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McMichael, Development and Social Change 5e – Instructor Materials
Development and Social Change Test Bank
What follows are examples of questions for instructors to pose to students to help them make
the connections necessary to following the text, and its interpretation of the world of
development. Five questions for each chapter will focus on the chapter’s content, cumulative
understanding across chapters and how specific cases illuminate general, or global, trends
Chapter 9. The Sustainability Project
1. In what ways do the various approaches to climate mitigation reveal the paradoxes of the
sustainability project?
2. Why are development agencies focusing on the centrality of agriculture in development?
What are the competing framings of agricultural multifunctionality and its role in
development? In what ways do these contestations over agriculture reflect a transitional
moment in the theory and practice of development?
3. How might the agrofuel and land grabbing phenomena be considered forms of eco-
imperialism? Is this an example of the ‘solution as problem’ syndrome? Explain.
4. How, and why, does the World Bank claim that ‘land deals’ can promote ‘win-win’
development solutions? What remains unaddressed in the World Bank’s framing of the
land grab phenomenon? In what ways and why might land grabbing be considered a
development paradox?
5. In what ways does the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) incorporate
the goals of the globalization project? Is the shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ green revolution
similar to the World Bank’s shift towards ‘development with a human face’? Explain.
6. Discuss whether the ‘promises’ of biofuel projects have stood up to the ‘realities’ of such
projects. Using the biofuel example, explain the myth of sustainability and how it
illustrates the idea of ‘development as rule.’
7. In what ways does the land grab phenomenon both reflect and differ from the tenets of
the globalization project? In what ways does land grabbing represent a form of ‘new
enclosures’?
8. How does the reframing of biofuels by social movements as agrofuels politicize and
make visible the relations of development? Does this distinction express the double
movement of the sustainability project? Explain.
