Convened by Anna Wolkenhauer, University of Bremen, and Philipp Oehlmann, HU Berlin

Religion and culture play an important role in Southern Africa's societies; they shape people's world views, attitudes and actions. Visions for a good life, imaginaries of desirable futures, notions of development and sustainability are fundamentally influenced by cultural norms and values, religious beliefs and people's interpretation of life. Indigenous knowledge plays an important role as well, and is deeply intertwined with cultural and religious systems, and specific place-bound practices. What sustainable development is in a specific context and how it can be achieved not only relates to policy and action, but importantly also to the very basic questions of what individuals and communities consider to be desirable futures. At this basic level, local and contextual notions of development and sustainability intersect with religious, cultural and indigenous knowledge systems. People's lived religion and lived culture, i.e. the way they interpret life and its meaning and the associated practices, and what one could call people's "lived development", i.e. the visions of life and society and the practices related to it, are closely related.
The panel therefore seeks to explore the dynamic interplay of religion, culture and indigenous knowledge on the one hand with notions and practices of development and sustainable futures. It focuses specifically on Southern Africa's rural areas, seeking to bring to the fore local and contextual concepts, ideas and practices of (lived) development and imaginaries of sustainable futures, in the interest of facilitating a (G)local exchange of knowledge.  Specifically, we envision four core themes of the panel, which papers can relate to:

1. The religious, cultural and indigenous perspectives that can be brought forward on the question of sustainable futures
2. Notions and practices of lived development and its intersection with lived religion and lived culture.
3. Religious and cultural resources for sustainable futures.
4. Religious action in sustainable development.