By Basile Boulay | EADI/ISS Blog Series

The closing plenary of the 2021 EADI ISS conference opened the floor to all participants, encouraging them to reflect on their changing research practices in times of Covid through a virtual fishbowl format. How has the pandemic changed our research practice? How do losses and gains balance out? What are the specific challenges faced by researchers in the Global South? Here is what our participants thought:

By Christiane Kliemann | EADI/ISS Blog Series

Development Studies requires “an epistemological and ontological change” write Elisabetta Basile and Isa Baud in the introduction to the recent EADI volume “Building Development Studies for a New Millennium”. The planned sequel of the book will take this analysis one step further and explore viable ways to build on both the critique of development as such, as well as the growing demand to decolonize knowledge production. The plenary session on “Questioning Development – Towards Solidarity, Decoloniality, Conviviality” at the recent #Solidarity2021 conference hosted a discussion by four contributors to the book which is currently in preparation for publication in 2023. The discussion is summarized here.

By Lize Swartz | EADI/ISS Blog Series

In the face of increasing pressure on global water availability, a degree of inventiveness in finding just and sustainable ways to ensure access to water is required. The redistribution of water is one possible way in which this could be done. But ongoing research on elite responses to a recent water scarcity crisis in South Africa shows that the redistribution of water resources will not go uncontested by water elites and that existing narratives on the sharing of water are not creating the extent of solidarity needed.

By Christiane Kliemann | EADI/ISS Blog Series

The absence of serious measures to protect citizens from the COVID-19 virus in countries such as India and Brazil, as well as vaccine grabbing by countries in the Global North, have created much avoidable suffering, mainly, but not only, in the Global South. Nearly a year and a half after the outbreak of the pandemic, hope for transformative change rests mainly on the countless practices of solidarity by local communities worldwide. It therefore comes as no surprise that all speakers at the opening plenary of the EADI ISS #Solidarity2021 conference were torn between pessimism and hope when taking stock of solidarity in times of COVID-19.

We are happy to announce that the Dudley Seers Lecture which precedes our upcoming General Conference "Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice" will be held by Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University. Since 2008, the Dudley Seers Lecture has been an inherent part of the EADI General Conferences. Remembering one of the founding members and the first EADI president, this lecture allows a renowned speaker to formally set the tone for the debates at and around the conference.

Pande's talk will explore how power structures - within households, communities and countries – are determined by informal and formal institutions. It will analyze how inequality of power and economic inequality interact within these institutions.