CGD 4th annual summer school with EADI

This year's CGD summer school is in cooperation with EADI  

Exploring challenges and opportunities to achieving ‘Just Practices of Development’ in the context of the SDGs

As the international community gears up to respond to the new Sustainable Development Goals, join us to debate issues around development research and practice and whether and how genuine reform, inclusion and justice might be achieved

In a world characterised by recurrent crises, and entrenched and deepening inequalities, business as usual remains the order of the day in many professional fields, including international development. And yet, the societal upheavals and disappointing outcomes of recent interventions and policies in the name of ‘development’ pose important questions for the current modus operandi of international development actors. Our summer school picks up on this point and problematizes various international development practices, in order to analyse how they are framed, and by whom, and their role in reproducing or challenging the status quo. We reflect on how and why current practices bring such a difficult mix of challenges for human existence and survival ranging from poverty and urban growth, to climate change, food and health, and ask:

• How is development practice entangled in the current challenges of political conflict, social inequality and unsustainability, and what opportunities are there to overcome this?
• What are the principal challenges when implementing more progressive development approaches that advance ‘inclusive’, ‘bottom up’, or popular-democratic development?
• What are the politics of knowledge in development practice? In other words, whose knowledge counts and matters in the day-to-day operations of a range of development stakeholders, considering the constraints posed by narrow measures of effectiveness, managerialism, results-based management and payment-by-results frameworks? How is this being tackled?

This summer school will address these questions as we explore the very real challenges of ‘doing’ development as the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gain momentum.