Paper short abstract:

There is a gulf between development and innovation that can be bridged through a relational social justice. This can allow inclusion/equality to be affirmed without dis-incentivising growth/utility. Social justice should be about distributing material resources for equalising social relations.

Paper long abstract:

Phenomena of global development and technological innovation have been approached from two distinct theoretical perspectives. The first is the perspective of long-term social, political, economic, and technological transformations. The second is the perspective of short-term entrepreneurial activity that combines technological forces to create novelty, often destroying old ways of doing things i.e., the so-called ‘creative destruction’. Both structure and agency are interrelated perspectives, producing the evolutionary common ground of development and innovation theories. However, apart from this common ground, there is a gulf that needs to be bridged. In several respects, development theory is preoccupied with social values such as inclusion and equality whereas innovation theory is preoccupied with economic values such as growth and maximisation of aggregate utility. This gulf of competing values underpins public policies which are unable to deal with modern day crises such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and unsustainable development. I argue that the gulf between development and innovation theories can be critically re-thought and permanently bridged using a relational notion of social justice that can allow inclusion/equality to be affirmed without dis-incentivising growth/utility. Such a notion of social justice should be only concerned with equalising resources in as long as this eliminates hierarchies, oppression, and domination in globalised societies.

Paper short abstract:

Can we redeem ourselves? I believe we can only if we recognise, in our social, cultural, and economic practices, our entangled complicity with the elite networks of eco-capital that perpetuate the Anthropocene. Decolonising alternatives exist and require the nomadic ethics of welcoming strangers.

Paper long abstract:

Ethical treatments of the Anthropocene tend to be clinical or even analytical, frequently cataloguing tables of responsibilities among different agents and institutions from capital to political parties, thereby permitting my own habitus to slip through the cracks of accountability. Levinasian ethics cuts through the fog and calls on me to face my obligation to the other directly, in this case, children, asylum seekers, and nonhuman life and nonlife. In this paper, I show that I must indeed take on this onus head on by paying attention to my ways of living and their entanglements with interlocking elite networks and their systemic violence.

This paper is a philosophical confession to children of the Anthropocene. My generation's culpability has deep roots that must be acknowledged fully if we are to have a chance of redeeming climate justice. Those roots are the links that we (the privileged 5 percent in academia, think tanks, and other elite establishments, even when we bemoan our misfortune or financial deprivation) maintain with those deep in the inner circle of power. Our social roles in prolonging capitalism run well beyond our vegan, organic consuming selves; in fact they perpetuate them to our puzzlement. With an anarchic and non-identity based ethics of the other, we might just discern our complete responsibility as rentiers, patrons and allied base capacities of everyday deception.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses a core tradition of development theory, structuralism, to reflect on the limits of contemporary approaches to sustainable development and reconsiders forgotten structuralists contributions on an ecologically sustainable and needs-based approach to development for the periphery.

Paper long abstract:

The decade of the 1970s stands as a singular moment in the history of development thinking. It is indeed marked by the convergence of three major intellectual trends.

Firstly, the effort among structuralist development thinkers — i.e., thinkers studying the political-economic reality of peripheral countries — to overcome the economic reductionism that had characterised early post-war development theory. In addition, the 1970’s also saw the entry of the ‘environmental problem’ on the global stage. Rising environmental concerns presented structuralist thinkers with two challenges: i) reaffirming the right-to-development of the peripheral world against neo-Malthusian views, and ii) analysing the origins and drivers of ecological degradations and their implications for the development of “under-developed” nations. However, the conceptual outputs of this attempt to integrate ‘development’ and ‘the environment’ have been largely forgotten. This is a direct consequence of a third trend: the progress of neo-liberal and neo-classical ideas which contributed to the marginalisation of development structuralism.

Against this background, the ambition of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate how the disappearance of the 'periphery' from development theory has led to the sedimentation of approaches to sustainable development that fail to properly consider how to avoid the reproduction of global asymmetries in a green configuration of global capitalism. Secondly, to reclaim and reconsider the concept of eco-development, a concept that emerged in the 1970s and catalysed the heterogeneous attempts of structuralists to reject mimetic forms of development and to reflect on an ecologically sustainable and needs-based approach to development for the periphery.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws out ontological inconsistencies in development's status as a unique sub-discipline of economics. I argue that its existence is predicated on geopolitical grounds, and refute plausible differentiating characteristics that could justify its separation from other fields of economics.

Paper long abstract:

Economists devote substantial resources to ideating notions of optimal social organization. However, the discipline allocates remarkably few to the study of its own institutions — and the implications of those structures for the form that scientific output takes. This paper addresses this deficiency by considering critically the question of whether development can and should stand unique as a sub-discipline of economics. First, drawing on seminal work by Lionel Robbins, I propose and discuss a definition of development as an analytic category, drawing out its ontological peculiarities vis-á-vis other sub-disciplines of economics. Then, through a critical review of the post-war intellectual history of economic development, I discuss the usefulness and uniqueness of development’s core themes, arguing that remarkably little in principle separates the field from others in economics. Finally, I reflect on the utility and future of development economics, arguing that its existence justifies a paradigm where the lives and livelihoods of a vast majority of the world’s population are discounted against those of a small group of countries in the Anglo-European “core”. I thus propose a merger of the fields and institutions of development with labor, health, and other sub-disciplines, contending that development commands a historical legacy duly unfit for a vastly evolved economic and political praxis.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the boundaries of development organisations in a case study of two NGOs working on youth employment in rural Uganda. Organisational boundaries are blurry as consortia work together on projects, build on previous projects, and often depend on work of various outside actors.

Paper long abstract:

Where does the world of international development projects start or end? On an organisational level, development tends to ‘arrive’ in the form of planned interventions that turn into projects that are pioneered by development organisations, partner organisations, or implementing organisations. It is typical that one project is done by multiple organisations co-working, while those organisations are simultaneously working on other projects in other collaborations. In addition, development is temporally stretched out, as organisations use lessons, infrastructure, personnel, partnerships from previous projects they worked on – sometimes literally copying them. Also in terms of those who are working in development – the employees or development workers – it may be quite unclear who is working for, working with, or is on the receiving end.

Based on a study with two development organisations in Uganda, this paper explores these boundaries. It follows an ethnography of development approach with an agricultural development organisation and a direct cash transfer and graduation programme that are both working on promoting decent work in rural areas. This paper argues for better understanding of the world of work in international development organisations, and how this understanding affects development as a concept both in theory and in practice.

Paper short abstract:

While looking to heritage may contribute to reconceptualising development, instrumentalising the past for better futures risks reproducing depoliticised ‘top-down’ models of development, which aim to do development ‘better’ rather than fundamentally rethink the meanings and relationships it entails.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the potential and politics of mobilising ‘heritage’ for development. Heritage can be understood as the use of the past in the present for contemporary and future needs. Appeals to heritage may inform radical reimaginings of development studies and practice. However, the utility of looking to the past to bring about ‘progress’ is also increasingly recognised within the formalised development and heritage sectors, envisaged in part as a departure from imposition of standardised Western models and a way to better recognise local context and knowledge. Such attempts often position heritage as a public good, and a form of capital that can be mobilised to achieve existing development visions and strategies more effectively, while development is treated as self-evident, uncontested, and always positive. By obscuring the extent to which what constitutes a valued past and a better future is contested, the instrumentalisation of heritage for development risks reproducing unequal power relations between ‘experts’ and ‘beneficiaries’, and within and between ‘communities’. This does not mean heritage is unimportant in reconceptualising development. Indeed, all around the world people frequently draw on elements of the past in responding to challenges and opportunities, or imagining a better society, including in claims for restitution and reparation. Considering how the past is selectively used to pursue ‘progress’, and whose pasts and whose futures are at stake, thus offers a means to better understand the dynamic processes through which we work out what kind of development is desired and how it should be achieved.