Debating Development Research

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.

14/07/2026

What to Play Next: Development after the End of Development

By Heiner Janus and Michael Roll

Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of England’s north. When protests turned deadly at the Peterloo massacre, it helped galvanise a tradition of organised labour and democratic reform — one that later produced the suffragettes, founded there by Emmeline Pankhurst. And when the band Joy Division collapsed, the remaining members re-emerged as New Order. That instinct — not to reassemble what broke, but to build something new — was the animating spirit when the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute convened researchers in mid-April to ask: is the era of Development over? And if so, what replaces it?

06/07/2026

The Disciplinary Roots of Disagreement in Development Studies: Findings from a Global Survey of Scholars

By Ryan Briggs and Andy Sumner

Development Studies is institutionally well established. The QS rankings identify over 150 universities with postgraduate Development Studies programmes across approximately 40 countries. Journals, institutes and scholarly associations have proliferated since the 1960s.