By distinguishing between developed and less developed nations, the concept of development subtly establishes hierarchies and a supposed comparability, which is highly ambivalent from a socio-ethical point of view. The idea of holistic development in Catholic social teaching focus on cultural dimensions and therefore sets an important counter accent to the fixation on socio-technically producible and countable things. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lack a coherence between the social and the ecological components as well as a naming of power conflicts. For a power-critical, postcolonial and participatory concept of development, their interpretation could learn substantially from the encyclical Laudato si'.

The paradigm of development is subjected to a radical critique in parts of the academic debate: Is the idea of development, which in a gesture of aid divides the world into “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations and thus establishes a hierarchy, still politically and morally justifiable at all? Has this concept possibly become a backdoor to prolong the old colonial power relations into the 21st century, even to increase them in some cases? Is development one of the great utopias of the 20th century that promised freedom and brought division? Is the ecological overexploitation of global resources the inevitable reverse side of the spread of the Western model of prosperity disguised as “development”? Do the SDGs act subcutaneously as enablers of Western imperial power, or do they represent a genuine paradigm shift? This article explores these questions in four steps: 1. Is the age of development is over? 2. The ideal of “integral development” – steps of a revision process 3. In the tension between ecological and social goals: A Comparison of the “Sustainable Development Goals” and the Encyclical Laudato si' 4. Priorities and strategies of a “post-utopian development policy”.

The shadows of colonial thinking are still effective today in development concepts fixated on countable factors of socioeconomic efficiency.