In the late 1970s, Thayer Scudder, Michael Horowitz, and David Brokensha established an Institute for Development Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Anthropologists write with concern about the ways that non-Western objects of aid have been left out of the widespread drive to develop after World War II, especially in the ways that such projects limit solutions to poverty in the form of narrow Western capitalist models that promote exploitation and the destruction of household farms, or, more suspiciously, naturalise inequality between Western post-industrialized countries and former colonial subjects.
Some describe the anthropological critique of development as one that pits modernization and an eradication of the indigenous culture, but this is too reductive and not the case with the majority of scholarly work.
In fact, most anthropologists who work in impoverished areas desire the same economic relief for the people they study as policymakers; however, they are wary about the assumptions and models on which development interventions are based.
Criticism often focuses therefore on the cultural bias and blind-spots of Western development institutions, or modernization models that systematically represent non-Western societies as more deficient than the West; erroneously assume that Western modes of production and historical processes are repeatable in all contexts; or that do not take into account hundreds of years of colonial exploitation by the West that has tended to destroy the resources of former colonial society.
Development projects themselves flourished in the wake of World War II, and during the Cold War, when they were developed to (1) stop the spread of communism with the spread of capitalist markets, and (2) create more prosperity for the West and its products by creating a global consumer demand for finished Western products abroad.
Some scholars blame the different agents for having only considered a small aspect of the local people's lives without analyzing broader consequences, while others like dependency theory or Escobar argue that development projects are doomed to failure for the fundamental ways they privilege Western industry and corporations.
Escobar's argument echos the earlier work of dependency theory and follows a larger critique more recently posed by Michel Foucault and other post-structuralists.
More recent studies like James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine argue that the ideas and institutional structure that support Western development projects are fundamentally flawed because of the way the West continues to represent the former colonial world.