At the end of April I finish my ten year term as Director of the Institute of Development Studies, the wonderful, extraordinary Institute which has been my base for more than a third of a century. Here, in part one of two blogs, I reflect on my time at IDS.
I joined as a Fellow in 1990 to co-lead a then new area of work on the environment, amidst the rising concerns with climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation highlighted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. I never imagined I would still be here now, amidst global climate and ecological emergencies that have only intensified, intersecting with challenges of inequality, economy, democracy, technology and health that were then hardly imaginable.
Fresh from a Social Anthropology PhD on gender and resource use in the rainforests of Sierra Leone, and as one of a small handful of younger women in an Institute dominated by mostly-male, mostly-economist Fellows, making decisions in a senate-like Council (where it sometimes seemed that only the Roman togas were missing), I never imagined I would one day be leading it.
IDS has, since then, grown into a far more diverse and inclusive place, with our 270 staff comprising colleagues of all genders, ethnicities, ages and backgrounds in a wide range of research and professional roles, shaping our policies and day-to-day work through consultative processes.
There is more we could do, of course, and we continue to reflect and act on how we can ‘walk our talk’ internally around the justice, equity, diversity and inclusion we strive for in the wider world. Yet IDS has always felt like a community, united by progressive values and vision, but also warm relationships; a community that is uncompromising and critical, but also forward-looking and adaptable; a community that may have a physical base in the UK but constantly shares ideas and passions with partners all over the world, and this is a big part of why I have stayed here so long.
Shaping a better world
More fundamentally, IDS has been making critical contributions to the biggest challenges of successive eras, shaping a better world through research, knowledge, teaching and learning, leadership and impacts on policies and practices, and being part of this has been constantly exciting and rewarding. That this – and our central partnership with the University of Sussex – came to be recognised in the award of number one for Development Studies in the QS World University Rankings in 2015, a rank we have held for the last eight years running, has been a source of pride and celebration throughout my tenure as Director.
Yet this number one accolade has also rightly prompted us to ongoing reflection and self-critique about the meanings, practices and purposes of development and development studies; an ethos that has always been part of IDS, and that I’ve tried to continue under my leadership.
‘Whose development?’
Development, to many of us at IDS, has always been about far more than the discourses and practices of aid institutions, programmes and projects – valuable as these often are. To paraphrase Robert Chambers, whose 1986 book Rural Development – Putting the Last First and serendipitous research assistance for him as a naïve just-completed Geography undergraduate first drew me to IDS – it is ‘good change’ more broadly. And there are plural visions and versions of ‘good’, as my own anthropological perspectives, enriched over the decades through engagements with many colleagues, scholar-activists and communities, have always emphasised.
Asking ‘whose development?’ and ‘whose knowledge and expertise count?’ are longstanding stock-in-trades at IDS, along with participatory approaches that centre the perspectives and priorities of even the most marginalised people. So too are considerations of power, in its many guises, capacities to include and exclude, and to both open up and close down valuable deliberation and change. Development involves complex interactions between social, political, economic, ecological and technological processes, influenced by values, knowledge and power, and different possible directions have winners and losers, implicating justice.
Far-reaching ideas and influence
IDS groups, consortia and programmes with far-reaching ideas and influence in these areas over the decades are far too numerous to name-check here. They have addressed states and markets, trade and tax, health and education, conflict and humanitarianism, poverty and inequality, gender and social difference, and much more – with abiding concerns for the multiple dimensions of all of these, and the intersections between global, national and local perspectives.
For me personally, landmark learning came especially through our critical debates in the Environment Group of the 1990s, interacting with my research then on forests in West Africa; as part of the 25-country Citizenship Development Research Centre between 2000 and 2010, and then from 2006 as co-founder and co-Director of the ESRC STEPS Centre that linked IDS with colleagues in the University of Sussex and later in a five-continent consortium.
The STEPS ‘pathways approach’ we co-developed has shaped debates around science, technology and development; climate and energy; food and agriculture; water and sanitation, health and disease and more. Leaving a formal role in STEPS was my biggest regret in taking up the directorship of IDS in 2014, but the Centre continued to flourish until 2022. And its legacy lives on the Centre for Future Natures, the influence of the pathways approach in subsequent IDS-led reports from the 2016 World Social Science Report on Challenging Inequalities: Pathways to a Just World and 2023 Pathways to Equitable Food Systems, and in a large network of partners and STEPS Summer School graduates pursuing pathways to sustainability and social justice in creative ways all over the world.
While IDS Director, I’ve also continued my personal interdisciplinary, policy-engaged research and leadership on a range of overlapping and emerging themes of environment and sustainability, health, and social and gender justice – working with wonderful colleagues in IDS and in consortia with partners in African settings and beyond. In the last few years, particular foci have been the social and ecological dynamics of zoonotic disease, and – catalysed by the West African Ebola outbreak – bringing local lived experiences and social and anthropological knowledge into the heart of epidemic response and policy globally; work that became stunningly relevant when the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world.
Beyond so-called ‘developing countries’
Development for IDS has never been confined to so-called ‘developing countries’. The notion that development should also refer to progressive change in Europe and North America has been central since the Institute’s founding in 1966, part of to the canon of its first Director, Dudley Seers and colleagues in proposing ‘Britain – a case for development’ (Jolly and Luckham 1977).
Many IDS projects over the ensuing decades have included UK, European and North American cases, partners and sites. From John Gaventa’s paradigmatic work on power in Appalachia that gave rise to the Power Cube and is now being revisited as ‘green’ agendas impose new forms of disempowerment and injustice, to my research on vaccine anxieties amongst communities in Brighton as well as Guinea and the Gambia, recently revisited in work on Covid vaccines in UK, North American and African settings – and many more.
Looking back to my own early talks and opinion pieces as IDS Director, many emphasised development as progressive change for everyone everywhere ’in Brighton as much as Bamako or Bogota’. Alliterative slogans aside, IDS work has co-evolved with reflective critiques of simplistic and stereotyped categories and dichotomies between developed and developing, global South and global North.
Since 2015, such ‘global’ or ‘universal’ development has been core to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and more recently, evidence of the impacts of climate change and of the Covid-19 pandemic. These are relevant across all geographies and polities, although in different ways as shaped by particular contexts, histories and structural inequalities that include, but also cross-cut and complicate, dichotomies between the so-called global North and global South.
Recently, amidst important debates about decolonising development and development studies, renewed conversations are picking up with some arguing for a re-centring around global South experiences. IDS colleagues and I have engaged, drawing on our own research on pandemic impacts and arguing in their wake for a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics, relevant to all settings across the world.
Read: Reflecting and re-casting: a decade as IDS Director – Part two