1 Towards a New Vision of Development Studies
In 2005, in a meeting of Directors of its member institutes, the EADI decided that a Vision Paper on Development Studies (DS) 1 was needed to set out its position on the nature of DS, its interdisciplinary character, and the implications for its positioning in the changing European higher education system. In that period the Bologna agreements on making university teaching programmes compatible across Europe were developed. They presented a dilemma for teaching and research programmes in DS. Substantively, the interdisciplinary character of DS did not lend itself easily to the proposed European accreditation system based on mono-disciplinary fields. Institutional pressure arose from the fact that EADI member institutions were conscious that DS Institutes might have trouble facing an accreditation framework unsuited to the interdisciplinary specificity of DS.
To counter this problem, a Vision Paper on Development Studies was written by several senior members of EADI. 2 Its aim was to define DS as an interdisciplinary field and prepare DS Institutes and researchers to face the new accreditation processes. Defining DS was considered only the first necessary step: interdisciplinarity was seen as the key specificity of DS and a key weakness in view of accreditation processes. The 2005 Vision paper intended to deal with this specificity to make accreditation by academic peers feasible, reducing the risk for DS as a field.
In 2015, EADI members in the Executive Committee representing members from 26 European countries, took up the question whether the ideas concerning DS laid down in the 2005 Vision Paper were still valid and appropriate, or whether the world and Academia had changed so much in their thinking that it was necessary to rethink DS and lay down current ideas in a new EADI Vision Paper. The discussion was triggered by strategic changes within the understandings of DS, the issues and disciplines with which it is aligning, and by changing institutional frameworks locally and globally in the world of education and academic research. An increasingly polycentric world and shifting international relations bringing in new issues and actors into development processes and practices were changing DS in its thematic focuses and research methodologies (see EADI General Conference on Responsible Development in a Polycentric World. Inequality, Citizenship and the Middle Classes, 2014).
The ways issues are discussed within EADI had also changed since 2005. Whereas in 2005, institute Directors nominated three senior members of EADI to write up the Vision Paper , in 2015 the process entailed broader participatory processes . A round-table discussion was held with the Executive Committee of EADI, and a paper commissioned to a small group from the International Accreditation Council. They set out an online survey for EADI members concerning the nature of DS, and carried out a literature review of articles published on DS in leading journals (see chapter by Monks et al.). Subsequently, discussions with academic communities in South Africa and China were held on the topic.
The discussions generated great interest among EADI members, such that EADI realized that a larger set of papers on the question of defining DS and how it is positioned within the broader academic, policy and practice communities, would reflect the thinking of the wider EADI community more clearly. This book presents the outcome of the many contributions by EADI members on important dimensions of development issues, which together make up the EADI vision on DS and the nature of the work in which we are all engaged. 3 Although this volume includes contributions from southern authors linked to EADI , a future volume will provide a broader platform for engaging with Southern perspectives.
This introduction is organized as follows. The next section reviews the main changes in global development processes that we need to take into account in addressing DS in the new Millennium. Section 3 explores the nature of DS to understand the challenges it faces in addressing global development problems. Section 4 analyses implications of these changes for the DS academic community in terms of new perspectives on knowledge, recent narratives and paradigms, methodologies and scientific impact of DS research. It also provides contributions on how Southern issues and perspectives are informing current Northern-dominated academic discussions, and new themes in DS.
2 The State of World Development in the New Millennium
Major changes are influencing development trends and international institutional relations in the new Millennium, and are starting to define new power relations among countries and interests, impacting on development priorities and DS agendas.
The first change concerns the increasing cooperation among regional powers in the developing world, of which BRICSâthe association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa founded in 2006âis a strong example. With the last Summit (Xiamen, September 2017), the BRICS bloc has entered a new phase, intending to enhance an open, inclusive and balanced economic globalization . BRICS are moving in two complementary directions: increasing cooperation with non-BRICS developing countries, as shown by the Xiamen Summit which invited a group of non-BRICS developing countries; and creating new institutions enhancing financial cooperation. These include: (i) the New Development Bank created in 2014 to mobilize resources for development projects in emerging and developing countries; (ii) the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, operating since 2016 as a multilateral development bank supporting infrastructure building in the Asia-Pacific area; and (iii) the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, operating since 2015, to provide support through liquidity and precautionary instruments to countries facing short-term problems in their balance of payments. With China as leader, this institutional framework will have a major impact on financial cooperation in the future, challenging the hegemony of the Bretton Woods institutions .
The second change is the participation of new players, new sources of funds, and new initiatives in the system of aid and development finance. While the share of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in development finance has decreased, becoming marginal for several countries (Alonso 2012), the world is now in a âbeyond aidâ era and several alternative sourcesâdomestic and externalâprovide finance for development. This situation is a consequence of the difficulties of several OECD countries in meeting their commitments, particularly after the 2008 crisis, raising the question to what extent aid can enhance economic growth effectively. This concern accounts for changes in the ODA system since 2000 aimed at improving aid performance, both in terms of quantity of available resources and effectiveness.
Aid effectiveness is a controversial issue, combining political, socio-economic and technical aspects. Due to the variety of recipient countriesâ situations, measurement techniques and different choices of variables, research has produced a largely inconclusive literature (Alonso 2012). With some significant exceptions of scholars who argue that aid is harmful or useless for developing countries (Easterly 2006; Moyo 2009), the literature shows that aid has a positive but rather small impact on growth for reasons that range from the vulnerability to external shocks and country-specific factors, to the diminishing returns of aid after a certain threshold, and the quality of domestic institutions . This evidence supports the necessity of international efforts to address aid effectiveness (Rajan and Subramanian 2008; Arndt et al. 2015).
With the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), a comprehensive revision of aid management began, with agreement on actions for making aid more effective and introducing a monitoring system to assess progress. The institutional framework for aid management became fully defined with the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) (2008) and the Busan Partnership Agreement (2011). While the AAA focuses on relationships between donors and recipients and on the role of civil society in engaging citizens and the need to focus on fragile states, the Busan Partnership Agreement acknowledges the presence and the contribution of new players and new sources of funding in the aid system, including NGOs, civil society organizations (CSOs), and private funders.
The inclusion of SouthâSouth co-operating countries and CSOs widens the discussion on the aid system. However, information on SouthâSouth cooperation is difficult to collect, as transactions are usually in the hands of non-DAC countries. Only broad estimates are available. 4 Moreover, SouthâSouth aid introduces new forms of cooperation with impacts on development that could be positive as well as negative. SouthâSouth cooperation is âmore horizontalâ than NorthâSouth cooperation; moreover, recipient countries might learn from the experience of new donors (UNDP 2013). Yet, as ...