Introduction

The successful counterrevolution against development economics (Toye 1987) that began in the 1970s and culminated in the 1980s with the ascendance of the Washington Consensus (e.g. Kapur, Lewis and Webb 1997; Williamson 1990), significantly transformed the discourse on economic development. The counterrevolution later appropriated the cause of poverty reduction and invoked it to justify its own liberalization reforms involving macroeconomic stabilization (for an alternative perspective, see Stiglitz, et al. 2006) as well as microeconomic market liberalization reforms associated with structural adjustment.