By Simone Christ / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project
How can international cooperation ensure social, political, and economic transformations to shape sustainable futures in the context of geopolitical tensions? One crucial approach is to equip young professionals with competencies needed to become transformative change makers. The recent overhaul of the IDOS postgraduate programme reflects also broader efforts to decolonise knowledge.
The IDOS postgraduate programme celebrates its 60th anniversary this year and has now evolved into the “Postgraduate Programme for Sustainability Cooperation” (PGP). The PGP was founded in 1964 to train post-graduates for a future career in the then new sector of German bilateral development cooperation. While this mandate remains, the field of international cooperation has been undergoing significant transformations:
- While German development policy at its beginning focused on knowledge transfer and financial aid, parts of the sector now are characterised by international experts working collaboratively to tackle global challenges and support partners in designing and implementing their own problem-solving strategies.
- We are witnessing fundamental changes in the international system, such as global power shifts and systemic competition in an increasingly multipolar world.
- The sector of international cooperation/development cooperation is being criticized for maintaining postcolonial power structures. The division of the world into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries as prevalent in modernisation theory consolidates racist and colonial world views.
- In science cooperation, more and more academics – in different disciplines like development research, health, or migration studies – raise their voice to denounce hegemonic ways of knowledge production between the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’. Criticism includes the setting of research agendas in the ‘Global North’ and unequal power relations between research institutions and researchers. Rarely are researchers from the ‘Global South’ conducting research or teach in the ‘Global North’.
What makes the IDOS Postgraduate Programme unique?
IDOS combines high academic quality based on empirical and theory-led research with policy advice and relevance for development practice. The PGP is situated at the intersection of research, policy advice, and development practice.
Each year, 18 master graduates are admitted to the nine-month programme. The programme combines a broad overview on fundamental topics in international cooperation with research in an applied and policy-oriented project. The research projects, called ‘research teams’, are team projects under the guidance of IDOS researchers and include empirical research and cooperation with partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The research teams have always been at the heart of the programme. Being embedded within IDOS research, the research teams enrich participant’s learning experience. Unique to our programme is the proximity to political decision-makers, which allows our participants to engage directly in policy advice and to gain a comprehensive overview of development cooperation.
Decolonising the Programme? Diversity, Research Partnerships, and Reflexivity
Among various changes we are implementing, I would like to highlight three major areas from a decolonising perspective:
- Diversity of participants: Formally, the programme was limited to EU citizens with native German language skills, reflecting its focus on bilateral development cooperation between Germany and its partner countries. Now, we are aiming for greater diversity among our participants, and internationalisation is one key aspect of this effort. We have revised the admission criteria, allowing us to accept international participants. While internationalisation is a cornerstone, we aim to foster other dimensions of diversity as well. The recent shift from a loan-based to a scholarship-funded model has broadened access, promoting greater diversity in terms of social backgrounds. We appreciate different life experiences (e.g. disability, parenthood, transnational life experiences) as enriching for our programme.
- Strengthened research partnerships in our research teams: We aim to organise our research teams in such a way as to enable partnership-based cooperation. Ideally, the research teams consist of a joint leadership (IDOS and partner institution) and team members at the peer level from both institutions. The partnership approach should be reflected in the various phases of the research project, from agenda setting to authorship. First pilot research teams have already launched. We consider the research teams as crucial to foster cooperation competencies as a core competence for our participants.
- The competence of reflexivity: Reflexivity is a prerequisite to foster cooperation; it refers to the ability and habit to reflect on processes and results, […] taking a critical look inwards at own behaviour, assumptions, values and habits. In the PGP, we add different reflective elements in our curriculum. Sessions on post-colonialism, positionality, critical whiteness, or reflections on the limits of our partnership-based approach enable participants to develop reflective competencies and get an awareness of their own positionality within social power asymmetries – as a foundation for their research team projects as well as for their future work as practitioners in international cooperation.
Limitations, Constraints, and Ambiguities
While we believe we have taken significant steps towards building more equitable (research) partnerships, we recognize that limitations persist and many challenges remain unresolved. Every step forward reveals new questions, emerging inequalities and tensions.
As an academic, I can easily analyse and reflect on these tensions and inequalities. However, as a practitioner responsible for conceptualizing and delivering the PGP, addressing these tensions often proves challenging. We must also manage legal, administrative, and financial constraints and we need the agreement of our shareholders and supervisory board for all major changes. As I learn to navigate these ambiguities, it is essential to continuously reflect on them to address the questions that lie ahead. In the following section, I will highlight some of the key issues we face, particularly concerning our research teams.
- Funding: How should we finance our partners’ engagement? Should IDOS bear the financial responsibility for involving our partners? If so, does this create an inherent hierarchical relationship, or does it, on the contrary, promote greater equity? And if IDOS finances the engagement, where can we find additional funding to support our partners’ engagement, especially in times of budget cuts? If not, where can we seek alternative funding sources, given that not all partners have their own financial resources?
- Peer roles in the research teams: Our reform efforts aim to address power hierarchies within our research teams. Ensuring a balanced number of participants from IDOS and its partner institutions is critical for fostering equity and mutual respect. However, due to financial constraints, we have more postgraduates from the PGP than from partner institutions. What consequences might this imbalance have for the collaboration? How can we ensure that this disparity does not create hierarchies within the team?
- Definition of ‘partner’: Who qualifies as a partner? Should we define partners exclusively as institutionalised actors, or can they also be individuals, such as activists?
- Research sites: Typically, our research teams conduct studies in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, with partners primarily from the country where the research is conducted. These partners are engaged in research within their own countries, rather than participating in joint research in a third country or Europe. While the latter approach aligns more closely with the idea of decolonising research, structural constraints, particularly funding, hinder these efforts.
- Diversity in the programme structure: Diversity should not be limited to the participants; we must also consider diversity in the programme’s modules and session convenors. Our participants benefit significantly from IDOS’s international network, especially through exchanges with participants from the international programmes Shaping Futures (SF) and Managing Global Governance (MGG) and their well-established networks. We are currently working on further interlinking these programmes and are exploring the possibility of including MGG and SF partners as convenors in the PGP programme. These are potential steps to enhance the diversity and inclusivity of the PGP.
This blog post has outlined some of the challenges involved in decolonizing our postgraduate programme. In future contributions within this specific storytelling project, we will invite our partners from our pilot research teams to reflect on their experiences and to share their perspectives on how they envision building partnerships.
I consider it crucial to continuously reflect on the limitations we face in our decolonization journey, even as the day-to-day management of the programme demands much of our attention. Therefore, I look forward to the opportunity to use this storytelling project as a chance to collaborate with our partners and explore together what decolonizing research and training might look like. The upcoming contributions aim to explore possible answers to the questions sketched above and initiate conversations on what is needed to drive further change.
Simone Christ is head of the Postgraduate Programme for Sustainability Cooperation (PGP) and Senior Researcher at IDOS.
Image: taken by Albert Thönniges
Interesting conversations and hopefully initiatives like these can occur across board.