There's something deeply unsettling in the way the world talks about "development."
For decades we've used expressions like underdeveloped countries, Third World, backward areas. Words that seem technical, neutral, even benevolent.
But behind those terms lay a very precise vision of the world: a single scale of humanity, with some countries at the top and others at the bottom, some "ahead" and others "behind," some tasked with leading and others destined to be led.
Development has been told as a modern civilizing mission. No longer colonies to conquer, but economies to "modernize." No longer empires, but aid programs.
The languages have changed, but often not the hierarchies.
The problem isn't helping. The problem is who defines what "help" means.
The savior myth
Many of the dominant narratives about development start from an invisible premise: the Global North knows, the Global South must learn.
This is the heart of so-called white saviorism: the idea that poor, marginalized, or crisis-affected people are passive subjects waiting to be saved by experts, NGOs, Western governments, or volunteers full of good intentions and black-and-white photos on Instagram.
But who decides what it means to live well?
Who determines which needs are priorities?
Who has the right to speak for others?
Humanitarian rhetoric often turns entire populations into images of permanent suffering: hungry children, villages without water, women to be emancipated, bodies to be pitied more than people to be listened to.
Yet communities considered "poor" are not devoid of knowledge. They are not blank pages waiting to be filled with imported solutions. They have strategies, capabilities, social networks, collective memory, ways of surviving that experts often fail to understand.
The problem with top-down development is exactly this: it presumes to know reality better than those who live it.
Poverty is not an accident
We like to tell ourselves that the world is divided between "successful" countries and "failed" ones.
It's a reassuring story: if some are poor, they must have done something wrong. Corrupt governments, backward culture, instability — that's what you read in the papers.
But this narrative has an enormous advantage: it absolves the global system.
Because it's easier to talk about "backwardness" than about colonialism. Easier to talk about inefficiency than about exploitation. Easier to organize summits on poverty than to question how wealth is produced and accumulated.
The truth is that many contemporary inequalities were built historically.
For centuries, enormous amounts of wealth were extracted from the Global South toward the Global North: natural resources, labor, land, bodies. And when formal colonialism ended, the same economic relationships often remained, just under different names. Today many countries continue to export low-value raw materials — cocoa, coffee, minerals, oil — while importing finished goods, technology, and debt.
Yes, debt. Because one of the most sophisticated forms of contemporary control doesn't arrive with tanks, but with financial interest, the conditions imposed by international loans, the austerity programs that cut healthcare, education, and public services.
Meanwhile we believe the market will bring development. But development for whom? In recent years billionaire wealth has exploded while millions of people lost their jobs, homes, and economic security during the pandemic. Every crisis seems to function as a giant redistribution machine in reverse: from the many to the very few.
The problem with experts
There's a scene that keeps repeating itself in the world of development.
A group of consultants arrives in a rural community. They do quick interviews. Take photographs. Organize a workshop at a hotel. Produce a report full of graphs, indicators, and words like capacity building, empowerment, stakeholders.
Then they leave.
Maybe the project fails after six months. Maybe no one actually uses that well, that school, or that agricultural program. Maybe the community needed something entirely different.
But the report has been delivered, the funds have been spent, the project has been "implemented."
The point is that development often listens very little to the people it claims to help.
There's an implicit assumption in the classic development model: the idea that valid knowledge comes from outside — from universities, international institutions, so-called technical experts.
But whoever lives in a place every day possesses knowledge that no report will ever truly capture.
Participation is not inviting someone to a meeting
Real participation is far more radical and far more uncomfortable.
It means giving up power.
It means accepting that people may have priorities different from those of international donors.
It means a community can say: "We don't need this project."
It means no longer seeing people as passive beneficiaries and starting to consider them political subjects.
From aid to solidarity
Perhaps the most important shift is to stop thinking of development as an act of charity. Because charity maintains hierarchies: someone gives, someone else receives.
Solidarity, instead, starts from a different idea: we are inside the same system, we are far more connected than we like to admit.
That's why the question shouldn't be "how can we help the poor?" but:
how can we transform a system that keeps producing poverty?
And perhaps the first step is learning to truly listen. Because no real transformation can happen without the participation of the people who live that transformation on their own skin. And perhaps the future of development doesn't lie in saving someone. It lies in ceasing to organize the world into saviors and saved.
