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Paper short abstract

The proposal centers on the nature of DS in Nigeria. The findings shows a splintered tradition of teaching DS in traditional Social Sciences and current trend to establish independent DS programmes. I posed a contestation between offering DS in splintered disciplines vs. creating new DS programmes.

Paper long abstract

Development Studies (DS) is a transdisciplinary discipline and became prominent during the late decolonisation period - 1940-1960s. It was established to focus on colonised nations transition to ‘modern states’ based on Western notion of progress and enlightenment and political economy of resource transfer. There is paucity of literature exploring DS curriculum, pedagogies, and the state/nature of DS in various countries. The UK, Australia, and Canada, representing the countries with the earliest DS programmes have contributed more to the available literature. There is only a handful of literature on the state-of-the-field of DS in the Global South, including South Korea, Malaysia, and Ghana. Therefore, this proposal centres on the nature of DS in Nigeria.

Based on a critical qualitative research inquiry and multiple qualitative data, including ethnographic interviews with nineteen development lecturers across eleven universities in Nigeria. The findings showed that DS is mainly offered as Postgraduate specialisations and (splintered) across various Social Science disciplines and the epistemology is usually biased towards the discipline offering the program. The main exception is the recent inclusion of DS as an undergraduate program in Nigeria’s curriculum standards - Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS). The National Open University (NOUN) also offers an undergraduate interdisciplinary DS programme. The findings poses a final question and contestation between offering DS in splintered disciplines (‘Do we need DS to understand Nigeria's developmental challenges?’) and interdisciplinary DS (‘Despite our development challenges, we do not have a state-of-the-art Development school and an undergraduate foundational programme in DS’).