"...poverty is not about failed development, poor technology, lack of resources, mismanagement, or poor planning, but rather that it represents a routine, everyday, normal manifestation of the very process of economic development; indeed, development has caused modern poverty...

the "problem" should no longer be confined to the place where we see the tangible, physical evidence of poverty, but that it should include the very intellect that helped us conceptualize poverty in the first place. This leaves us in a serious predicament, because the academic tools at our command -- that is, the paradigms of development and the epistemology of poverty -- pose an obstacle to the solution by distorting our understanding of the problem.

...The Marxist theoretician Gramsci's concept of hegemony provides a useful tool to examine the role of intellectuals in constructing the social consensus. Drawing on the work of Gramsci, Williams (1983, 145), in his book Keywords, described the concept of hegemony in the following way:
It is not limited to matters of direct political control but seeks to describe a more general predominance which includes, as one of its key features, a particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships. ... it is seen to depend for its hold not only on this expression in the interests of the ruling class but also on its acceptance as "normal reality" or "commonsense" by those in practice subordinate to it...

In the Third World today, economic development has become a hegemonic idea for building national consensus. It is promoted not only as a political goal of the nation-state, but also as an expression of scientific rationality and technological progress..."

Source

Yapa, Lakshman. "What are improved seeds? An epistemology of the green revolution. (Theme Issue: Environment and Development, part 1)." Economic Geography 69.n3 (July 1993): 254(20).