Towards a planetary disposition for development: recasting environment and development from a geographical perspective

This paper sets out preliminary ideas and provocations for thinking about development amid current environmental, geopolitical, and technological change. We argue that the proposed shift from ‘international’ to ‘global’ development should go further in its critical ambitions, and that a more ‘planetary’ perspective is needed. A planetary disposition would recentre the material foundations of social and economic life, treat developmental and environmental processes as co-constitutive, uphold the value of multiple worldviews and epistemologies, and attend closely to the production of space, place, and scale. This offers a supplement to recent efforts to globalize, decolonize, and pluralize development inquiry, connecting environmental transformations to the human geographies of development in new ways. We also reflect on how our outlook as geographers, working in a field adjacent to development studies, has shaped these arguments as we seek to broaden and enhance the global development shift.