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What Is a “Development” Research Project? Transforming Ideas of Development through Development Research

By Mette Fog Olwig, Jacob Rasmussen, Lone Riisgaard, Christine Noe, Geetika Khanduja, Peter Taylor, Herbert Hambati, Lisa Ann Richey, Chris Büscher and Paola Minoia / New Rhythms of Development blog series

Development Studies has long operated with binaries such as “developed/developing” and “traditional/modern” that foster implicit assumptions of Northern superiority. As a result, research projects taking place in so-called “developing countries” tend to ask different research questions and use different methods leading to types of theories that differ from those concerning so-called “developed countries.”

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Contested development imaginaries: Hindutva and the co-optation of ‘decolonisation’

By Kalpana Wilson, Giti Chandra and Lata Narayanaswamy

We live in a time where deeply embedded, historically entangled perceptions persist of a bifurcated world, made up of a civilised ‘developed’ or ‘rich’ world as set against a largely corrupt, ungovernable ‘developing’ or ‘poor’ world. The perniciousness of these ‘development’ imaginaries came into sharp relief in October 2022 when Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, in a keynote speech to the European Diplomatic Academy, described Europe as a ‘garden’ where ‘everything works’ and the rest of the world as a ‘jungle’, a metaphor that he extended to further suggest that the ‘jungle’, without political engagement, ‘could invade the garden’.

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Four approaches to shifting mindsets for decolonising knowledge

By Peter Taylor and Crystal Tremblay

In the context of knowledge for development, what does it require to deconstruct the dominant narratives and personal privileges embodied in our race, class, gender, etc.? And, in a knowledge landscape littered with potential minefields, how do we go about shifting the mindsets that shape the ways in which ‘we’ understand the world and our subsequent values, behaviours, and attitudes?

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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.

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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.

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