In the coming decade we need to go well beyond an old paradigm of development based on relationships of donor and recipient, and adopt instead a new conception of development as a partnership for investment and growth.
The significance of a more open, flexible conception of development is that the developmental process itself becomes a source of novel, yet functional and coordinated, phenotypic variation.
At the same time, it departs from a conception of development associated with the immediate post-colonial period, which connected the individual to a clear destination and collective – a modernized nation.
There are different conceptions of development and, consequently, disparate approaches to the subject.
Rooted in the ancient societies of the Andes, this is not a return to the past but looks to the future, rejecting narrow conceptions of development exclusively based on economic growth.
Development theory has changed over time with changes in ideology and the international environment, and, as it changes, so do its conceptions of development and governance and how they are related.
"Contrary to conceptions of development held 30 or 40 years ago, young children can think both concretely and abstractly" (NRC 2007, p. 3).
"Contrary to conceptions of development held 30 or 40 years ago, young children can think both concretely and abstractly" (National Research Council 2007, p. 3).
But it is also possible to over-estimate the strength of the connection between informational conceptions of development and evolution and the idea that genes play a uniquely important role in development.
Rawls is far from the only thinker to conceive of moral development in terms substantially derived from Jean Piaget's work, and at the time Rawls was writing A Theory of Justice, educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was working out a Piaget-inspired conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development.
It is also a case in which we should let what we come to know about cognitive development in children help shape our epistemology, rather than counting on our antecedently formulated epistemology to shape our conception of cognitive development in children (see Rosch and Lloyd, 1978, and Gelman, 2003).
