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.
Yet the field has long been characterised by unresolved tensions over what development is for, where it happens and how it can be known. Our new EADI reflection paper brings direct empirical evidence to these debates for the first time.
We surveyed approximately 300 academics in departments offering postgraduate Development Studies programmes across more than 30 countries. The survey measured three dimensions: whether scholars see Development Studies as oriented toward transformation or problem solving within existing systems, whether the field should focus on the Global South or adopt a universal scope, and whether knowledge about development is understood in more positivist or constructivist terms. These are old fault lines. What’s new is that we can now measure how they vary by place and by discipline, and how they relate to one another. Three findings stand out:
1. Discipline trumps location
One debate in Development Studies concerns whether the field is divided along Northern versus Southern lines. Our data suggest it is not, or at least not in the way commonly assumed. Differences between respondents based in high-income countries and those based in non-high-income countries are small. Disciplinary training tells a different story. The discipline of a respondent’s PhD predicts far more consistently how they understand Development Studies than where they are based.
2. Problem-solving and positivism arrive as a bundle
The strongest pattern in the data is a tight correlation between theoretical orientation and onto-epistemology. Scholars who lean toward a problem-solving theoretical orientation also tend to hold more positivist views. Those who favour more radical transformation tend toward constructivism. This correlation holds across both high-income and non-high-income country groups. It does not appear to be driven by the disciplinary composition of either group.
This matters because it shows that disciplines transmit more than methods or subject-matter expertise. They also transmit normative orientations and epistemological commitments that persist when scholars move into Development Studies, regardless of where those scholars are located. An economist trained in causal inference and an anthropologist trained in ethnographic interpretation do not simply use different tools. They hold different views on what development is for and how social reality can be known. Doctoral socialisation produces coherent intellectual mindsets that sustain.
3. The scope debate is a different kind of argument
The question of whether Development Studies should focus on the Global South or adopt a universal frame has generated considerable recent debate. Our findings suggest that views on scope are less tightly structured by either discipline or location than views on orientation or onto-epistemology. The scope debate is a dispute about boundaries. The orientation and onto-epistemology divides concern the analytical and normative commitments that actually differentiate scholars from one another.
So what?
If Development Studies aspires to genuine interdisciplinarity, it must face the fact that many scholars arrive with doctoral training that is disciplinary. PhD programmes socialise scholars into specific ontological and epistemological commitments. These commitments persist even when scholars later work in a nominally interdisciplinary field. Cross-disciplinary dialogue requires deliberate institutional design in curriculum, editorial practice and research collaboration.
The data do not settle debates about power asymmetries in knowledge production. They do, however, suggest that treating the field’s identity primarily as a North-South question may obscure a deeper source of fragmentation. The more pressing challenge for Development Studies may not be where scholars are based. It is what they were trained to believe about knowledge, power and the purpose of the field.
Ryan Briggs is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and affiliated faculty in the Guelph Institute of Development Studies at the University of Guelph. His research focuses on meta-science, foreign aid, African politics, and effective altruism. His work has appeared in journals including Nature, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and the Journal of Politics. He previously taught at Virginia Tech and American University.
Andy Sumner is Professor of International Development at King’s College, London, and President of European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Economics and Development Studies at Padjadjaran University, Indonesia; and Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the United Nations University, WIDER, Helsinki and the Center for Global Development, Washington DC.
Image: David Clode on Unsplash
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
I thought there was evidence that people who give more weight to self-interest (their own and other’s) self selected to study economics, so perhaps it is not that PhD programmes socialise them into such assumptions.
Isn’t there evidence that people self-select into different disciplines according to their own characteristics, rather than PhD programmes socialising them?