The world is rapidly changing, but in ways that many of us fail to understand. For many, things are bad. For many, things are getting better. So we need to understand how the world can both be bad and getting better at the same time, and what this means for our understanding of social change and development.

The world has changed irrevocably over the course of the last 40 years as neoliberalism has come to shape the tenor of our times.