This blog by Aroop Chatterjee presents highlights from a workshop held as part of EADI’s 50th Anniversary, organised in collaboration with the Development Studies Association (DSA) and co-sponsored by the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute Journal of Development Studies Conference Fund.

The workshop brought together several distinct perspectives at a critical juncture in development studies, both in terms of the disciplinary relevance in the academy, and its crucial societal role in the face of interacting ecological, economic and political systemic crises – or what is now most popularly labelled as the ‘polycrisis’. As political economy paradigms have shifted over the last 70 years, Development Studies has also evolved in its critical analysis of issues. This has happened in the face of continued challenges of structural development but also in response to neoliberalisation of developing countries that seeks to negate these in favour of “market-led reforms”. 

This common theme underpinned several presenters’ analyses – Ravi Kanbur (Cornell University) posited that ‘development economics’ has dissolved into economics, applied to development countries (yet another case of Economic Imperialism?);  Pritish Behuria (Global Development Institute, Manchester) positioned Development Studies as an intellectual bulwark against “International Development” and “Global Development” to preserve its emancipatory origins; Hulme reflected on his career as it traversed across disciplinary imperatives  of the development challenges as they’ve been articulated at different times.

How should Development Studies navigate the powerful agendas that design development, and development economics, discourses? More critically, how can Development Studies manoeuvre through the tensions of context-specific approaches and universalising approaches? An example of this tension lies in the challenge brought from ‘decoloniality’.  Decolonial frameworks have helped, as Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS) noted, to reveal colonial foundations and dynamics present within the development industry. Devika Dutt (KCL) argued that central to the future of Development Studies must be to ‘decolonise’ the concepts and approaches, as without doing so, it risks inadvertently reproducing the very hierarchical relations it seeks to break free from. In contrast, Behuria observed that some critiques of Development Studies has led, ironically, to an unusual alliance between neoclassical and post-development scholars (of which undoubtedly some decolonial scholars would fall under) into ignoring the importance of capitalist development. Kate Meagher (LSE) raised concerns that decolonial agendas often led to a focus only on indigenous knowledge, at the expense of critical local knowledge in ‘traditional’ disciplines, leading to weakened local capacity that could resist Eurocentric agendas which allow (neo-) colonial hierarchies. It should be said that decolonial scholars have been careful not to situate decoloniality as primitivism, yet often this has not prevented its use in ethno-nationalist agendas.

Meagher put a central focus on critical analysis as a fundamental method for decoloniality in development studies. This critical analysis has often been embodied in development studies and development economics and has in key to critiquing and pushing back against policies by hegemonic institutions of the global North. Meagher referenced Dependency Theory, Political Settlements by Mushtaq Khan, and Transformative Social Policy by Thandika Mkandawire. Yet surely added to this list (that frequently gets obscured) is the critical analysis that has critiqued and enriched Marxian analysis, most notably the stages of capitalism (equivalent to the critique of the stages of development in orthodox development economics, mentioned by Dutt). This includes the South African Marxist scholars who demonstrated the central role of and necessary co-existence of pre-capitalist relations for capitalism (as opposed to the assumed proletarianising forces of capitalism), and Mkandawire, who, in disproving the application of Warren’s theory of imperialism to Africa , revealed Eurocentric tendencies of even Marxian analysis (Mkandawire 1987). This is to say – critical analysis of mainstream development studies itself is not sufficient, critical analysis of “critical analysis” is just as crucial – this is surely at the heart of the decolonial critique.  Mezzadri argued that choosing between approaches sets up false dichotomies, and using plural frameworks allows Development Studies to centre and universalise theories and experiences from the global South to push back against Eurocentric paradigms and projects of development.

Two questions are key – first, with such pluralistic approaches, what does a coherent research agenda look like? The answer perhaps lies in the process. Despite the varied theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches involved in development studies, consecrating its core value- to promote and shape emancipatory and egalitarian capitalist transformation – is what must bring together development studies as a discipline, as it is only this that can counter the strong dynamics of nationalist-populism and collapse in the face of the poly-crisis. The second question remains – how do pluralistic approaches agree on a unified re-imagining of society?

Aroop Chatterjee is the lead researcher on Wealth Inequality at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a PhD candidate at the Department for International Development, King’s College London. His research is on the political economy of wealth inequality, and elites, in the global South.