amazon.co.ukA* revision for AQA 4.6 (Global Development) and OCR H580/03: economic, political and cultural globalisation, modernisation (Rostow), dependency (Frank) and world-systems (Wallerstein) theories, aid, trade and TNC case studies, and 20-mark essay technique.
AQA 4.6 (Global Development) and OCR H580/03 (Globalisation and the digital social world) open with the three dimensions. Economic: TNCs run global production chains, capital moves freely across borders, and trade under WTO rules ties national economies to global demand - a fall in one market ripples worldwide. Political: intergovernmental organisations (UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank) set rules and attach conditions - IMF structural adjustment programmes demand privatisation and spending cuts in exchange for loans - while nation-state sovereignty erodes; AO3: the state persists where it matters (China's state-directed development), so 'the end of the nation-state' is overstated.
Cultural: Western media, brands and consumption patterns spread globally. Sklair frames this as the culture-ideology of consumerism - global capitalism exports one consumerist worldview; Tomlinson counters with hybridisation: local cultures appropriate and rework global forms, and glocalisation (global products adapted to local markets) shows the flow is two-way (see the Media topic for the full imperialism vs hybridisation debate). Held's typology is the sharpest AO3 frame: hyperglobalisers (a single global economy is dissolving national boundaries), sceptics (globalisation is regionalised trade among blocs, and most of the world is excluded) and transformationalists (real but uneven, with outcomes shaped by how societies respond).
AO3: the strongest answers treat the dimensions as interacting rather than separate - TNC production (economic) needs compliant states (political) and markets saturated in consumerist culture (cultural) - and judge globalisation as real but unevenly distributed, which sets up the development theories below.
Flows to name: migration (labour migration from the global South to the North, with remittances now exceeding aid for many economies), information flows (the internet collapsing distance - see the Media topic's digital social world) and capital flows (foreign direct investment and global finance moving faster than states can regulate). Political detail: the IMF and World Bank were built at Bretton Woods (1944) to stabilise the world economy, and their structural adjustment programmes (privatisation, spending cuts, trade liberalisation) attached to 1980s-90s lending are the standard case that globalisation's rules are written by the core - the evidence base on which dependency and world-systems critiques draw.
Modernisation theory (Rostow 1960) is the functionalist baseline: all societies develop through five stages - traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, age of high mass consumption. Underdevelopment is explained by internal barriers: traditional values, low investment, weak entrepreneurship - so the remedy is Western aid, technology transfer and value change. AO3 critiques: it is ethnocentric (Western consumerism as the universal endpoint); it ignores colonialism - extraction by the West built the underdevelopment it treats as home-grown (Frank); it assumes a single path, contradicted by state-directed development (China, South Korea); and the values claim is unfalsifiable. Synoptically, modernisation imports functionalism's consensus assumptions - exactly the weak point examiners reward you for spotting.
Dependency theory (Frank 1967): 'the development of underdevelopment' - metropole-satellite chains extract surplus from the periphery, so each satellite's richest periods coincide with its strongest links to the metropole: contact with global capitalism causes poverty, and only delinking (or revolution) brings development. AO3 critiques: it ignores internal barriers (corruption, war, poor policy) and cannot explain the escape of NICs (South Korea, Taiwan) that developed through, not against, global capitalism.
World-systems theory (Wallerstein 1974) refines the Marxist account: one capitalist world economy stratified into core (high-profit production), periphery (raw materials, cheap labour) and semi-periphery (mixed). Positions are relational and can shift - East Asia's rise moved states from periphery to core - so the semi-periphery absorbs the NIC evidence that sank dependency theory. AO3: the strongest answers stage Rostow against Frank (or Wallerstein) and reach a verdict tied to evidence: modernisation explains some growth episodes (post-war Japan; East Asian take-offs built on investment and education) but cannot generalise, because external terms of trade and colonial history demonstrably shape who develops.
Applications: modernisation in practice - post-war aid programmes extending the Marshall Plan's logic to the South, and Green Revolution technology transfer - with the standard evidence that gains bypassed the poorest. Dependency in practice - colonial commodity chains (cotton, sugar, copper) whose post-independence successors still export raw materials and import manufactures, keeping value-added profit in the core. World-systems in practice - China's movement from periphery towards semi-periphery and core status, and the rise of the East Asian tigers, as the model's strongest evidence. Tie every theory to a case: theories without cases earn AO1 marks only - the evaluation comes from testing the theory against the evidence.
Aid: bilateral (state to state), multilateral (via the World Bank, IMF or UN), and NGO aid - top-down (large infrastructure, donor-designed) against bottom-up (small-scale, community-led NGO projects). Tied aid - conditional on buying the donor's goods or adopting its policies - benefits the donor and erodes sovereignty. The aid debate: Moyo (Dead Aid 2009) argues aid creates dependency, fuels corruption and undermines local producers (food aid collapsing farm prices) - cut it and let markets work; Sachs (The End of Poverty) counters that targeted aid works - debt relief, vaccine programmes and the Millennium Development Goals show measurable gains; Easterly splits the difference: 'planners' (grand top-down schemes) fail, 'searchers' (small, accountable, local) succeed. AO3: Moyo conflates all aid with its worst forms and ignores success cases; aid effects depend on recipient governance - so the aid/trade dichotomy is partly false.
Trade: free trade is the orthodox engine of growth (comparative advantage, export-led development), but terms are unequal: commodity dependence (many developing economies rely on one or two primary exports with volatile prices), protectionism in rich states (EU and US farm subsidies undercut developing-world farmers), and fair trade as a partial bottom-up fix - guaranteed minimum prices and community premiums, though coverage is small.
TNCs - weigh, don't assert. Harm: profit repatriation and tax avoidance (Starbucks-style transfer pricing), the race to the bottom in wages and conditions (Rana Plaza collapse 2013, killing over 1,100 garment workers in a Primark supply chain; Foxconn assembly for Apple), environmental damage (Shell in Nigeria - Ogoniland pollution and the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa after protests). Benefit: FDI, employment, technology and skills transfer, and infrastructure - and the NICs industrialised through export manufacturing. Verdict: harms are real but not inherent - where host states negotiate hard (South Korea, Vietnam), benefits outweigh; weak states capture less. Aid works as emergency stabiliser; trade as long-run engine - but only with fair rules and accountable recipients.
Aid detail for the 20-marker: distinguish aid types precisely - bilateral (state to state, often tied), multilateral (pooled via the World Bank, IMF or UN agencies) and NGO aid (Oxfam, Save the Children - typically small-scale, bottom-up, needs-led). Note the debate's sharp edge: emergency humanitarian aid is broadly defended even by Moyo, while long-term development aid is where the dependency, corruption and donor-interest critiques bite. On trade, the standard case study is commodity dependence - when world coffee or copper prices collapse, whole export economies contract - which is why fair trade, diversification and value-added processing recur in mark schemes as the policy responses.
Environment: global development externalises ecological costs onto the weakest. TNC production relocates to low-regulation states, so pollution is exported - e-waste dumped and burned at sites like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; global commodity demand drives Amazon deforestation (beef and soy exports) releasing carbon and destroying habitats; and climate change hits developing countries hardest - drought, flooding and crop failure - while they contributed least to emissions. AO3: the growth-versus-sustainability tension (Brundtland's 1987 'sustainable development') frames the debate: can the global South industrialise without replicating the North's environmental damage? Green and state crime links apply here (AQA 4.3.1.5): TNC and state complicity in environmental harm, as in Ogoniland.
Feminist perspectives: Boserup (1970) showed development planning ignored women - modernisation schemes transferred technology to men, widening gender gaps; WID/WAD/GAD mark the feminist evolution from adding women into development, to reading women's subordination as structured by global capitalism, to transforming the gendered structures of development itself (GAD). Elson & Pearson theorise the feminisation of labour: export manufacturing concentrates women in flexible, low-paid, insecure EPZ assembly work (the Rana Plaza workforce was mostly female), while women still carry subsistence labour - water, fuel, care - and remain excluded from decision-making. AO3: employment also brings independence and bargaining power (Kabeer), and education access has narrowed gaps - so benefits are real but unequal and conditional on class and locality.
Postdevelopment (Escobar 1995): 'development' is a Western discourse that constructs the South as backward and authorises intervention - the strongest answers use it to question the question itself, before reaching a judgement: global development has lifted living chances measurably, but its benefits are distributed along core-periphery lines and its costs (environmental, gendered) fall on those with least power.
Case anchors for essays: Shell/Ogoniland (state-TNC complicity, Ken Saro-Wiwa 1995) for environmental harm; the Amazon (beef and soy commodity demand) for deforestation; Agbogbloshie, Ghana (exported e-waste) for pollution transfer; Rana Plaza (2013, majority-female workforce) linking TNC labour practices to the feminisation of labour; and the MDGs/SDGs for measurable development progress (extreme poverty falling, girls' school enrolment rising) - the standard evidence that development delivers, used to balance the structural critiques. One or two named anchors per paragraph is enough: the marks come from tying them to theory, not listing them.