Paper short abstract

This paper will review very recent experience with Official Development Assistance, updating a chapter to be published in an edited book during 2026. Deteriorating international security and the rightward political shift in the Global North has increasingly marginalised the Global South.

Paper long abstract

This paper will review very recent experience with Official Development Assistance, updating a chapter to be published in an edited book during 2026. The discussion will present illustrative data, providing evidence in terms of the level and composition of ODA, as well as examples of the impact that reductions in ODA has in recipient and donor countries. Deteriorating international security and the rightward political shift in the Global North have increasingly marginalised the Global South meaning that ODA is not by any means the only area where these changes have been detrimental to the socio-economic development of the Global South. Examples from international trade and finance, global health measures and responses to climate change will be presented as evidence.

Paper short abstract

This paper shows how colonial sugar cane production in Maui reshaped land and water systems, intensifying the 2023 forest fires. Plantation irrigation, land clearing, and the displacement of Indigenous governance produced fire-prone landscapes, amplifying wildfire risk under climate stress.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how colonial development trajectories in Maui reshaped land and water systems, increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, with particular attention to the legacy of sugar cane production. It argues that plantation-era infrastructure, epistemic erasure of Indigenous ecological knowledge, and settler-colonial political economy reconfigured ecosystems to prioritise extractive accumulation over ecological resilience. Irrigation works, stream diversions, wetland drainage, and land clearing for sugar cane monoculture transformed hydrological and vegetative regimes, producing dry, fire-prone landscapes that persist long after the decline of the plantations.

Rather than treating the 2023 Maui wildfires as an anomalous climate event or a failure of emergency response, the paper situates them within a longer history of colonial development that reorganised natural processes. Indigenous systems of watershed management and fire-adaptive landscapes were displaced by legal, scientific, and bureaucratic frameworks that defined land and water as productive inputs rather than relational ecologies. These transformations did not merely shape risk exposure but also altered how climate stress manifests materially on the ground.

Drawing on and extending existing scholarship on the production of vulnerability, the paper shows how development operates as a historical process that conditions disaster outcomes over time. By tracing the connections between sugar cane production, water governance, and contemporary wildfire risk, the analysis demonstrates how colonial infrastructures continue to structure environmental instability in the present. The Maui case contributes to decolonising development debates by showing that reducing disaster risk requires confronting the historical and institutional foundations of development models that amplify natural disasters.

Paper short abstract

Malaysian palm oil exports to Europe -- originated as colonial primary commodity -- has been framed as an environmental and health threat reflecting a core–periphery relationship through neocolonial forms of economic and discursive regulation and white supremacy ‘political ecology’ imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

The historical and contemporary development of Malaysian palm oil exports to Europe originated as a colonial primary commodity cultivated under British rule for western European markets. Palm oil has since become a widely used global ingredient and a competitor product. In recent years, Malaysian palm oil has been increasingly framed in Europe as an environmental and health threat, associated with tropical deforestation and sustainability concerns. We argue that this shift reflects the continued maintenance of a core–periphery relationship, through neocolonial forms of economic and discursive regulation in which European industries and states redefine the value and perception of palm oil as a perpetual primary commodity from the Global South that causes environmental and social harm. These processes are also based on white supremacy ‘political ecology’ imaginaries. We argue that these dynamics perpetuate unequal exchange between western European and Malaysian economic markets and actors. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia, England, and Germany, we present our preliminary findings using a transdisciplinary approach combining artistic research, critical political ecology, global value chain analysis, and structural theories of unequal development.

Paper short abstract

The fascinating story of the Padma Bridge constructed by Bangladesh, challenging the funding withdrawal by WB. Reviews the lessons from this project and also from two other projects (Aswan Dam and Bokaro Steel plant) for which the original promised foreign funding failed to materialise as well.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to review the lessons from three major challenging projects for which the foreign funding as originally expected failed to materialise: Padma Bridge of Bangladesh, Aswan Dam of Egypt and Bokaro Steel Plant of India. In particular, the governance issue as raised by the World Bank in the case of the Padma Bridge project of Bangladesh needs to be closely attended as this is often a major concern in the public sector projects in many developing countries. Also, the urgency to attend to macro-economic stability for faster economic development needs to be strongly emphasised, thus necessitating to attend to the two main gaps (the savings-investment gap and the foreign exchange gap) which have remained as major hurdles for economic development of most developing countries. So, the relevant developments as taking place in Third World countries will be closely reviewed. Indeed, there is a clear message: a developing country should not take it for granted that even if a project is economically sound, it will necessarily bring external funding. Hence the urgency to endeavour to improve its own financial capability and, in particular, make every attempt to raise its savings and also increase its foreign exchange earnings, thus ensuring its ability to close the savings-investment and the foreign exchange gaps, the two major gaps constraining faster economic growth. Indeed, without sound macro-economic management and good governance, a developing country will continue to experience difficulties, thus perpetuating its underdevelopment (see, e.g., A Clunies-Ross, et al, 2009; and M Huq, forthcoming).

Paper short abstract

We attempt to understand the critical process of challenging and transforming the dominance of imperialism-driven knowledge systems by recognizing, valuing and integrating indigenous, local and marginalized ways of doing, knowing, thinking, producing and democratically disseminating knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Knowledge is often legitimized in the context of the alliance between the State and market by pushing society to the margins. The dialectical relationship between the production and certification of knowledge, on the one hand, and its application and dissemination, on the other should be examined against the backdrop of the nature of the state itself, the location of the state within the matrix of a class-divided society and the relationship of the state with various contending social forces. The state is, rather, thought of as an entity that stands outside and above society, an autonomous agency that is invested with an independent source of rationality, and the capability to initiate and pursue programmes of development in a linear fashion. There is an explicit and/or implicit disjunction between the State and society, slurring over questions about the social foundations of political power and the making of public policy. The categorical imperative lies in the critical process of challenging and transforming the dominance of imperialism-driven knowledge systems by recognizing, valuing and integrating indigenous, local and marginalized ways of doing, knowing, thinking and producing knowledge that were hitherto suppressed by colonialism, aiming for epistemic justice and diverse knowledge creation and dissemination.