A new blog for 2025 signposts some of the ways GDI researchers are using their expertise to conceptualise future threats and reimagine some of the ways we organise the world. Read the full blog.

Lessons from Africa – for Manchester: Diana Mitlin reflects on what working on the African Cities Research Consortium has brought to her work at the University of Manchester, and how that can improve development in Manchester and the role the University plays in this. Read more.

Pragmatist-critical realism as a development studies research paradigm: Richard Heeks and colleagues have published a new paper on pragmatist-critical realism as a development studies research paradigm and explores what it would mean not to fully integrate the two but to bring together complementary aspects as a new research paradigm: ‘pragmatist-critical realism’. Read the open access article.

Pritish Behuria published the paper, ‘Is the Study of Development Humiliating or Emancipatory? The Case against Universalising ‘Development‘ in European Journal of Development Research.

The new book, China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South, edited by Richard Heeks, Christopher Foster, Ping Gao, Xia Han, Nicholas Jepson, Seth Schindler and Qingna Zhou, was published by Routledge.

Lucas Alencar, a post-doc with the Sustainable Forests Transitions team, published a paper in Land Use Policy titled ‘Long-term landscape change in contrasting land occupation strategies in the Brazilian Amazon’.

Seth Schindler and Steve Rolf published ‘Geostrategic globalization: US–China rivalry, corporate strategy, and the new global economy’ in Globalizations.

Maria Rusca and colleagues published ‘Pluralising the materiality of water: More-than-water, lively waters, water with, and the agency of hydro-social assemblages’ in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Maria also co-authored ‘Experimental and speculative political ecologies for an age of crisis, hope, and action’ in Progress in Environmental Geography.