Integrating Contested Aspirations, Processes and Policy: Development as Hanging In, Stepping Up and Stepping Out

This article proposes a dialogue around a conceptualisation of development as involving three complementary processes: 'hanging in', 'stepping up' and 'stepping out'. These describe different types and scales of structural change in national and sub-national societies and economies, in different sectors within these economies, and in people's evolving livelihoods. The simplicity and strong theoretical, empirical and experiential content of this make it a powerful framework both for interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, multi-scale analysis of dynamic development processes, and for structuring dialogue about contested aspirations, assumptions, modalities and constraints among development analysts and stakeholders with different interests and paradigms.