Week 1: What is a development intervention?
Introduction
Welcome to Week 1. In this first week, you’ll look at and reflect on the range of interventions that are commonly used to bring about development. We define development quite simply as ‘good change’. Of course, what one person sees as good change may not be viewed as such by another. Hence there is a normative element in such a definition (what should be). So, for the first activity of the course, it will be useful to consider what doing development means to you.
Activity 1
Take a moment to think about the following questions:
- What do you think of when you read about ‘doing development’?
- What does ‘doing development’ look like?
- Who can ‘do development’?
Note your answers in the box below.
Text boxes are provided in all activities. You can use these to note down your answers to the questions. Once you click Save, your answers will be stored and you can return to them at any point to view or amend your response. Your responses will only be visible to you. However, if you would prefer to make notes using pen and paper, or a different format, you can.
Discussion
The people who work on, in, and around development do many different things, in many different places. What first springs to mind is the word ‘international’ where development relates to processes and practices occurring in other countries and communities. But on reflection, doing development means a whole set of other issues, too. This could mean involvement about cycle routes in the local area. It could relate to issues of knife crime and youth clubs that fill the local papers. Or any number of time-consuming projects, like working with local schools to engage children to learn about and campaign on single-use plastic, fast fashion, and carbon dependence. These activities certainly count as ‘doing development’ – but why is it not this work that springs to mind?
Development is very diverse and it is done by all sorts of people. So, this week you will start to look at the actual practise of ‘development’, and specifically at the different types of interventions that are used to try to bring about good change. You may be surprised by the diversity of interventions!