The Culture and Development Manifesto

With fascinating examples from around the world, this inspiring "manifesto" shows how to account for cultural diversity in reshaping economic and political development.

Around the world, the realities of underdevelopment are harsh and galling, and current strategies are not working well enough or quickly enough. One reason, Robert Klitgaard argues in this pathbreaking book, is that the strategies don't take cultural diversity into account. Gently but firmly, he shows how and why anthropology and cultural studies have not been effectively applied. But it need not be so.

The Culture and Development Manifesto shows how to mobilize knowledge from and for the disadvantaged, the indigenous, and the voiceless. Looking beyond interactions between cultural contexts and particular projects, Klitgaard seeks new ways to think about goals, new kinds of alternatives, new and perhaps hybrid ways to implement or resist, and, as a result, new kinds of politics. In short, this remarkable book fundamentally re-envisions what development policy can be.

Robert Klitgaard is a University Professor at Claremont Graduate University, in California. His research and consulting have taken him to more than 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He has been a professor at Harvard, Yale, and the Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, America's leading Ph.D. program in policy analysis. Among his ten previous books is Tropical Gangsters, named one of the New York Times' Books of the Century.