When newly independent states in Africa set out to make their own economies in the 1960s, they did so under the label of “planning,” a generic term denoting economic policy-making to create the economic future. This planning was guided by international experts, sent “on missions” to help, or perhaps oversee, local economists in what was seen then as an expert, technocratic process. Nigeria offers an important example of this technocracy at work, under the guidance of its “missionary”: Wolfgang Stolper. His diary, and his writings of the day, reveal how local information and local values travelled around social, political and economic circles, to be then spliced together according to certain economic principles in making a “five-year plan” for the future of Nigeria.

In 1980, Belgian Plan Commissioner Robert Maldague clandestinely circulated a document called The Impossible Scenario, thereby reshaping planning practices in Belgium amidst a widely perceived moment of crisis. Using archival records and oral histories, this article traces how reformers within the (now federal) Belgian Planning Bureau combined foresight scenarios and macroeconomic modeling in The Impossible Scenario. It explains the use of foresight scenarios through the Planning Bureau’s aim of restoring its capacity to intervene in Belgian policymaking. The article then highlights the broader political meaning of this epistemic transformation: the reconfiguration of planning infrastructures in Belgium—and, more broadly, in Europe—from instruments of democratic economic coordination to tools of market governance. Examining this previously underexplored Belgian case thereby reveals the neoliberalized and neoliberalizing character of Western planning infrastructures in the early 1980s.

Development planning was a form of interventionist social knowledge widely used in the mid-twentieth century. Planning was employed with different aims, and the adoption of concrete techniques and procedures was highly sensitive to each country’s institutional context. This article studies the life trajectory of Colombia’s Ten-year Plan, an internationally celebrated attempt to design economic development on a large scale in what actors characterized as a politically “democratic” and economically “liberal” setting. Based on the Colombian case, I argue that a central function of planning in developing countries was to build trust, on behalf of local stakeholders and international donors, in the state’s capacity to credibly use public resources and foreign aid to achieve its development aims. In turn, planning also allowed outsiders to invigilate the actions taken by states on the economy, and to make them accountable for their commitments. I examine the media of persuasion used in the build-up to, and the publicization and revision of the Ten-year Plan, to account for the shift from the macro scale of comprehensive plans to the smaller-scale development interventions observed in the 1960s. This case shows that the malleability of planning procedures was key for the enduring resilience of the planning system.

This article examines how the American psychologist David McClelland advocated a quasi-colonial interventionist view to social science, shaped by his understanding of scientific progress, economic development, and social change. In the 1960s, he saw real-world experiments as a means both to test his theories and to generate knowledge efficiently and quickly—all with the ultimate aim of improving the human condition. While his primary focus was knowledge production rather than social transformation, his dual roles as professor and consultant carried an interventionist dimension, grounded in the belief that psychological measuring instruments could serve as tools for psychological training. By reconstructing this stance and the interstitial space McClelland created between academia and consultancy, I aim to show that his drive to intervene—exemplified by his company’s work in Curaçao—stemmed less from a pre-scientific conviction than from a distinctive mode of scientific practice.

This article examines the intellectual and interventionist trajectory of American popular writer and commentator Robert Reich from his early 1980s advocacy of “industrial policy” to his time as US Secretary of Labor in the 1990s. It argues that Reich is an interesting figure to consider through the lens of “interventionist knowledges” because, although he draws selectively on social scientific data and knowledge, his syntheses of these things are more rooted in mythic thinking than in disciplined analysis. This article recounts the history of a failed bill, the Reemployment Act of 1994, to examine how Reich and those around him drew on and interpreted existing social scientific data to construct an idea of “the New Economy” and what, they claimed, it meant for national human capital policy. This article suggests that mythic visions of society and economy possibly play a large role in policy-making and issues advocacy.

This article investigates how anthropological knowledge about regions with economic difficulties became part of regional development in France during the pivotal decade of the 1970s. It argues that ethnological fieldwork in French peripheries in the 1960s provided knowledge about regional culture and practices for its maintenance that became the core of a new development tool, the Ecomusée. It was via this tool that French anthropologists sought to intervene in regional development. By analyzing one of the first French ecomuseums, we gain an understanding of how anthropological practices and knowledge nurtured the shift to cultural development politics associated with the “enrichment economy.” Fieldwork in the 1960s, aimed at a professionalized Ethnologie de France, problematized interaction with the local population and produced knowledge about regional culture that identified a region with its economic past. The practices of documentation and participation established during these fieldwork projects shaped the enrichment economy.