Developing Differences: Gender, Childhood and Economic Development

SUMMARY: Western images of the child in modern thought set up an opposition between innocence and experience which is supplemented by discourses of child care and child protection, and reflected in international policies and legislation for children. This article traces idealised conceptions of children of the North and South and unravels dichotomies between work and play as they map onto gendered and cultural spaces. These issues are linked to an analysis of assumptions underlying both international policies for child development and models of economic development, focusing in particular on the Human Development Index put forward in the 1992 United Nations Development Programme. In order to counter the naturalisation and abstraction of development in both, which reflects and contributes to the cultural and economic domination of the Northern hemisphere over the South, the article ends with a call to attend to both the specificity and diversity of children's developments.