resources than the standard considered normal in a particular society.

22. What are the three Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty measures?
P0 measures how many people are poor. P1 measures the average poverty gap. P2 gives greater weight to those who are furthest below the poverty line.

23. Why is GDP alone not enough to measure development?
GDP does not show how income is distributed or whether people have good health, education, safety, and opportunities.

Topic 3: Understanding Poverty

24. Is poverty only about money?
No. Poverty can also mean lacking education, healthcare, security, social inclusion, political voice, and opportunities.

25. What is an individual explanation of poverty?
It focuses on a person’s circumstances or choices, such as education, employment, or skills.

26. What is a structural explanation of poverty?
It focuses on wider barriers, such as discrimination, unequal access to resources, low wages, and unfair institutions.

27. What is the difference between individual and structural explanations?
Individual explanations focus on people’s circumstances and actions. Structural explanations focus on how society’s systems create or maintain disadvantage.

28. What is Amartya Sen’s capability approach?
It defines development as expanding people’s real freedoms and opportunities to live the lives they value.

29. What is the difference between capabilities and functionings?
Capabilities are the genuine opportunities a person has. Functionings are the things the person actually does or the states they achieve, such as being educated or well-nourished.

30. What is a poverty trap?
A poverty trap is a situation where poverty makes it difficult to gain the resources needed to escape poverty, causing it to continue.

31. How are poverty and inequality different?
Poverty concerns whether people have enough resources to meet their needs. Inequality concerns how resources and opportunities are distributed between people.

Topic 4: Ethics and Development

32. What is development ethics?
Development ethics examines whether development decisions are fair, morally acceptable, and beneficial to people.

33. What is consequentialism?
Consequentialism judges an action by its outcomes.

34. What is utilitarianism?
Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism that aims to produce the greatest overall well-being for the greatest number of people.

35. What is John Rawls’s veil of ignorance?
It asks people to design fair rules without knowing their own social position, wealth, abilities, or advantages.

36. What is Rawls’s difference principle?
Inequalities are acceptable only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society, alongside fair equality of opportunity and Rawls’s other principles of justice.

37. What is libertarianism?
Libertarianism emphasizes individual liberty, property rights, and limiting coercive government power.

38. What is cosmopolitanism?
Cosmopolitanism argues that people have moral responsibilities beyond national borders because all human beings matter.

39. What is communitarianism?
Communitarianism emphasizes the importance of communities, shared values, and social relationships in shaping moral responsibilities.

40. What is human security?
Human security focuses on protecting people from serious threats to their safety, dignity, and well-being, rather than focusing only on the security of states.

41. What is intergenerational justice?
It is the responsibility to treat future generations fairly and avoid leaving them with serious environmental or social harms.

42. What are the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights?
They are organized around three pillars: the state duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and access to remedy for people harmed.

43. Why can development projects create ethical conflicts?
A project may create jobs or electricity but also displace communities, damage ecosystems, or violate people’s rights.

44. What does the Narmada Dam conflict illustrate?
It illustrates conflicts between development goals, such as electricity and irrigation, and the rights and livelihoods of people displaced by large dams.

Topic 5: Colonialism and Imperialism

45. What is colonialism?
Colonialism is the control of one territory and its people by another power, often involving settlement, resource extraction, and political domination.

46. What is imperialism?
Imperialism is the broader extension of a country’s power over other peoples or territories through political, economic, military, or cultural influence.

47. What is the difference between colonialism and imperialism?
Colonialism often involves direct control over a territory. Imperialism is broader and can operate without permanent settlement or formal colonial rule.

48. What was the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885?
It was a meeting where European powers established rules for their territorial claims in Africa, accelerating the partition of the continent without meaningful African participation.

49. What is resource extraction under colonialism?
It is the removal of resources, labour, and wealth from colonized societies, often to benefit the colonial power.

50. What is Social Darwinism?
Social Darwinism misapplied ideas about natural selection to human societies to justify claims that some groups were superior to others.

51. What was the civilizing mission?
It was the claim that colonial powers had a duty to bring civilization or progress to colonized peoples. It was often used to justify domination.

52. What was the White Man’s Burden?
It was a colonial-era idea that portrayed white Western powers as having a duty to rule and supposedly improve other peoples. It reinforced racist beliefs.

53. What is settler colonialism?
Settler colonialism occurs when outsiders settle permanently on Indigenous lands and establish systems that displace Indigenous peoples and undermine their sovereignty.

54. What is the Doctrine of Discovery?
It was a set of European Christian legal and political ideas used to support claims to lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples.

55. What is terra nullius?
A Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one.” Colonial powers used this idea to justify claiming lands despite Indigenous peoples already living there.

56. What was the Royal Proclamation of 1763?
A British Crown proclamation that recognized Indigenous land interests and established rules for acquiring Indigenous lands, including Crown control over purchases. Its meaning and implementation have been contested.

57. What is the Indian Act?
A Canadian federal law, first passed in 1876 and amended many times, that imposed extensive government control over First Nations status, governance, and reserve lands.

58. What were residential schools?
Institutions that forcibly separated many Indigenous children from their families and communities to assimilate them into settler society. They caused profound and lasting harm.

Topic 6: Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism

59. What is postcolonialism?
Postcolonialism examines how colonialism continues to shape identity, culture, knowledge, power, and society after formal colonial rule ends.

60. What is neocolonialism?
Neocolonialism describes situations where powerful countries or institutions maintain control or influence over less powerful countries through economic, political, or other indirect means.

61. What is Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism?
Orientalism describes how Western representations often portrayed Eastern societies as backward, irrational, or inferior, helping justify Western power.

62. What is othering?
Othering is portraying a group as fundamentally different or inferior to make it seem separate from the group holding power.

63. What did Frantz Fanon argue about colonialism?
Fanon examined how colonialism creates psychological harm, racism, and internalized oppression, and argued that liberation requires challenging colonial power.

64. What is Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry?
Mimicry occurs when colonized people are encouraged to imitate the colonizer’s culture or behaviour, but are never accepted as fully equivalent.

65. What is ambivalence in postcolonial theory?
Ambivalence describes the mixed and contradictory feelings or relationships colonial power creates, such as attraction to and resistance against the colonizer’s culture.

66. What does Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak mean by the subaltern?
The subaltern refers to marginalized people whose ability to speak and be heard within dominant systems of power is severely restricted.

67. What is strategic essentialism?
It is when a diverse group temporarily presents itself as having a shared identity to pursue a common political goal, while recognizing that the group is not truly uniform.

68. How does postcolonialism criticize development?
It questions whether development policies impose Western values and treat non-Western societies as backward, rather than respecting their histories, knowledge, and priorities.

Topic 7: Dependency, Global Power, and Post-Development

69. What is dependency theory?
Dependency theory argues that poverty in some countries is linked to their unequal economic relationships with wealthier countries.

70. What did Paul Baran argue?
Baran argued that imperialism and the control of economic surplus can prevent poorer countries from using their wealth for broad domestic development.

71. What did Andre Gunder Frank mean by the development of underdevelopment?
He argued that the same global relationships that enrich powerful economies can actively produce and maintain underdevelopment in poorer economies.

72. What is unequal exchange?
Unequal exchange occurs when trade relationships systematically favour powerful economies, allowing them to capture more value than weaker economies.

73. What is Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory?
It explains the global economy as a connected system divided into core, semi-periphery, and periphery positions.

74. What are the core, semi-periphery, and periphery?
Core countries tend to control high-value activities and powerful institutions. Semi-peripheral countries occupy an intermediate position. Peripheral countries often depend more on lower-value production and resource exports.

75. What is a Marxist approach to development?
It examines how class, ownership, labour, and control of production shape inequality and economic power.

76. What is Arturo Escobar’s critique of development?
Escobar argued that development discourse can portray poorer countries as problems to be managed, giving powerful institutions authority to define their needs and solutions.

77. What did Ivan Illich criticize?
Illich criticized institutions and professional systems when they create dependence, undermine people’s autonomy, or prevent communities from meeting needs in their own ways.

78. What is Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony?
Hegemony is the process through which dominant groups maintain power partly by making their ideas and values seem normal, natural, or common sense.

79. What did Stuart Hall say about representation?
Hall emphasized that representations do not simply reflect reality; they help construct meaning and shape how people understand groups and societies.

80. What is James Ferguson’s anti-politics machine?
Ferguson argued that development projects can present political problems, such as inequality and power struggles, as technical problems that experts can solve, leaving underlying power relations unchanged.

Essential Comparisons

Development versus economic growth: Growth is about increased production; development is about broader improvements in people’s lives.

GDP versus HDI: GDP measures economic production; HDI measures health, education, and standard of living.

Absolute versus relative poverty: Absolute poverty concerns basic needs; relative poverty concerns a person’s resources compared with the society they live in.

Capabilities versus functionings: Capabilities are what people genuinely have the opportunity to do; functionings are what they actually do or achieve.

Colonialism versus imperialism: Colonialism often means direct territorial control; imperialism is the broader exercise of power over other societies.

Postcolonialism versus neocolonialism: Postcolonialism critically studies colonialism’s continuing effects; neocolonialism describes indirect forms of continuing domination.

Modernization versus dependency theory: Modernization emphasizes societies moving through stages of development; dependency theory emphasizes unequal relationships within the global economy.

Hegemony versus direct force: Direct force relies on coercion; hegemony also maintains power through accepted ideas, values, and social norms.