Reparative Development

Development has functioned as a powerful apparatus for ordering the world—shaping how problems are defined, whose knowledge counts, and what futures are possible. Development sociology has been central to exposing the harms embedded in this project, from dependency and unequal exchange to financialization, dispossession, and epistemic domination. Yet the field has been more explicit about diagnosing harm than theorizing its reversal. This article argues that diagnosis is insufficient. Because the development project has been historically entangled with empire—reproducing epistemic hierarchies, extractive political economies, and asymmetric relations of authority—any forward-looking agenda must begin with repair. Drawing on a cross-disciplinary reparative turn in social thought, I introduce reparative development, grounded in three commitments: pluralizing knowledges, redressing extraction, and building worlds otherwise. Each corresponds to a form of power—epistemic, material, or relational—that development has organized and that repair must redistribute. I illustrate each commitment retrospectively through a contemporary case: Māori data sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand; the Yurok Tribe’s land-back agreement on the Klamath River; and community wealth building in Cleveland, Ohio. These cases demonstrate that disaggregated repair is achievable under conditions favorable to redress in a given domain; they do not show that it is reliably available wherever harm has occurred. Reparative development reframes development sociology’s central task, shifting analytic attention toward the institutionalization of redress and treating redistribution, restitution, and relational reconstruction as central objects of sociological inquiry rather than policy add-ons.