Debating Development Research

20/06/2025

Rebuilding Legitimacy for Global Governance: The Case for a New Independent Commission

By Andy Sumner, Stephan Klingebiel and Arief Anshory Yusuf

The global landscape of development cooperation is fracturing. The promise of the 2030 Agenda and the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals is giving way to geopolitical tensions. The international order is no longer merely under strain; it is in disarray. Amid this uncertainty, the idea of convening a new Independent North–South Commission (INSC) has re-emerged in the German government’s coalition agreement and potentially in the UK’s proposal for a ‘global conference’. We argue that the time has come to imagine a new independent commission. A new INSC could offer a credible response to today’s fragmentation by providing a structured space for international dialogue grounded in fairness, feasibility, and forward-thinking. But such a commission must be different in tone, structure, and ambition from the high-level panels of the past.

17/06/202517/06/2025

Decolonizing Expertise: Reflections on Power, Knowledge, and Governance in International Organizations (IOs)

By Marine Gauthier / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

A Personal Reckoning with Expertise

My engagement with international development has always been entangled with postcolonial sensitivities—an awareness shaped by my Belgian family’s colonial past, my academic training on North-South relations in environmental governance, and my own professional trajectory which started in Senegal as the only white development worker in a national NGO. Yet, despite this awareness, I found myself deeply embedded in the very structures I sought to critique.

10/06/202517/06/2025

Epistemic (Ir)relevance, Language & Passport Positionality

The three hurdles I’m navigating as a UK-based Ethiopian academic

By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project

I write this reflection piece to use my personal experiences as a UK-based academic with an Ethiopian passport as a lens to comment on the structural power asymmetries of the academic landscape. I believe I’m not the only one facing these challenges. However, there is hardly sufficient attention, recognition, and space to discuss them. I have no intention of reducing the importance of other challenges by focusing on these three topics. I focused on the three hurdles because I experience them in everyday scholarly work and am determined to engage in critical discussions and reflections.

04/06/2025

Is Postdevelopment a Theory of Development? Situating Postdevelopment in Social Theory

By Aram Ziai

Four decades after its beginnings, postdevelopment (PD) has become an established approach in development theory. Its core claim that we should ‘reject the entire paradigm of development’ and look for alternatives, has become well-known. However, is postdevelopment still part of development theory or is it something else? This post, based on a longer, more nuanced article in the EJDR tries to address this question.

27/05/2025

EADI at 50: Thinking Through the Winter, Looking to the Spring and the Next Chapter

By Andy Sumner

We marked EADI’s 50th anniversary with a conference last week. As EADI president I reflect on this jubilee moment drawing from my opening remarks.

Anniversaries are an opportunity for both reflection and anticipation. As EADI marks its 50th year, we find ourselves, once again, in difficult global times. In the mid-1970s, amid oil shocks, the collapse of Bretton Woods fixed exchange rates, and a crisis of the post-war development model, EADI was founded. Today, the international order appears equally unstable—fractured by a resurgence of nationalism, institutional retreat, and weakened global cooperation. The past and present resonate uncomfortably.