Module manager: Dr. Lata Narayanswamy
Email: l.narayanaswamy@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2026/27
This module is not approved as a discovery module
This module challenges students to think critically about the possibility and utility of ‘global goals’ from the perspective of politics and power within and across spaces in the Global North and South. The module asks students to engage with how history, politics and power produce specific ‘development’ dynamics and outcomes e.g. patterns of poverty and inequality, or access to basic services. Students will explore how different actors shape and influence development outcomes from the global to the local.
This module aims to give students a thorough grounding in the politics of ‘development’, a term representing a constellation of ideas and assumptions that is both contested and also foundational to the social, political and economic underpinnings of ‘modernity’. This module will equip students with the skills, insights and knowledge to undertake critical, contextual and comparative analyses of power, conflict and place in those change processes that are labelled as ‘development’. The module will combine a critical focus on how societies and places – and respective social orders (and their power relations, practices of power and rule, etc.) - develop and change, with an analysis of how actors and institutions advance specific interests (political, economic, social, cultural) and produce particular outcomes. The module enables students to examine, challenge and critique universalising presentations of ‘development’ such as the Sustainable Development Goals.
On successful completion of the module students will have demonstrated the following learning outcomes relevant to the subject:
1. Demonstrate understanding of multiple forms of ‘development’, dynamics and outcomes in particular places.
2 Be capable of understanding and assessing development dynamics, with a focus on identifying themes of power and politics.
3. Demonstrate an appreciation of core contemporary academic debates in the politics of development.
4. Explain how global, regional, national and local institutions shape development dynamics and outcomes.
Skills Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module students will have demonstrated the following skills learning outcomes:
5. Retrieve, organise, and produce complex summaries of information and/or data relating to broad issues in the politics of development.
6. Assemble complex arguments and assessments of power to empirical case studies, and be able to evaluate and criticise the arguments of others.
Details of the syllabus will be provided on the Minerva organisation (or equivalent) for the module
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture | 11 | 1 | 11 |
| Seminar | 11 | 1 | 11 |
| Private study hours | 178 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 22 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 200 | ||
A formal formative assessment opportunity will be provided for each summative assessment task, which is specifically pedagogically aligned to that task. As part of this, each student will receive feedback designed to support the development of knowledge and skills that will be later assessed in the summative task.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Coursework | . | 100 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Check the module area in Minerva for your reading list
Last updated: 30/04/2026
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team