By Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň and Tereza Němečková
We have both worked in development research for more than two decades. And yet, again and again we were amazed by stumbling upon great publications and scholars we didn’t know about. They may have worked in a neighbouring faculty in Prague or a smaller regional university. So, as simple as it may sound, this observation became the main motivation behind the creation of a national platform that would become the Czech Research Network for Global Development and Sustainability (CRENDES): to get to know each other. Fast forward, CRENDES celebrated its second anniversary in January 2026, and it is worth reflecting on how the network has grown and what challenges lie ahead.
Why a national platform, and why now?
While we floated the idea of a national network for some time, it really gained momentum only after the 2022 EADI Regional Meeting and PhD Symposiumin Prague (thank you, EADI!). Building on this experience, and together with Lenka Suchá from the Czech Academy of Sciences, we decided to make it a reality.
First, we launched an online snowball survey to identify the needs and priorities of researchers working on development issues and the Global South in the Czech Republic. Encouraged by the results, we organised an informal event, drafted the mission statement, and formally established CRENDES in January 2024.
Originally envisioned as a network of individual researchers, CRENDES quickly expanded to include institutional members. Czechia is not a large country, but development research has long remained fragmented, divided along disciplinary and institutional lines. Today, it brings together ten institutional members from Prague and the regions: universities, faculties, institutes, and departments, alongside fourteen individual researchers, reaching around 70 researchers in total.
From the outset, the geographical balance mattered to us, which is why networking meetings have alternated between Prague and other regional Czech cities. This broad participation confirmed something important: national platforms still matter, especially for smaller institutions and individual researchers, and they complement – rather than compete with – Europe-wide associations.
Bringing development and sustainability communities to one table
CRENDES was also born out of the frustration with the persisting gap between Development Studies and environmental or sustainability research. Despite the obvious need for social and economic development within planetary boundaries and their formal integration into the Sustainable Development Goals, these communities often work in parallel, using similar concepts but under different umbrellas.
This rapprochement has a long way to go, but progress is possible. For instance, a first joint research proposal cutting across these lines has already been submitted by two institutions that would otherwise not have met.
At the same time, we see the need to move beyond the social sciences and humanities. Technical universities, for instance, are increasingly active in the Global South, and their involvement is essential to any serious discussion of sustainable development.
Do it yourself, until you can’t
For the first two years, CRENDES functioned entirely on a pro bono basis. This included the work of exceptionally talented Gen Z interns, kindly provided as an in-kind contribution by an institutional member. We designed our logo and other promotional materials ourselves, but wrestling with WordPress to build a new website proved beyond our collective Gen X skill set.
Since institutional membership grew much faster than expected, paying for a website or a roll-up banner was not really a challenge. However, the collected membership fees were still far from sufficient to pay a professional and establish a permanent secretariat of the network. We also introduced an advantageous membership for students and PhD candidates who are the real future of our discipline, but we need to find ways to motivate them to join.
As our experience with interns shows, however, the time-demanding tasks of setting up all the processes and keeping the information flow running primarily tested our capacities as academics. Indeed, in the Czech academic environment, increasingly shaped by productivity metrics and competition for scarce resources, networking and community-building are rarely rewarded. Only a couple of universities saw their involvement in CRENDES as a way to implement their internal sustainability commitments.
Unfortunately, in Czechia, many researchers juggle multiple jobs while continuously applying for external grants with a decreasing success rate. Against these odds, four networking meetings, hosted rotationally by our member institutions in Brno, Prague and Olomouc, have shown a strong, often unmet, demand for connection, trust and simple conviviality in academia.
High-level and not-so-high-level policy engagement
Our strategy was not merely to foster internal dialogue, but to demonstrate that academic expertise has a place in high-level policy discussions. Over the 2024–2025 period, CRENDES succeeded in improving the visibility of development research beyond the academy. Two particular events exemplify this approach.
In June 2025, we organised the Europe-Africa Discussion Forum as a side event to ECAS 2025, the largest European conference on African Studies that took place in Prague. Rather than a standard panel, the forum created a space for dialogue among African and European researchers, NGO representatives, and high-level policymakers, featuring a representative from Kaja Kallas’s cabinet, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Along with this, CRENDES established a strong and regular presence at the National Development Days, organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since their premiere in 2024. We compiled an initial list of study programmes, modules, and courses across the country, and we could, for the first time, approach high school students interested in development and sustainability in person and in one place.
The establishment of the network also made us an institutional partner for the Czech MFA alongside the NGDO platform FoRS. As CRENDES representatives, we could present our views at a meeting with Jozef Síkela, the European Commissioner for International Partnerships, though the imbalance in the time allocated to the private sector and academia was striking.
Challenges ahead: professionalisation, politicisation… and philanthropy?
Looking ahead, CRENDES faces several challenges. In terms of establishing a professional secretariat, there is a vicious circle: finding capacities among the Board to prepare the network to host externally funded projects requires the project application to be written and submitted first. Employing people also practically requires outsourcing accounting, and in some cases, auditing. So far, we have been successful in raising funds from a major private company, which offers more flexibility than public funding.
Politically, one thing is to be recognised as a single academic platform; another thing is to become a serious partner for the government. In development policy, that means bringing ‘soft’ expertise to Team Czechia and responding to the ‘360° approach’ that the European Commission claims to advance in mitigating the local impacts of the EU’s development policy’s geopolitical turn under the Global Gateway umbrella. In research policy, it means lobbying for national research funding to support interdisciplinary research like ours.
And this at a time when the national political environment is becoming more difficult. In fact, the new government has decided to cut Czech humanitarian aid and democracy support by 70% and bilateral development aid by 30%. During our recent General Assembly, we discussed the necessity to articulate joint political positions to defend the role of development research and cooperation. In an era of rising populism, the network may have to act not only as a scholarly hub but also as a collective shield – working alongside platforms such as FoRS and DEMAS to protect the sector.
Meanwhile, if you have ever considered setting up a national research platform yourself, don’t hesitate to get in touch: horky@iir.cz and tereza.nemeckova@mup.cz. Stronger national research communities are essential if we want European and global networks such as EADI to remain vibrant – and to have the impact on policy-making that is so urgently needed.
Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň is a Co-Founder and former Vice-Chair of CRENDES. He is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.
Tereza Němečková is a Co-Founder and former Chair of CRENDES. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the African Studies Centre at the Metropolitan University Prague.
Image: by the authors
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes