After finishing my ten year term as Director of IDS, I will be stepping down at the end of April. In my first blog post I reflected on the wonderful, extraordinary Institute which has been my base for more than a third of a century. Here, in part two, I reflect on IDS research and strategies that I have been proud to be part of, and on how we can recast development to meet the complex challenges of today.
The continuities and changes in IDS themes and approaches that I described in part one, responding to shifting external contexts, are captured at least to some degree in the emphases of the Institute’s successive five year strategies, which we have co-developed amongst staff with many inputs from alumni and partners.
My first IDS strategy as Director, for 2015 – 2020, tasked us to ‘contribute to transformations that reduce inequalities, accelerate sustainability and build inclusive, secure societies’, and to ‘work locally and globally within a universal framing of development’, with much emphasis on development ‘beyond aid’ and on mutual learning between low, middle and high income countries.
By 2020 we were also emphasising the need to ‘respond to the shocks and disruptions of our era’ and the 2020-2025 strategy period, now in its final year, foregrounds strategic commitments to upholding climate and environmental justice; reducing extreme inequities; fostering healthy and fulfilling lives, and nurturing inclusive, democratic and accountable societies.
Histories of development and development studies
Going back further, Richard Jolly’s Short History of IDS: A personal reflection prepared for the Institute’s 40 Anniversary gives a candid account covering the period 1966 to 2008, including the Institute’s critical contributions to shifting development paradigms – from those centred on growth and modernisation, neo-liberalism and structural adjustment, to emphases on gender, rights and citizenship, sustainability and more.
And further still, the British Library of Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection, catalogued and brought to life in one of the most rewarding projects of my directorship period, tells a longer history of development preoccupations, silences, approaches and institutions since the 1950s, with numerous lessons for today. Histories of development and development studies have much we can learn from, and a crucial role in nourishing debate that is both critically-engaged with current development paradigms, yet engaged with diverse contexts and forward-looking.
Alongside these continuities and changes in what IDS works on have been important progress in how we work. Development studies has always claimed interdisciplinarity, but over the last decade we have fostered strengthening links between social sciences, natural sciences and arts and humanities more effectively, through flexible research and knowledge clusters within IDS and partnerships and consortia beyond.
Research that makes a difference to people’s lives has always been the Institute’s hallmark, and the last decade has seen even more that is engaged and often co-constructed with policymakers, practitioners and citizens, helping ensure relevance and impact; something we badged as ‘engaged excellence’ in the Institute’s 2015 – 2020 Strategy.
Pioneering knowledge platforms
In the early days of the internet IDS was a pioneer in online knowledge platforms and information services, and during the last decade these capabilities have grown, adapted and integrated right across the Institute, in a suite of approaches and programmes that do not just mobilise knowledge and evidence for development, but also foster worldwide reflection and learning on the practicalities and politics of these processes.
All this increasingly happens with partners and networks, extending from the global to the grassroots and including those strengthened since 2020 through the IDS International Initiatives in Brazil, China, Pakistan, Ghana, Europe and the MENA region. We’ve endeavoured to foster partnering principles and practices that are genuinely equitable, and it’s been particularly exciting to see networks emerge that disrupt mainstream development thinking, challenge established hierarchies and bring vernacular theories into play.
The massive international diversity of our postgraduate students, and the growth in their numbers from less than 100 to nearly 300 per year since 2014, is a further positive, bringing diversity of perspective and passion, nourishing our research and debates, and becoming a worldwide alumni community that has growth in strength and engagement over the last decade too.
Disruptions, uncertainties and crises
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just as the external world has been full of disruptions, uncertainties and crises during the last decade, so these have played into and required navigating within the Institute too. Shortly after I became Director, Brexit challenged an IDS that had always considered itself part of Europe; we’ve responded by re-committing even more strongly to our European partnerships and membership of networks such as EADI, while weathering the reduction in European students.
In 2020-2021 the Covid-19 pandemic that up-ended the world threw into disarray an IDS community that had always thrived on in-person relationships; we responded, like so many others, by taking our research, teaching, meetings and social events online but not without struggle, and all-important collegial relationships inevitably frayed.
The cuts in UK ODA budgets from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent GNI, linked to the pandemic and its economic and political fall-outs, hit hard an IDS that has always relied on significant ODA funding, even though this has been essentially competitive project-based, with no core institutional funding, since the 1990s.
Nevertheless the early part of my Directorship decade, from 2015, was a period of relatively high UK ODA funding for development research, with IDS and partners, like many universities, benefiting from schemes such as the Global Challenges Research Fund and DFID Aid Connect. With budget cuts setting in, we initially feared having to lose projects and colleagues but were able to respond with a collective ‘call to action’ amongst our staff, rescheduling projects and replenishing funds through diversification.
We have and are building an ever-richer array of relationships with new funding partners, including foundations. Yet the funding context is tighter and more competitive than ever before, and the Institute’s financial sustainability requires ever-faster running to stand still, taking its toll on workload and stress right across the Institute.
Adding still further to this perfect storm have been challenges linked to the UK and global political-economic context: a cost of living crisis affecting staff and students, and difficulties facing the UK University sector including dispute over the USS pensions scheme that brought us successive periods of industrial action during 2018 – 2023. These affected many UK universities but hit a small collegial institution like IDS particularly hard, and the resolution to the USS pensions situation in 2023 was welcome relief indeed.
Meanwhile, many of the places where we work have become more difficult and dangerous, beset by violent conflict, repressive authoritarianisms and heightened divisions and geo-political sensitivities. Protecting safety, work, relationships and reputation, individual and institutional, whilst upholding essential academic freedoms, is a constant juggle – one brought to the fore recently amidst the appalling war in Gaza. We manage to navigate challenges such as these with (and perhaps because of) a strong IDS community; yet helping it remain so has made every day a roller coaster and brought some of my biggest areas of learning as Director.
Looking to the future
So what of the future? In early 2024 our world is in a dire state, experiencing multiple, intersecting crises – of climate and environment, conflict, pandemics, economies, democracies – that are sharply highlighting and deepening inequalities and injustices. The Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 are off-track and often ignored. In this context, as we have been exploring at IDS and with key partners during the last year, the time seems right for a “recasting” of development and development studies that is underpinned by the centrality of universality (development as progressive change for all), plurality, justice, equity and resilience.
Rather than small adjustments and tweaks to concepts and practices, we have been calling for a radical reimagining of what is possible. Recasting is, in this sense, less about reshaping and revising, as a sculptor might do, and more about throwing forward into the future, like a fisherperson (re) casting their line. Of course this looking-forward can also be inspired by looking back, drawing on longstanding emphases in an Institute that has always been a place of radical critique and imagination.
Yet some emerging themes may require renewed emphasis: re-envisaging humanity-nature connections; challenging capitalist and financial relations and fostering inclusive, resilient economies; responding to uncertainties through flexible institutional arrangements; reconfiguring citizen-state relations amidst new kinds of power; building solidarities – local and global, and more. IDS will need to engage fulsomely and respectfully in the growing global conversation about decolonising development, and think seriously about its international positioning in changing contexts.
Choices about which directions to pursue and how are not matters for me though; they are for a new Director who will bring their own understandings and priorities, and for the Institute’s co-development of its next Strategy for 2025-2030. My parting wishes are for the next decade of this amazing Institute’s journey to be as successful as the last, and for IDS and its many friends and relations, longstanding and new, to continue to engage ideas and action towards a better world – fostering a politics of hope for our troubled times.