‘Pedagogical’ and Ethnographic Fictions and Meta-narratives of Development: <italic>1 World Manga</italic>

This article focuses on the development-themed Manga series entitled <roman>1 World Manga</roman>, a World Bank/Viz Media project that follows the adventures of a young orphan boy, who ‘discovers that the only way to become a true warrior is to understand the challenges facing the poor and disadvantaged people he befriends along the way’. I argue that the series generates a pedagogical meta-narrative of ‘development’ that engages behavioural and situational, rather than ontogenetic and structural causes of inequality and disenfranchisement impede the characters' human development. I then discuss how ‘pedagogical’ fictions of development produce normative discourses of development that are centred around explicit, recognisable, fixed sets of circumstances, actors, and outcomes, and how they differ from ‘ethnographic’ fictions of development that emerge when development projects and interventions become sites of cultural production.