Prepared for the UNRISD Conference on the role of Social Knowledge in Development Policy Making, this paper argues the need for the South to secure greater policy autonomy and discusses factors involved in achieving this. In the 1950s the subdiscipline of development economics promoted policy autonomy by legitimizing the principle that their economies should be understood sui generis and providing justification for policies of national industrial and technological development. Southern institutions and the United Nations system supported a torrent of indigenous empirical research and theorizing in the developing world. The reversals of the 1980s disrupted the accumulation of policy experience in much of the South and squandered much of intellectual capital developed in the earlier period. Since the late 1990s global social movements, financial crises, contradictions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) process and the shifting political climate in the South have re-opened space for academic enquiry and policy experimentation. This process would be enriched by interrogation of the epistemic basis of the claims to universal applicability of neoclassical economics and the ethnocentricity that underlies it. It proposes acceptance of the ‘universality of diversity’ and recognition that responses to economic policy instruments are conditioned by political, social, cultural and institutional factors.

[Published as UNRISD Overarching Concerns, Programme Paper Number 9, October 2005 and in Peter Utting (ed.) Reclaiming Development Agendas: Knowledge, Power and International Policy Making. Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2006; ch. 4, 73-89.]

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