8. New Discourses on Development

This chapter introduces and analyses the preliminary results of a larger study that explores the connection between new discourses on development and the imagined futures for Latin America. A primary assumption guides the whole proposal: collective imagination does not work in a vacuum; far from it, it operates within a “social discourse”, which sets limits to the thinkable (Angenot), and within a “regime of historicity”, which organizes our relationship with temporality (Hartog). The chapter sustains that a productive mode of approaching the ways by which we imagine the region’s futures is to think in terms of more or less defined discursive configurations on development. It assumes that knowing and understanding these configurations can help us capture in an organized way the diversity of the voices that dispute and confront each other, more or less fiercely, on development and imagined futures. The adjective new refers to the last three decades –it is not a completely arbitrary choice, since “1990” represents a “breaking point” in several senses: geopolitical, technological, environmental. Using tools taken from the structural analysis of ideological discourses, the chapter sketches a stylized profile of the images about the future related to each configuration, working on materials considered illustrative/contrastive.