Debating Development Research

22/09/202622/09/2026

The Unintended Effects of Development Research Funding Structures Should be a Europe-wide Conversation

Do Big Research Grants Lead to the ‘Faux-Popularisation’ of Principle Investigators’s Flagship Concepts?

By Portia Roelofs / First post in a mini-series on large grant-funded research centres

In 1990 the Beninese political scientist Paulin Hountondji called attention to the role of concept generation and dissemination in ‘the North’s Monopoly on theory’. In recent years European Development Studies and adjacent discipline of African Studies has turned the spotlight on how this hierarchy is reproduced in conferences, journals, hiring and textbooks. With 70-85% of African research produced through international collaborations, and mainly funded by European countries, European research funding regimes are a key node in this landscape.

09/09/2026

Inverted Eurocentrism: The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North

By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

At a moment when the United States has recently kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is plotting regime change in Cuba, and is continuing to support genocide and colonial oppression in Palestine, the question of how to understand empire, capitalism, and possibilities for resistance is as pressing as ever. In a new article, I argue that any radical decolonization agenda must be aligned with critique of and resistance to contemporary oppression. I also posit that the most dominant form of decolonial theory – the one that is now pervasive across global North universities as well as many institutions across the global South – does not lend itself to such radical critique and resistance.

18/08/2026

The Limits of Exporting Development: Lessons from Afghanistan

By Abdullah Qayomi

Between 2001 and 2021, Afghanistan received more international development assistance than almost any country in modern history. Nevertheless, the Afghan state fell apart within days creating social chaos and causing the country to hit rock-bottom socially, economically and politically like never before in its history. The explanation for such a level of societal fragility, after billions of U.S. Dollar investment, is disturbing and simply beyond corruption or poor implementation. This is not to deny the importance of corruption, insecurity, political fragmentation, regional interference, or insurgency. Rather, these factors became so devastating because the development approach itself failed to build institutions that were socially legitimate and locally rooted.

11/08/2026

Beyond Innovation: Exnovation as a Catalyst for Post-Growth Transitions

By Sabrina Chakori

Post-growth entrepreneurship: the need for non-extractivist models

There is growing recognition that responding to the socio-ecological crisis requires more than technological fixes. There is a need to shift away from palliative interventions, which remain limited to promoting incremental or unproven technological approaches, and to embrace more radical interventions that address the structural drivers of environmental degradation and social inequality. This has led to an interest in degrowth and post-growth economies as a way to catalyse transformational change. Degrowth (or post-growth) can be defined as aiming at an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long-term.

21/07/2026

The Shifting Geopolitics of Deep-Sea Mining in the Pacific Islands Region: an Industry Poised to Emerge?

By Ben Radley and Imogen Eagles

The ocean’s seabed contains vast deposits of minerals deemed critical for green transition technologies, military defence systems and AI hardware, among other uses. According to some estimates, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone – an approximately 4.5 million square kilometre abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean – holds more copper, nickel and cobalt than all land-based deposits combined. With China’s recent tightening of export controls on several critical minerals creating global price shocks and disrupting Western supply chains, geopolitical contestation to access and exploit seabed minerals is heating up.