Development Studies from a Decolonial Perspective:Discourse Analysis on the OECD Development Reports

Sammanfattning: The concept of development has been extensively researched, and it isa key topic in political and economic international and domestic agendas.Modernization and globalization theories have been the most prevalentanalytical approaches to development, but from a postcolonial and decolonialperspective, these theories are Western-centric, overgeneralized, andoverused. As a result, Political Studies have struggled to comprehend andlegitimate the local knowledge from the Global South and face moderncolonialism, as uncritical transfers of science, technology, and knowledgefrom the Global North take place. For this, the goal of this thesis was to raiseawareness of the OECD's development discourse through a transformationaland critical lens. Decolonial thinking, which asserts an epistemology from thesouth, specifically from Latin America, was employed for this work as atheoretical-epistemological, ethical-political, and methodological framework.This investigation is a pilot and desk study with abductive reasoning thatexamines discourses characteristic of the OECD, supported by a qualitativeresearch approach. In response to coloniality and modernity -building theoriesof development-, a content and critical discourse analysis through categorieswas conducted. Along with the instrumentalization of concepts and discursivetactics, the findings demonstrate and explore a productive, economical, andbusiness-like logic in the OECD discourses. In conclusion, colonial narrativesare found in the modernization and globalization approaches that take the formof utilitarian, neoliberal, universal, and emotive narratives in the twodevelopment reports by the OECD where the epistemic postulates are builtupon the idea of growth and a natural need to evolve.