Source: The future of ‘development’ – and IDS@60 | zimbabweland This year is the 60th anniversary of the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex. IDS has been an independent institute linked to the university since June 1966, so the birthday party is not due quite yet. Since its early days with a […]
This year is the 60th anniversary of the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex. IDS has been an independent institute linked to the university since June 1966, so the birthday party is not due quite yet.
Since its early days with a focus on training civil servants and others in the newly independent former colonies it has come a long way. The institute’s founding director, Dudley Seers, laid out a vision for ‘development’ that was progressive and far-reaching, aiming to generate economic independence and wealth in ways that would banish the idea of a separate, poor, marginalised ‘third world’ over time.
That this hasn’t happened, and that there are even starker inequalities today than 60 years ago is a recognition of the persistence of particular capitalist relations, with geographic centres of power. These geopolitical axes of course have shifted, and no one could have predicted the rise of China or even India, Mexico, Brazil or Indonesia. But the failure of development – and particular ‘aid’ – in many parts of the world, especially Africa, is witness to the limitations of the development project.
Today, the very idea of ‘development’ – and so development studies and institutes like IDS – is being questioned. The collapse of funding is well known but it is perhaps the shift in discourse that will have the most lasting impact. No longer are ‘northern’, rich OECD countries such as the UK expected to provide development support as part of an internationalist commitment to other, poorer places. Percentage targets of GDP as aid spending are being slashed or simply ignored. The ideals of the 1960s no longer exist, and the late Barbara Castle, who was the Labour minister responsible for supporting IDS at its inception, would be appalled by the attitude of the current Labour government.
An IDS journey
Rather shockingly I have been employed at IDS for just over half its existence. I arrived from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in January 1995 just as the last of the core funding was being cut. Margaret Thatcher had put paid to earlier largesse, but it didn’t suppress the commitment to big ideas and important debates. There were the classic debates around the role of states and markets under neoliberalism; the important discussions over the economics of poverty; pathbreaking work on gender and development; research on the politics of democratic decentralisation and many important studies on the impacts of globalisation and changing patterns of trade. Some years back, Richard Jolly produced a fascinating personal history of the place, which is well worth a read.
I arrived at IDS having engaged with the institute through different connections before. At IIED we had worked closely with Robert Chambers and the on-going work on participation, rapid (later participatory) rural appraisal and approaches to farmer participatory research (farmer first and beyond). I had also worked with Jeremy Swift, who years before was my external PhD examiner, together with Camilla Toulmin on pastoralism and dryland development, and the whole emergence of the ‘new ecology’ or rangelands and pastoralism.
With the establishment of the Environment Group by Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, IDS (belatedly) engaged with environment and development issues. Through our collective work on ‘environmental entitlements’, ‘environmental policy processes’ and ‘sustainable livelihoods’, IDS began to get a reputation for challenging conventional wisdoms and bringing a social science perspectives to such debates. We were able to develop this through ESRC funding for the STEPS Centre from 2006 in partnership with SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) at Sussex, continuing remarkably for 16 years until 2021, and through many other projects led by IDS fellows and partners.
On the back of generous funding for research from the then UK Department for International Development after 1997, along with others, IDS blossomed – and grew. Staff and student numbers expanded on the back of the international development aid boom. ‘Things can only get better’, as the New Labour song went. But times change, and the rise of inward-looking nationalistic policies, linked to populist positions that reject an internationalist outlook, has meant that an unwavering commitment to development – once part of a strong cross-party consensus in the UK – has gone.
With Trump and Musk slashing USAID, the impossible became certain, and many other governments have followed suit, if with a bit more stealth and subtlety. Declining funding has been made worse by the collapse in international student numbers, with hostile immigration policies discouraging many from coming to the UK. A perpetuation of austerity policies has decimated higher education, and the bright uplands of the 1960s are nowhere to be seen today.
New narratives, recasting development
Instead, in this new context, new narratives around development are being developed, centred on national self-interest in a geopolitical context where a ‘rules-based’ order is rejected. So, for example, development is being recast as a project of ‘green extractivism’, driven by the rush for critical minerals to supply the energy transition; as centred on market-based instruments, public-private partnerships and state-funded ‘derisking’ for absolutely everything; and wrapped up in attempts to stem the flow of migrants from poor places. All are seen as domestic priorities, with opportunities for Western companies. Rather than confronting or transforming capitalism and the privileges of the imperial powers in favour of the periphery, ‘development’ is instead mobilised to support the core, sometimes linked to military adventurism. Much of this new development discourse is narrow, regressive and deeply uninspiring.
In the face of all this, what next? One response is simply despair and depression; another is to imagine that funding will return, and everything will go back to ‘normal’; but the most useful is to rethink and recast, not getting too dispirited, while accepting that the ‘aid era’ was time-delimited and has ended. The 1960s vision of development was often paternalistic and condescending as has been much development/aid practice since. Development as imagined then should have long been over. But how can the idea of development – a progressive vision of change that confronts power and privilege and seeks out alternatives – be reimagined?
Development reimagined for a post-aid world
I am frequently asked what is IDS going to do next? I don’t know the answer, but I can offer my two cents worth of what I hope will be a future in the ‘post-aid’ world. Even if old ideas of aid as charity die (certainly a good thing), there remain a number of critical global issues that affect us all, including those in ‘the global north’. A robust, progressive internationalism around so-called ‘global public goods’ is a necessity, but such priorities also usefully serve national interests and have support from domestic electorates too.
What am I thinking of? Addressing climate and environmental change; global public health (and pandemic preparedness); humanitarian support in conflict areas; and innovating around the governance of economic architectures for inclusive economies are all crucial – and importantly interlinked. There are of course many international organisations and agencies with mandates in these areas, and lots of international relations and geopolitics research groups and thinktanks that do research on such topics, but there are few that can connect global challenges to local realities and back again.
With the 60-year IDS track record on themes such as citizen participation, sustainable livelihoods, social protection, gender dynamics, governance and politics, a social science take on these global themes remains much needed. Such research would help counter the hubristic assumptions of solutions coming from top-down global policies or techno-fixes offering silver bullets to solve problems, while at the same time as offering ways of linking to local contexts and realities – real people and places – in ways that only deep, engaged research-action partnerships can do.
While such an agenda may not appeal to the extremely narrow nationalist populist politics of Trump or Farage, a reclaiming of an internationalist politics and with this a new type of development must surely be possible. This will mean less aid of the old type, fewer projects and more mature, long-term partnerships, more of a focus on global public goods and less emphasis on national and local problems that are best dealt with by national governments and citizens. Such a vision surely must be central to any politics that confronts an ascendant populist right across the world.
IDS is a special place, both for ideas and people and it is has allowed me the flexibility to pursue interesting, engaged research with many collaborators over 31 years, including throughout this period in Zimbabwe. The networks with colleagues at the University of Sussex have been central to this, through the STEPS Centre (co-run with SPRU, also 60 this year), as well as many other interactions. Let’s hope that IDS – and other similar organisations, north and south – can carve out a future in an increasingly turbulent world with a bold, internationalist and progressive vision that challenges the narrow negativity that currently dominates.
