Breaking down the question
The verb trace asks for a chronological and analytical account of how thinking about development — as a lens on social change — has evolved. Development perspectives are the successive theoretical frameworks that have explained why societies change and how poorer societies might transform. Your task is to show a trajectory: a movement from one paradigm to the next, each responding to the failures of its predecessor.
How to approach it
Structure the answer as a sequence of paradigms: modernization theory, its dependency and world-systems critiques, and the later human-centred and post-development turns. For each, state the core claim, its view of change, and its limitation that provoked the next shift. This narrative of critique and succession is exactly what tracing a trajectory requires.
Conclude by noting the contemporary plural and sustainability-oriented landscape.
Model answer
Development perspectives on social change have passed through several distinct phases, each superseding the last.
The first, modernization theory, dominated the post-war decades. Drawing on evolutionary and functionalist assumptions, thinkers such as W. W. Rostow depicted development as a linear ascent through stages of economic growth, with Western societies as the model. Change meant the diffusion of modern values, technology and institutions replacing tradition.
The evident persistence of poverty in the decolonizing world provoked a sharp reaction. Dependency theory, associated with Andre Gunder Frank, argued that underdevelopment was not an original condition but was actively produced by the extraction of surplus from peripheral to metropolitan economies. Change here is understood through unequal global relations, not internal deficiency. Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis extended this into a single capitalist system of core, periphery and semi-periphery.
By the 1980s both grand narratives seemed inadequate. A human development perspective emerged, crystallized in Amartya Sen's capability approach, which redefined development as the expansion of substantive freedoms rather than mere income growth. This shifted attention to health, education and agency.
More radical still, post-development thinkers questioned the very idea of development as a Western imposition, calling instead for pluralist and grassroots alternatives. The contemporary landscape adds concerns of sustainability and ecological limits, reflected in the discourse of sustainable development.
The trajectory thus runs from linear optimism, through structural critique, to human-centred and finally sceptical, plural conceptions of change.
For further reading, see Development and Dependency.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners value a clear sense of movement — each perspective arising from the limitations of the one before. Naming representative thinkers such as Rostow, Frank and Sen anchors the trajectory, while a concluding gesture towards post-development and sustainability signals awareness of current debates. Answers that merely list theories without showing the logic of succession score lower than those that narrate the intellectual evolution.