IB DP Global Politics – Thematic study – Development and sustainability Study Guide

This study guide teaches the whole Development and sustainability thematic study of IB DP Global Politics. It follows the IB Diploma Programme Global politics guide (first assessment 2026, published February 2024), the course examined from the May 2026 session onwards. It covers all four prescribed topics of the thematic study: contested meanings, interactions of political stakeholders and actors, the nature, practice and study of development and sustainability, and the debates. The content is common to SL and HL.

The course hub lists every Global Politics resource, and the printable checklist lets you tick off each prescribed topic.

What this unit covers

Prescribed topic	Prescribed content	What you must be able to do
Contested meanings	Development; sustainability; poverty; inequality	Define each term in more than one way and explain why actors disagree
Interactions of political stakeholders and actors	States, national and local governments and agencies; civil society; IGOs including international financial institutions; marginalised, vulnerable or most affected groups and individuals; TNCs and MNCs	Explain what each actor wants, what power it has, and how actors cooperate or clash
Nature, practice and study	Dimensions and assessment; pathways; economic, environmental, political, social and institutional factors; links between development and sustainability	Use indices critically, compare pathways, and explain why development succeeds or stalls
Debates	Globalization and development and sustainability; sustainable development; alternative views	Argue both sides with examples and reach a justified judgement

All of this is SL and HL content.

Contested meanings

Development

The guide asks you to treat development as political, social, institutional and economic, and to look well beyond economic growth. Three views are worth knowing.

• Development as growth. Rising GDP or GNI per person. Easy to measure, but silent on who gains.
• Development as human development. Amartya Sen’s capability approach sees development as widening the real freedoms people have: to be healthy, educated, safe and able to take part in public life. This thinking shaped the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index.
• Development as political and institutional change. Accountable government, working courts, low corruption and secure rights. A country can grow fast while these stay weak.

Sustainability

Sustainability has environmental, social and economic dimensions. The guide also treats it as a possible condition of any system or practice: something is sustainable if it can continue without destroying what it depends on. The best-known definition comes from the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future, 1987): development that meets present needs without reducing the ability of future generations to meet theirs.

Poverty

• Poverty as lack of resources: too little income, food or shelter. Absolute poverty is falling below a fixed minimum, such as the World Bank’s international poverty line in dollars a day at purchasing power parity.
• Poverty as lack of opportunities: no school nearby, no access to credit, no voice in decisions. Relative poverty is falling well below the typical standard in your own society; the EU, for example, uses 60% of national median income as an at-risk-of-poverty line.

Inequality

Inequality can be economic (income and wealth), political (unequal voice and access to decision-makers) and social (unequal status by gender, ethnicity, caste or location). The guide links inequality to power asymmetries: groups with less wealth usually have less say over the rules that keep them poor.

Interactions of political stakeholders and actors

Actor	Typical goals and power	Contemporary example
States, national and local governments and agencies	Set tax, welfare, land and environmental policy; sovereign control over resources	Brazil’s Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer (from 2003)
Civil society, including grassroots initiatives	Mobilise communities, deliver services, hold power to account	Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, founded by Wangari Maathai
IGOs, including international financial institutions	Lend, set conditions, set trade rules, coordinate goals	World Bank, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank, WTO; the UN’s SDGs
Marginalised, vulnerable or most affected groups	Claim land, resources and a say; often excluded from decisions	Indigenous communities contesting mining or dam projects
TNCs and MNCs	Profit; bring investment, jobs and technology; shape supply chains	Garment supply chains after the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh

Points to use in analysis:

• Power and legitimacy of IFIs. The IMF and World Bank were set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. From the 1980s their loans often carried structural adjustment conditions: cutting deficits, privatising and opening to trade (the “Washington Consensus”). Critics say this cut health and education spending. Supporters say it restored stability. Voting shares follow financial contributions, so many borrowing states question the fairness of the rules.
• Sovereignty. Conditional loans, trade rules and investment treaties limit how freely a state chooses its own path. Debt is a key lever.
• Partnerships between developing countries. South-South cooperation and newer lenders, such as the New Development Bank set up by the BRICS states, offer alternatives to Western-led institutions.
• Global trade networks link producers in one country with consumers in another, so a decision in one place (a tariff, a boycott, a supplier code) changes livelihoods elsewhere. This is interdependence.
• Civil society ranges from large NGOs to grassroots cooperatives. Grameen Bank’s microcredit model (Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize 2006) is a well-known, and debated, grassroots pathway.

Nature, practice and study of development and sustainability

Dimensions and assessment

The guide lists these measures. Know what each captures and what it misses.

Measure	What it combines	Main limitation
Human Development Index (HDI)	Health (life expectancy), education (years of schooling), income (GNI per person)	Ignores inequality, environment and freedom
Human Poverty Index (HPI)	Deprivation in survival, knowledge and living standards; UNDP replaced it with the MPI in 2010	Country averages only
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)	Ten indicators across health, education and living standards, measured household by household	Weights are a choice; income left out
Happy Planet Index	Wellbeing and life expectancy against ecological footprint	Wellbeing is self-reported
Gini index	Spread of income from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 or 100 (one person has everything)	Same Gini can hide very different shapes
Corruption and trust indices	Perceived corruption (e.g. Transparency International’s index); trust in institutions	Based on perceptions
ESI, Sustainable Society Index, Sustainable Governance Indicators	Environmental, social and governance performance	Many indicators; weights disputed

Worked example 1 – MPI. In a fictional district of Kestland, a survey covers 1,000 people. 340 are deprived in at least one third of the weighted indicators, so they count as multidimensionally poor. On average each poor person is deprived in 50% of the weighted indicators.

• Headcount ratio H = 340 ÷ 1,000 = 0.34
• Intensity A = 0.50
• MPI = H × A = 0.34 × 0.50 = 0.17

A second district has the same H but A = 0.40, so its MPI = 0.34 × 0.40 = 0.136. The same number of people are poor, but less deeply.

Worked example 2 – why the HDI uses a geometric mean. Fictional Country A has dimension indices of 0.90 (health), 0.50 (education) and 0.85 (income). Country B scores 0.75 in all three. Both have an arithmetic mean of 0.75. The HDI takes the geometric mean: for Country A, the cube root of (0.90 × 0.50 × 0.85) ≈ 0.726; for Country B it stays 0.75. A weak score in one dimension pulls the total down, so a state cannot hide poor schooling behind high income.

Pathways towards development and sustainability

Pathway	Core idea	Criticism
Modernization (e.g. Rostow’s stages of growth)	Poorer states follow the path richer ones took: investment, industry, mass consumption	Assumes one route; ignores the external constraints
Market-led / neoliberal	Open trade, attract FDI, shrink the state	Growth can be unequal; social spending cut
State-led	Government directs investment and protects new industries	Risk of corruption and vested interests
Dependency and world-systems	Global trade keeps the periphery supplying cheap raw materials to the core	Hard to explain states that climbed the ladder
Human development	Invest in people’s capabilities first	Slower to show in growth figures
Community-led and sustainable	Local control, cooperatives, green technology	Hard to scale up

Factors

The guide groups the factors that help or block development into five sets.

• Political: ideology, history and persistence of conflict, stability, accountability, transparency, legal frameworks, the political consequences of different development paths, how aid is allocated, political culture, bureaucracy and vested interests.
• Economic: access to resources, growing resource constraints, infrastructure, debt, access to capital and credit, aid, trade, FDI, income distribution, the informal economy.
• Social: values, culture, tradition, gender relations, migration.
• Institutional: the UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, partnerships between developing countries, how well national and local institutions work.
• Environmental: geography, resource endowment, the effects of climate change on people’s lives.

Factors interact. Take the resource curse: oil or mineral wealth (environmental and economic) can feed corruption and conflict (political), so resource-rich states sometimes develop more slowly than resource-poor ones.

Links between development and sustainability

• Trade-offs. Coal and forest clearance can raise incomes quickly while damaging long-run sustainability.
• Environmental Kuznets curve. A disputed claim that pollution rises with early growth and then falls as income rises. Critics say rich states move polluting production abroad.
• Climate justice. States that emitted least often suffer most. The loss and damage fund agreed at COP27 (2022) reflects this claim.
• Synergies. Clean energy, secure land rights and girls’ education can advance development and sustainability together.

Debates on development and sustainability

Globalization and development. Supporters point to export-led growth and the fall in extreme poverty in East Asia. Critics point to rising inequality within states, a “race to the bottom” in labour and environmental standards, and loss of policy space under WTO rules and investment treaties.

Sustainable development and the SDGs. The UN adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, running to 2030, after the eight Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015). Supporters value a shared framework that covers rich and poor states alike. Critics argue the goals still assume endless growth, some targets pull against each other, and nothing binds states to meet them.

Alternative views. The guide names de-growth and regenerative approaches. De-growth argues that rich states should shrink material production and consumption and aim for wellbeing instead. Regenerative approaches aim to restore ecosystems and communities, not merely to slow damage. Related ideas you can use: Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” of social floors and ecological ceilings; buen vivir and the rights of nature in Ecuador’s 2008 constitution; Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness.

Using the key concepts

• Power: who sets loan conditions, trade rules and aid priorities.
• Sovereignty: how far a state can choose its own path when it owes money or needs investment.
• Legitimacy: whether IFIs, TNCs and governments are accepted as fair by the people their decisions affect.
• Interdependence: how supply chains, debt and climate change tie states’ development together.

How this unit is examined

Paper 2 (1 hour 45 minutes, 30 marks; 40% at SL and 30% at HL) is based on the thematic studies. You answer one essay from section A, which has questions from each thematic study, and one from section B, which has integrating questions across the thematic studies and core topics. Essays are marked with markbands, and the top band needs diverse perspectives explored and evaluated. Paper 1 is set on the core topics, but development cases are useful evidence there. At HL, the guide names environmental factors of development and conceptions of poverty as links to the Paper 3 global political challenges, so cases from this unit can feed your HL research. The paper-by-paper exam preparation and assessment revision notes cover exam technique.

Common errors

• Treating development as a synonym for GDP growth, when the guide wants political, social and institutional dimensions too.
• Quoting an index score without saying what it leaves out.
• Using “sustainability” only for the environment; social and economic sustainability also count.
• Writing about “the IMF” as if it acts alone, without its member states and voting shares.
• Arguing only one side of a debate such as de-growth.

Next steps

Test yourself with the revision notes, then try the practice questions. For the other thematic studies, see Rights and justice and Peace and conflict.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Global politics guide, first assessment 2026 (published February 2024). Thematic studies: Development and sustainability – all prescribed topics and prescribed content.