Democracy, Global Citizenship and Development in a Multidisciplinary World

Abstract

The relationship between democracy, global citizenship, and development is discussed in this paper. The first substantive portion delves deeper into the two notions of democracy and development, highlighting the hegemony of liberal, restricted official discourse and policy understandings. After that, it analyses three modern phenomena to demonstrate why this is problematic: the ambiguous role that outside interventions frequently play in influencing democratic or developmental change, the difficulty presented by emerging authoritarian growth and development patterns that seem to be shielded from democratic reform, with a particular focus on China; and the apparent decline in both development and the calibre of democracy that pervades much of the West. This paper contends that the many conceptual and empirical connections between global citizenship and development are only partially explained by approaches to global citizenship that are policy-framed, promoted, and mainstreamed. It highlights some of the most essential theories of global citizenship and distinguishes between methods that emphasise status and method. This paper examines how global citizenship is becoming more mainstream within the framework of development that is becoming more popular, based on studies on international volunteerism and development education. It demonstrates how certain understandings and experiences of global citizenship support and unite traditional North-South conceptions of poverty with neo-liberal notions of agency. This paper seeks to decenter dominant conceptions of global citizenship and development by focusing on the subjectivities of global South civic actors, disparities in access to global civic space, and silences in current practitioner and scholarly discourse. In light of changing geopolitics and current calls for greater citizen participation in these fields, it concludes by examining the direction of democracy, global citizenship, and development research and practice.