Shaping an image of international development in the twenty-first century: the perspective of metamodernism

The world faces many global challenges, and at the same time, there is a dwindling appetite among citizens of the Global North for foreign aid and a loss of faith in grand narratives like liberalism. Simultaneously, postcolonial critics have undermined faith in development, arguing that it is an instrument of neocolonialism or, at best, misguided. We need to reimagine development as hope and articulate narratives around solving global problems without the naivety of modernism or the cynicism or skepticism of postmodernism. The paper explores how metamodernist principles such as metaxis, epistemic flexibility and pluriversalism, pragmatic idealism and oscillation could reimagine modern development discourse using gender, evaluation and climate as illustrative themes.