At a time of widespread disillusion as to what development has in practice done to the lives of hundreds of millions of marginalised people over the past 40 years, this book seeks to reclaim development as a project of people's own autonomous agency.

Born out of three decades of field experience and working with 'Third World' students, it revisits the primary question of what development ought really to be about.

Raff Carmen starts from the conviction that development is too important to be left to the developers. He critically examines what has gone on under its name, finding it wanting both as an epistemological category and a sound operational practice. Instead, he presents a counter-view of development as an act of creation whereby people exercise their inalienable right 'to invent their own future' as authors of an ongoing process of transforming and humanising the landscapes they inhabit.