Agrarwissenschaftliche Expertise und ländliche Modernisierungsstrategien in der internationalen Entwicklungspolitik, 1920er bis 1980er Jahre

Abstract

This article analyzes the role awarded to agriculture and the rural sector in international development thinking over the course of the twentieth century, focusing especially on the modernization approaches promoted by development agents to reform agricultural practices and rural life according to the problems they believed they had identified. The majority of the countries that came to be understood through the prism of development were predominantly rural, agricultural, or both. The article thus argues that it is vital that we better understand the ways in which development experts and policymakers conceptualized rural life and agricultural production with an eye to identifying both similarities and differences across temporal and spatial distances.