Development in Practice
Volume 24, Issue 5-6, 2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cdip20/current
Special Issue: Endogenous Development
[This special issue includes 14 articles around this theme with selected articles focused on the experience in Rwanda, Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, and Somalia. Below are guest editor’s introduction and closing article]

Guest Editors’ introduction
Endogenous development: naïve romanticism or practical route to sustainable African development?
Chiku Malunga* & Susan H. Holcombe
DOI: 10.1080/09614524.2014.938616
pages 615-622
Abstract
Development theory and practice in developing countries are dominated by the power of Western ideas, worldviews, actors, tools, models, and frameworks. Consequently, the resulting development interventions may too rarely be locally rooted, locally driven, or resonant with local context. Another reality is that theories and practice from developing countries rarely travel to the Western agencies dominating development, undermining the possibility of a beneficial synergy that could be obtained from the best of the two worlds: West and developing countries. There are many reasons why the experience of locally driven development is not communicated back to global development actors, including but not limited to the marginal role of Southern voices in global fora. Perhaps the greatest unwelcome and unintended outcome is that by trying to create, or perhaps better said, “clone” development in developing countries in the image of Western “development”, development efforts defeat their own purpose through undermining their own relevance, legitimacy, and sustainability.

Endogenous development going forward: learning and action
Chiku Malunga* & Susan H. Holcombe
DOI: 10.1080/09614524.2014.938617
pages 777-781
Abstract
More than 50 years after independence Africa is yet to move from colonial to post-colonial identity – and to entitlement to determining its own destiny. Increasingly, however, African development thinkers and practitioners are questioning the dominance of externally driven, mostly Western models of development, which they believe have done little to date toward bringing about self-reliant sustainable development. We have observed successful patterns of endogenously led development in East Asia and Brazil. In Africa the papers included here suggest emerging new patterns of local leadership and of resurrecting and renewing cultural and traditional strengths to support modern development. Endogenous development, while a sometimes awkward term, is a concept increasingly informing practice.