Skip to main content

Welcome to the EADI Blog!

We cordially invite you to join this blog which we have set up as a discussion platform for the international development research community. The world is facing dramatic changes and challenges and so is science. What is the role of development research in these times and what are the most pressing issues it needs to address? What are the different existing positions on these issues, where are open questions and what requires further elaboration? What makes sense in relation to the larger picture and where do scientists need to take a stand?

This blog invites you to share your opinion, thoughts and insights on everything that might be of interest to the broader community – and of course also on articles that appear on our blog. If you disagree with something you read here, feel free to let us know and tell us why. We explicitly encourage discussion, and hope that a diversity of positions will enrich everyone’s perspective.

To showcase the wide range of approaches and research areas our members represent, we feature research projects or studies from our member institutes and organisations, as well as outstanding blog articles from their websites. Sometimes we also publish thought-provoking pieces from other sources when we feel that the covered topics are of broader interest and could trigger fruitful discussions.

Below you find the most recent blogposts, linking you directly to the EADI Debating Development Research Blog where you can also subscribe to get notified whenever a new post is published. This happens around two to five times a month. Enjoy the read!

Recent Blogposts

Results: 1 to 3 of total 179

The Shifting Geopolitics of Deep-Sea Mining in the Pacific Islands Region: an Industry Poised to Emerge?

Ben Radley, Imogen Eagles - European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI)
The ocean’s seabed contains vast deposits of minerals deemed critical for green transition technologies, military defence systems and AI hardware, among other uses. According to some estimates, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone alone – an approximately 4.5 million square kilometre abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean – holds more copper, nickel and cobalt than all land-based deposits combined. With China’s recent tightening of export controls on several critical minerals creating global price shocks and disrupting Western supply chains, geopolitical contestation to access and exploit seabed minerals is heating up.
continue

What to Play Next: Development after the End of Development

Heiner Janus, Michael Roll -
Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of England’s north. When protests turned deadly at the Peterloo massacre, it helped galvanise a tradition of organised labour and democratic reform — one that later produced the suffragettes, founded there by Emmeline Pankhurst. And when the band Joy Division collapsed, the remaining members re-emerged as New Order. That instinct — not to reassemble what broke, but to build something new — was the animating spirit when the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute convened researchers in mid-April to ask: is the era of Development over? And if so, what replaces it?
continue

The Disciplinary Roots of Disagreement in Development Studies: Findings from a Global Survey of Scholars

Ryan Briggs, Andy Sumner - European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI)
Development Studies is institutionally well established. The QS rankings identify over 150 universities with postgraduate Development Studies programmes across approximately 40 countries. Journals, institutes and scholarly associations have proliferated since the 1960s.
continue