Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Romain Chenet
(University of Warwick)
Maria Gavris (University of Warwick)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- The Future of Development Studies
Short Abstract:
This panel considers alternative approaches to conceptualising, pursuing, and expressing ‘development’, seeking to build on legacies of critical development thinking and scholarship while also exploring new ideas emerging out from the crises that mark our era.
Description:
Physical, epistemic, and psychological violence inflicted by dominant exertions of power across development eras has prompted repeated attempts to engage constructively with alternatives to the mainstream paradigm, responding to community experiences and diverse cultures.
Working with an overarching theme of ‘polycrisis’ and challenges / opportunities this presents for development studies, this panel invites a playful and generative approach in seeking paths past rightful but disempowering frustrations, desperation, and identity crises that – like in the 1990s – appear to be gripping our sector again. Stepping ‘out’ from what has been called our interregnum or, in Tibetan terms, our bardo, we include contributions from a plurality of sources to explore perspectives that marginalised ontologies, epistemologies, and human groupings can offer into development studies.
Our panel’s aim is to rearticulate and potentially discover new development aspirations for our common but differentiated futures. We share inputs from a diverse and evolving canon of post-development, pluriversal, degrowth, decolonial, ‘alternative’, and otherwise critical approaches to development studies. We encourage participants to also engage with temporal, dialectical, and/or discursive relationships between alternative approaches to development and overlapping crises: how do these crises shape meanings we give ‘development’, and how can these alternative meanings in turn influence our understanding of the polycrisis?
Regarding format, we are open to theoretical, conceptual, artistic, and practical / case-based responses to this panel, which can be experimental or ‘conventional’ in form (depending on proposers’ wishes in terms of how their contributions can best be articulated in the allotted time).
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This presentation will be an overview of degrowth, decolonial, and eco-feminist accounts of the polycrisis, and proposals for systemic transformation, with emphasis on the value of reproductive work for development.
Contribution long abstract:
The global polycrisis reawakened debates around the limitations of our current mode of development. While conventional accounts of the polycrisis assert that business as usual can continue if we implement a few technical tweaks, a wide range of alternative perspectives of the polycrisis recognise that what is needed for sustainable development is nothing short of systemic transformation.
This presentation will explore degrowth, decolonial, and eco-feminist theoretical accounts of the polycrisis. These, although conceptually different, all highlight how the polycrisis exposed the dependence of the economy on the non-market spheres (the environment and the care sector), and construct a vision of ‘development’ which focuses on making invisible work visible, with reproductive work – or what Ariel Salleh (1997) has called ‘meta industrial labour’ – at its core. Practically, such a vision has resulted in a demand for ‘wages for earthwork’ (Temin, 2024) which builds on the ‘wages for housework’ movement of the 1970s.
The presentation will therefore also consider synergies between these different alternative development paradigms, as well as reflect on the question of what role crises play in bringing about a paradigm shift.
Contribution short abstract:
This study critically examines Kenya’s Vision 2030 amid economic shocks, climate change, and political instability. Using post-development, decolonial, and pluriversal perspectives, it explores alternative, community-driven pathways that enhance resilience, sustainability, and inclusive development.
Contribution long abstract:
Kenya’s Vision 2030 was formulated as a roadmap to economic growth and industrialization, aimed at transforming the country into a globally competitive middle-income nation. However, persistent crises—including economic instability, political upheavals, climate change, and global health emergencies—have significantly disrupted this trajectory, exposing the fragility of conventional development paradigms. This study critically evaluates how these crises have reshaped Kenya’s development aspirations and investigates the potential of alternative frameworks grounded in post-development, pluriversal, and decolonial thought.
Drawing on these critical perspectives, the paper examines the role of community involvement, participatory governance, and localized economies in fostering resilience. It highlights key shifts, such as Kenya’s devolution process, grassroots climate adaptation initiatives, and public-private-community partnerships, while assessing their transformative potential. However, structural dependencies on foreign aid, extractive industries, and neoliberal economic policies continue to constrain efforts toward a more plural and sustainable development model.
This research argues for reimagining development beyond growth-centric models by embracing diverse, context-specific approaches that prioritize social justice, ecological sustainability, and economic plurality. It concludes that for Kenya to navigate its future successfully, development must be conceptualized as an evolving and participatory process shaped by multiple knowledge systems and community-led innovations rather than a rigid, top-down vision of progress. The findings contribute to broader debates on alternative development pathways, offering insights into how nations in the Global South can reclaim agency in defining their futures.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores UN policy's decade-long decays, mirroring losses of progressive capacity visible in lived experience. Considering ‘enthrallment’ thus enables playful exploration of necrotic maxims, while encouraging site-work to seek cultivable rumblings of renewal.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper adopts a discursive playfulness in charting decade-long decays implied by United Nations (and relatedly intertextual) development policies. Focusing on ‘receding horizons’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2012), I discuss high-level policy shifts that mirror losses of progressive capacity visible in more everyday experiences (e.g., climate, gender inequality, and economic oppression).
Critiquing such policies for flattening development into a technical problem with only technical solutions (Telleria, 2017), it is widely posited that inherent flaws are discursively occluded to reduce development into a structure of slim expertise, re-enabling liberal economics to retain a long-discredited supremacy. Such analysis of ‘enthralled’ policies can thus be interpreted to show our era occupying an inter-reigning limbo state, where ‘Gramsci’s monsters’ are zombified maxims which cling to deathly existence and harm scope for flourishing. My paper however highlights that we do have schematics for inclusive futures, galvanising scope to return into the ‘bestial belly’ and seek cultivable rumblings for renewal amidst a miasma of necrotic rationalities.
I thus hope to show how accumulations of new vitalising norms and modalities of experience may reshape 'development', offering escape from the material/psychic violences inflicted by decaying structures in our shared times.
Contribution short abstract:
Gathering cultural forms watched by fragments of the global collective worker – and situating them via the global social process of capital, rather than ‘stages of development’ – this paper hopes to probe how they can reveal differences and commonalities in these fragmented workers’ struggles.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the fragmented subjectivities of the global collective worker. Taking case-studies from positions in global value chains, the paper cris-crosses countries in different ‘stages of development’, to bring together cultural forms global workers are watching and reproducing themselves through–from Zambian miners’ preferred TV shows, to Silicon Valley developers’ favoured video games. And, while it firmly situates these cultural forms in relation to each fragment’s global position, it does so by comprehending each fragment as an aspect of a fundamentally global process (Bonefeld and Holloway 1996). In so doing, the paper seeks to step ‘out’ of the methodological statism that can afflict conceptions of ‘development’. Here, we are not dealing with organic national ‘paths of development’ that have been held back or accelerated – either by inter-national (core-periphery / unequal) relations, or national policy successes / mistakes (Iñigo Carrera 2016). Rather, what may appear as ‘under-development’ is simply a result of how that territory has participated in the uneven development of global capital. This is not to deny that inter-national relations have effects – but to stress that the determining relation is between territories and a global capital whose dictates are produced ‘behind the backs’ of all state actors. From this basis, it’s hoped we can probe these forms for the differences and commonalities in how these fragments of the global collective worker are processing their struggles to survive in –and against - a crisis-ridden social process whose only developmental concern is that ‘money beget more money’.