Development Studies is well established insitutionally and over the last 20-30 years has become more intellectually diverse. This paper asks how scholars in the field understand what Development Studies is, using a new survey of about 300 academics in departments offering postgraduate Development Studies programmes across more than 30 countries. We focus on three long-standing fault lines: whether Development Studies is oriented toward transforming underlying structures or solving problems within existing systems, whether the field is centred on the Global South or expanded to a universal scope, and whether knowledge about development is understood in more posiivist or construcivist terms. Our central finding is that disciplinary training explains these understandings more consistently than does insitutional geography. Differences between respondents based in high-income and non-high-income countries are small, while differences by PhD discipline are larger and more coherent. Respondents with PhDs in economics and poli?cal science are more problem-solving-oriented and posi?vist while those with PhDs in anthropology sit on the transformaive and construcivist end of the field. Across both high-income and non-high-income country groups, problem-solving orienta?on is strongly associated with posiivism, while transformative orientation aligns with constructivism. These findings suggest that much of the contention within Development Studies is less about the North-South divide and more about the tensions among academic disciplines.

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