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Reflections on Development in Development Studies

By Henning Melber

There is a history to Developmentalism long before the US-American President Truman’s interpretation in his inaugural address of 1949. He then advocated development as an integral part of Western policy embracing the emerging independent states through aid in support of sovereign governance. An embracement, which often turned out to be more of a strangulation than a provision of oxygen to breathe the winds of change as signs of freedom and self-determination to make own choices.

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Water, accumulation, and the space in-between

By Basile Boulay

Droughts, floods, shrinking water tables and growing competition to access what is becoming the new gold bring water governance at the centre of the global discourse. While evidently crucial, the governance question cannot be disentangled from the broader issue of the neoliberal agenda seeking the commodification of life, including water. Can sound resource management be achieved when states openly support private accumulation at the expense of nature and people? Madelaine Moore’s new book on Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism comes in handy to help us make sense of these questions by bringing insights from Australia and Ireland.

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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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Global partnerships to prioritise care and the preservation of life

By Christiane Kliemann / New Rhythms of Development blog series

Amid the multitude of current interconnected and mutually reinforcing global crises, the closing panel of our recent #NewDevRhythms conference in Lisbon centred around the question what Development Studies could do to understand and respond to the various facets of these crises, while, as a  discipline, facing numerous crises of its own. To consult and bring forward non-European perspectives, EADI president Andy Sumner who chaired the session had invited representatives of Development Studies Associations from different parts of the world.

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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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