Debating Development Research

13/03/2023

Securing sufficient, sustainable energy for-all needs a massive reduction in global inequality

By Joel Millward-Hopkins

Few people believe that the world’s poorest should remain in their current situation of material poverty – and fewer still would admit such a belief in public. Perhaps even fewer believe that it would be acceptable for humans to trigger a global ecological disaster. Most can thus agree that there are billions around the world for whom living standards should be improved, and that humans should endeavour to keep the only habitat in our solar system habitable.

02/03/2023

#GlobalJustice: Learning and activism through social media

By Madeleine Le Bourdon

In an era of ‘Fake News’ and polarised mainstream media, is social media educating young people or exacerbating misconceptions on global injustices? At the height of COVID-19 lockdowns around the world, we saw an acceleration of online soci a l justice campaigns, with localised injustices connecting to global audiences. With this traction came an evolution of the way these campaigns engaged users. Accounts and posts dedicated to educating on social injustices through infographics, threads and audio-visuals trended widely.

21/02/202321/02/2023

Understanding epistemic erasures of local & indigenous communities:

Decolonizing research and re-imagining alternative partnerships in Development Studies

By Yafa El Masri, Melis Cin, Kitty Furtado, Paola Minoia and Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm / New Rhythms of Development blog series

Epistemic erasures continue to exist in a wide range of institutional designs at the local, national, regional, European and international level. Bringing up a debate on this topic not only opens the possibility to raise awareness on the concept, but also motivates research to shed light on alternative partnerships of resistance to these erasures. As Sharon Stein and others have pointed out, partnerships that arise collaboratively between actors from academia, civil society and politics can contribute to recognizing, repairing and re-imagining new decolonial futures.

06/02/202301/03/2023

Ecocentric pedagogies and green scholarships: Towards green academia

By Sayan Dey

In 2006, the Ministry of Education in Bhutan launched what is officially known as the Green School System. One of the many purposes of introducing this green education system was to counter the mainstream modern/colonial knowledge systems that are anti-ecological, self-profiting and capitalistic in nature, and to build knowledge systems that are centered on the existential and functional values of the natural environment.

23/01/2023

Decentralised Development Cooperation: potential and practices from an international perspective

By Jorge Gutiérrez Goiria

What role should municipal and regional governments play in international cooperation? For some time now, the processes and results of traditional development cooperation have been under scrutiny, and its main parameters are being reconsidered with regard to its own objectives, agents and instruments, which prove to be insufficient to face global challenges.

Decentralised development cooperation (DDC), promoted by local governments, offers a promising approach here. Its practices can promote relations of cooperation and solidarity with greater horizontality and reciprocity, as they naturally involve different actors while responding to problems close to the citizenry.