Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that development studies needs to include the thinking conducted within religions. On the basis of two case studies, it discusses how theological reflection can be an important resource for interrogating processes of social change and creating new leaderships.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the field of 'religion and development' being now established, development studies remains cautious in engaging with the worldviews coming from religions. The paper argues that development studies, as a field of study that bears upon processes of social emancipation, needs to broaden its scope to include the thinking conducted within religions, i.e. theological reflection. On the basis of two cases studies, the paper discusses how the articulation of people's experience of disadvantage and dispossession from within a religious framework can help create spaces for new leadership to emerge.

The paper starts with discussing how development studies is constantly re-interpreting its geographical, multi-disciplinary and normative commitments in the face of new global realities. After analysing how development studies has been, and is currently, dealing with the question of the ultimate ends of social change, the paper discusses contributions from within religions and the normative standpoints from which they interrogate processes of social change. The paper then looks at the experience of dispossession of indigenous peoples in the Amazon and of extreme poverty in Bangladesh. It examines how their experience has been mediated by reflection about development's ultimate ends from within the normative standpoint of religious worldviews, and how such mediation has created new spaces for new leaderships against exclusion and dispossession to emerge. The paper concludes that leadership for global challenges does not only need leaders but also normative standpoints from which leaders can interpret, and transform, development processes. Theological reflection can act as a powerful resource for this.