Paper short abstract:

What forms of 'discipline' can help to decolonise development studies? I suggest and empirically test a deliberative approach that is prefigurative as well as critical. It also offers a critical realist perspective, combining complexity ontology, abduction and retroductive case-study validation.

Paper long abstract:

What would a fully ‘decolonized’ development studies look like? And what form of ‘discipline’ can avoid itself fostering colonial-style concentrations of knowledge and power? Development studies can flourish by being highly undisciplined or permissive, but at what opportunity cost to its contribution to social justice? This paper addresses these questions by defining development studies not as a static realm of research based on a settled body of knowledge, but as a research process that is both deliberative and unruly. Central to the identity of development studies, defined in this way, are the evolving values and principles governing participation in the development studies research community. The issue of discipline concerns how these are defined and governed. I contribute to this process by proposing five guiding principles for development studies: (1) plural conceptualisation of development; (2) methodological pragmatism; (3) commitment to fair and equitable research processes; (4) commitment to socially just research outcomes; and (5) cultivation of research autonomy. These are explored through analysis of three case studies of development research in Malawi - a context in which local ideas about development (as 'chitikuko') are deeply bound up with the idea of dependency. The case studies concern NGO brokerage, tobacco diversification and donor-government relations in the mainstreaming of social assistance. Rooted in complexity ontology and critical realist philosophy, the paper combines theoretical underlabouring with an abductive leap (in the form of the proposed principles) and their retroductive validation through case studies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper unpacks decolonizing development in Southeast Asia, drawing on firsthand experience & critical theory. It exposes power imbalances in aid dynamics, advocating for local agency & knowledge in fostering community-driven, sustainable initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

This research examines the complexities of decolonizing development in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam and Cambodia. This study provides an insider-outsider perspective based on the author's firsthand experience as a student volunteer working with regional NGOs. It analyzes power dynamics within development practices and their implications on diverse stakeholders ranging from international donors to local beneficiaries, shedding light on the complexities of development work. Adopting a critical development studies perspective, the research utilizes postcolonial theory and decoloniality to challenge Eurocentric approaches and advocate for the importance of local contexts and perspectives. It prioritizes agency, participation, and knowledge production as crucial elements in fostering a more equitable and sustainable development landscape.

Incorporating the perspectives of local communities, government officials, and international organizations, the research ensures a comprehensive understanding of decolonizing development. Case studies and comparative analyses from different regions within Vietnam and Cambodia provide a nuanced understanding of the variations and lessons learned. The study also explores the intersectionality of power dynamics, considering how factors like gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status intersect with the decolonization process, ensuring inclusivity and addressing potential disparities within communities.

Further, the research critically examines the dichotomy between short-term solutions provided by external donors and long-term, community-driven approaches. By analyzing how contrasting strategies affect the autonomy, effectiveness, and sustainability of development initiatives, this research provides practical insights for navigating the complex power dynamics in Southeast Asian development. It addresses immediate challenges and proposes community-driven solutions that foster long-term, locally grounded initiatives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper posits large grant-funded research centres (LGRCs) as on object of study in themselves. Two case studies of British LGRCs point to unintended consequences of the recent development research funding regime, with worrisome implications for concept generation and dissemination.

Paper long abstract:

Research centres are increasingly an integral part of the institutional and organisational infrastructure of knowledge production in development studies. However, whilst other components of the knowledge production have been problematised for their role in reproducing the hierarchies of the “global-north-dominated science and research ecosystem” (Gebremariam 2022), centres have received little direct attention. This paper identifies a new generation of large grant-funded research centres (LGRCs) as on object of study in themselves. These are large in terms of both ambitions and budgets, yet are distinguished from more permanent departments or institutes in their reliance on fixed- term grant funding. It seeks to unpick how their internal organisational dynamics and location within the British and global political economies of development research, may serve to maintain the uneven ability of differently located scholars to not only capture funding for their research, but crucially, to disseminate concepts. Whilst research grants commonly release scholars from contractual teaching and administration obligations, two case studies of LGRCs at a UK university show how this process of ‘buy-out’ can be conceived more broadly, with consequences for which ideas achieve impact in academic and policy discourse and what Paulin Hountondji (1990, 6) calls the “North’s monopoly of theory”.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines conventional inclusive development practices through the lens of deaf epistemic injustice. Drawing from a Cooperative Inquiry with Deaf women in Colombia, it advocates for redefining inclusion based on their lived experiences, emphasizing a shift towards epistemic justice

Paper long abstract:

This presentation interrogates conventional inclusive development practices through the lens of epistemic injustice and its implications for achieving more efficient, substantive, and long-lasting results. Drawing from a Cooperative Inquiry conducted with Deaf women in Colombia, the research challenges dominant, monolithic definitions of Deaf-inclusion. By co-constructing alternative understandings of what being included feels like, based on Deaf women's lived experiences and knowledge, the project demonstrates how epistemic justice can be central to decolonizing inclusive development practices.

This cooperative research highlights examples of epistemic injustice where Deaf women's experiences of exclusion and ‘failed practices of inclusion’ are undervalued in mainstream approaches and strategies of change. It highlights the limitations of current inclusion practices and policies, which often focus solely on accessibility while failing to recognize the complexity and nuances of Deaf experiences.

Through collaborative knowledge production, the research aims to start the conversation on how to co-create a practical definition of what inclusion truly is and feels like for those being included. Is an approach that demonstrates the potential of decolonial action research methodologies from Latin-America, such as Sentipensar (Fals-Borda) and Conscientisation (Paulo Freire) to counteract epistemic injustice and foster more realistic practices of inclusion within development studies. Ultimately, this research is an invitation to consider inclusion and development not as separate processes with their own expertise, but rather as two intrinsically intertwined components of a larger discussion of decoloniality.

Paper short abstract:

Practical experiences of decoloniality are already populating the sector, and they have an impact. This paper will present the experience of "Living decoloniality" a toolkit for practitioners and policy actors that gathered experiences of decoloniality happening in many different parts of the world.

Paper long abstract:

“Living decoloniality” is a toolkit in form of podcast, launched in 2023 for the benefit of policy actors and aid practitioners. Based on the assumption that the sector is steeped in coloniality and epistemic injustice, the toolkit collects practical experiences of decolonial re-existence through semi structured interviews to practitioners and researchers all over the world.

The first season introduced the concept of Coloniality and Colonial Matrix of Power (Quijano 2000), while the second focused on Coloniality of Being (Maldonaldo Torres 2007), and Coloniality of Gender (Lugones 2008). Snowball sampling was used to identify participants.

The toolkit also challenges methodologies as “scaling up” and “replication” when applied to aid, as inevitably focused on increasing numbers and maximizing resources in a logic of market economy, and therefore often leaving behind the most vulnerable and isolated subjects. It proposes therefore a different methodology for fruition and use, based on Extrapolation, as framed by Eugene Bardach (2007).

Finally, the podcast format was also chosen because of its potential: while only few practitioners would have accessed the toolkit had it been written as a report, many approached the podcast: it was downloaded about 2000 times in 6 months.

This paper is willing to present Living Decoloniality as a practical success, to share its methodological foundations and main findings after two seasons of broadcasting.

Paper short abstract:

Discussion on the empirical and experiential experiences of the Global South researchers based in the Western academia conducting research in their non-home Global South countries and how this entanglement of positionality, ethics and power contributes to knowledge creation on development studies.

Paper long abstract:

Development studies in western academia remain a discipline focusing on researching the challenges and issues of the so called ‘Global South’. In this context, developing country researchers, based in Northern institutions, are often questioned about their choice of research geographies if it differs from their ‘home’ countries in the Global South. Why Western researchers’ inquiry for ‘the other’ in developing countries is often presumed to be a matter of ‘scholarly’ choice.

This paper aims to problematize the power (as a function for knowledge) upheld in the knowledge creation of development studies (as a power exercise) within the Western academia by taking a closer look into the positionality and methodological experiences of developing country researchers work. The authors reflect on their own experiences based in Northern institutions, conducting research in East Africa – this positionality raise questions on race, gender, colour, and south-south relations. By reflecting  through diverse and multi-layered insider and outsider experiences and research collaboration, the article sheds light on the current knowledge creation structure and approaches that usually depart from and impose the Western gaze on developing country researchers, as well as south-south relational dynamics.

Thus, the paper illustrates the experiences of the researchers and critiques knowledge production in the field. We also situate the empirical and experiential experiences of the developing country researchers in a conceptual discussion on the  entanglement of knowledge and power as enabling forces for shift and how power shifts within the development studies and practice could potentially happen with the developing country researchers.

Paper short abstract:

The author reflexively engages with the question of how a co-creation approach to research projects in Africa was able to shift power for epistemic justice. The work was guided by the question ‘how can research spaces be transformed so that communities have a greater shared epistemic agency?’

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an autoethnographical account by a female social science researcher based in India on her reflections on providing advisory support to social justice research projects in Africa striving to align with a decolonial praxis. Decolonizing research strategies are less about the struggle for method and more about the spaces that make decolonizing research possible (Miguel, 2013). This paper discusses the various ways in which a co-creation process was set up in various research projects on which the author provided advisory support so that these projects align with a decolonial praxis. The co-creation process was guided by the question ‘how can research spaces be transformed so that partners and communities in the global south have a greater shared epistemic agency in knowledge creation processes?’ Feminist researchers emphasize on the importance of ‘non-hierarchical interactions, understanding, and mutual learning” (Golfin, Rusansky and Zantvoort in Harcourt, 2022). This ethic guided the co-creation phase. The motive for co-creation was to have a project which is committed to equity in research partnerships and has a commitment to social justice. Each project applied an approach of co-creation, with an emphasis on co-designing the research, intentional participant selection, participatory data collection, diversifying research methods and outputs, and intentional reciprocity and reflexivity at all stages of research. The author reflexively engages with the question of whether and how the co-creation approach was able to shift power for epistemic justice. It is hoped that this learning will inspire and challenge thinking and practice of decolonization of knowledge production.

Paper short abstract:

We aim contribute to the discussion on empowered deliberation in digital development to counter ongoing marginalisation of voices and epistemes, disrupting the recursion of colonial power dynamics and fostering cognitive justice in post-colonial contexts.

Paper long abstract:

One of the hallmarks of the colonial project is the devaluing of local cultures, epistemologies, and ways of being. Devaluing these aspects has become amplified in the digitalisation of post-colonial contexts, fuelled by top-down techno-feudalism and western agendas. Digitalisation perpetuates the marginalisation of local knowledge and knowledge systems, imposing foreign ways of being, and entrenching power and hegemonic influence from the west. These dynamics intersect with the global efforts towards digital development, which are meant to pursue an inclusive, coherent and integrated agenda across the social, economic, and environmental dimensions. The phrase 'leave no one behind' implies that existing contexts have to catch up to epistemic agendas set under ontologies misaligned with what progress and existence mean in post-colonial contexts. The paper critically presents the manifestations of coloniality in digital development across knowledge systems - problematizing the notions of ‘indigenous knowledge’, and the universalization of western epistemologies and methodology; forms of being - online identities codified through the western lens and norms; and power dynamics - associated with ‘digital inclusion’, digital power asymmetries associated with frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, digital surveillance, and techno-feudalism. Critical in framing how these elements influence the design and governance of frontier technologies, is a step toward opening and developing transformational spaces of deliberation, and calling out superficial representation of local actors in the name of ‘inclusive decolonised practice’. ‘Epistemic power’ of deliberation should be enabled where self-correcting learning processes among empowered actors are improved through knowledge and feedback in digital innovation.

Paper short abstract:

A systemic, action-oriented framework of epistemic justice is employed to analyse how development organizations are addressing coloniality. Although they are taking steps to increase testimonial and hermeneutical justice, systemic issues, like the decolonization of knowledge, are generally ignored.

Paper long abstract:

Epistemic injustice as a philosophical concept is being applied increasing in international development, information and knowledge management, health care and education to understand coloniality. Using the criteria of social philosopher, Morten Byskov (2021), the multiple epistemic injustices of development research, practice and teaching amount to social injustice. Although Miranda Fricker (2007) provides the analytical tools to explain how the knowledge of the marginalised is discredited, these tools do not directly show a way forward. This paper applies a systematic, action-oriented framework of epistemic justice (Cummings and colleagues, 2023), derived from interdisciplinary approaches to epistemic injustice, which provides signposts towards more just knowledge practices. This framework is used to interrogate new knowledge practices being introduced in a number of development organizations (iNGOs, NGOs, bilateral) to address coloniality. The analysis shows that while these organizations are implementing more just knowledge practices in terms of whose voices are being heard (testimonial justice) and new cognitive tools and terminologies (hermeneutical justice), many of the structural, systemic aspects of epistemic justice, such as decolonization of knowledge, are not on the agenda. One iNGO’s work on anti-racism illustrates how deeper systemic issues might be addressed.

Paper short abstract:

Through a critical analysis of the encounter between rights-based paradigms and feminist, anti-colonial scholarship on child participation, this paper argues that untangling children’s epistemologies from Eurocentric discourses is crucial to decolonising international development research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a critical analysis of the encounter between rights-based paradigms and feminist decolonial perspectives of child participation in international development. Inspired by the New Social Movements of the 1960s, participatory scholarship flourished in the late 1970s as a challenge to dominant research paradigms rooted in Eurocentric, positivist biases (Chambers, 1997; Fals Borda, 1979). Such scholarship, however, remained largely adult-centric until after the emergence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (United Nations, 1989), which provided the ontological and normative framework for children as subjects of rights, and thereby bestowed upon them right to be heard (Article 12). This paper argues that, as the CRC has come to constitute the dominant paradigm in research with children (Boyden and Ennew, 1997; Lundy, 2007), it also functions discursively to render certain forms of children’s knowledge illegitimate. The paper draws upon literature from decolonial feminist scholars engaged in participatory research with children who have sought to destabilise the Othering, Western-centric tendencies of rights-based child participation, including with a focus on: working children in Peru (Taft, 2019); children whose homes have been demolished by Israeli occupying forces in East Jerusalem (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009); and girls who have supported resistance fighters in Sri Lanka (Gowrinathan, 2021). Finally, drawing on personal insights and experiences of working alongside child and youth human rights defenders through the lens of subaltern theory, the paper considers alternatives through which children’s epistemologies can be explored and elevated as crucial forms of knowledge to counteract colonial hegemony in international development research.