By Anna Wood.

A workshop marking the 50th anniversary of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes was held at King’s College London ahead of the Development Studies Association annual conference in June. The workshop sought to pause and reflect on a number of other development studies journals, institutes and scholarly associations also marking ‘half century anniversaries’. The workshop was a reflection on the current state of the field and broadly focused on development framings and on the questions of universality and decolonisation.

The first panel asked: Should development be transformational or more modest? Sam Hickey (University of Manchester), who chaired the session, gave a potted history, over modernization and dependency theory, towards big narratives of the neoliberal era and introduced the main themes that would be covered by the speakers. I dwell here on Eyob Balcha Gebremariam’s (University of Bristol) provocation on ‘decentring coloniality.’ In his presentation he drew on the case of the CFA franc as an example of the enduring structures of coloniality which persistently undermine attempts at transformation; in the discussion he argued that the idea of transformation was a ‘luxurious debate to have’ in such contexts, warning of the need for care when we think about it. Having just returned from Dakar, Senegal, where demands to leave the CFA franc featured loudly in the recent election and its run up, I found this intervention particularly pertinent.

The case of the CFA franc is gaining increasing visibility, in scholarship and politics alike. Created in 1945, at the time pegged to the French franc, now to the Euro, it continues to bind France to fourteen countries (fifteen including the Comoros franc) across central and west Africa. Where the banknotes have been redesigned – from depictions of Marianne, symbolic of the French Republic, to African savannahs and monuments – the manufacture of its coins and notes, decision making on its valuation and foreign exchange transactions all happen in France. It is the only currency arrangement like it in the world, and one that continues to extract wealth and pose a significant obstacle to development across these regions.

Workshops like this one marking anniversaries are productive in presenting a moment of reflection on the history of the field. The case of the CFA franc taken here calls for the ‘recovery’ of conceptual tools and approaches like dependency theory, often considered outdated and sidelined from analytical work. Such calls can be read alongside a push back against the recent reframing of Development Studies as ‘global development,’ a universalising framing that obscures historical inequalities between the North and South. Pritish Behuria (University of Manchester), one of the co-authors of this paper just cited and one of the workshop convenors, highlighted this debate in his contribution on the day. Whether modest or transformational, such approaches restate the importance of South-centred and politically driven scholarship that is vital to guiding Development Studies as a field today.

Anna Wood is a Research Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge studying poverty, social policy, and politics in Senegal.