By many accounts a global revival of religion is afoot – not simply a revival of individual religious belief, but of the public role of religion. Correspondingly, development scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that we must reconsider the meaning of national development in light of religious worldviews. However, scholars have yet to fashion an empirically grounded, synthetic framework for understanding the range of approaches to development, both material and spiritual, that are at play in the world today. This paper presents such a framework, drawing on 200 interviews with development practitioners sampled from across 9 countries in the global south.
