Decolonising International Research Collaborations Requires us to go Beyond the “Ts and Cs Apply” Approach.

The tendency to approach the current drive of demanding equity, redressing power imbalances, and undoing colonial relations in knowledge production through international collaborations uses approaches that have just enough room to raise critical issues, but not enough for meaningful change writes Eyob Balcha Gebremariam.

Decolonising Development Studies: Progress, challenges, and the role of the Africa Charter

The task of decolonising Development Studies demands that we reckon with our place in the capitalist system. Louisa reports on some of the webinar’s key moments on the Global Development Institute blog.

The Charter is an Africa-centred framework for advancing a transformative mode of research collaborations that will serve to advance and uphold the continent’s place in the global production of scientific knowledge. Read the Charter in English, French and Portuguese.

Beyond ‘equitable partnerships’: the imperative of transformative research collaborations with Africa. By Isabella Aboderin, Divine Fuh, Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, and Puleng Segalo. In this provocation the authors draw on African and other postcolonial, decolonial and feminist scholarship, as well as systems thinking and global science data to argue that such ‘equitable partnerships’ efforts at best sidestep the urgent need for a much more profound rebalancing of the positioning of Africa and ‘Global North’ in the worldwide science and research ecosystem as a whole.

Beyond Tinkering: Changing Africa’s Position in the Global Knowledge Production Ecosystem. By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, Isabella Aboderin, Divine Fuh, and Puleng Segalo. The aurhors argue that the current global ecosystem of knowledge production exhibits multiple layers of injustices and inequities entrenched in its orientations, institutions, policy and legal frameworks and practices.

Decolonisation and the Pursuit of Human Dignity. Divine Fuh explores the complex relationship between decolonisation and the pursuit of human dignity. Fuh argues that the decolonial movement in South Africa has shifted its focus from the decolonisation of knowledge to addressing the suffering and inequality experienced by poor black South Africans.

Decolonising knowledge for development in the Covid-19 era. By Peter Taylor and Crystal Tremblay. This working paper seeks to explore current and emerging framings of decolonising knowledge for development, with the intent of helping to better understand the importance of diverse voices, knowledges, and perspectives in an emerging agenda for development research.

Reflecting on development: a call for a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics. By Peter Taylor, Melissa Leach, Hayley MacGregor and Ian Scoones. Calling for a ‘recasting’ of development – and development studies – in ways that are “underpinned by the centrality of universality (development as progressive change for all), plurality, justice, equity and resilience”.

Redefining equitable Research Partnerships: a Southern led Action Agenda: Southern Voice is leading an initiative to study power imbalances in development research and find means to address them. The initiative is in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies and supported by the International Development Research Centre.

Reflection Paper on Decolonising Knowledge for Development by the European Association of Development and Research Training Institutes.

You can read the concept note for the discussion, authored by Eyob Balcha Gebremariam et al here.