CDS Blog - International development: past, present and prospects – a call to widen participation in the CDS 50th Anniversary conference in September.

by James Copestake

2025 may not be a good year for ‘celebrating’ fifty years of research into international development, but it seems very timely to be reflecting on ‘what next’. This will be front-and-centre during the Development Studies Association Conference - “Navigating crisis” CDS is hosting, where we expect more than 500 research presentations from around the world. It will also be central to the 50^th Anniversary Conference planned for past and current staff and students on 11-12 September 2025. Anticipating this event, this blog sets out five strands of ongoing CDS development research and invites your support in building on the list. This spans global political economy, normative, and public policy issues, as well as how the contributions of CDS to development studies is already evolving, should be and could be. I hope the blog encourages you to register for the anniversary conference (HERE), and to come up with proposals for your own contributions to it.

1. Global prosperity for whom? While the global human population has more than doubled in fifty years (from 4.0 billion in 1975 to 8.2 billion in 2025), the world’s Gross Domestic Product has more than trebled in real terms to $US 110 trillion - or by roughly 50% per person. CDS research has always emphasised the issue of how material prosperity is shared (or not) as well as generated. Ongoing examples, including the work of Mihika Chatterjee on land dispossession in India, and Virgi Sari on earnings inequality in Indonesia.

2. Anthropocene or ‘capitalocene’? Rising prosperity has of course resulted in huge and mostly damaging changes to the atmosphere and biosphere - through carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and climate change. CDS research on the environment is increasingly channelled its membership of the global Earth Systems Governance network, including the work of Michael Bloomfield on global supply chains, and Yixian Sun into the Sustainability Governance of China’s Global Infrastructure Investment (SGAIN).

3. Transitions to net zero – how just? Linking these two themes is a growing cluster of research into the political economy of growth in renewable energy generation (e.g. Ben Radley), including backward linkage effects of rising demand for cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper and other critical minerals (e.g. Roy Maconachie, Aiden Barlow) in Southern Africa.

4. What is development anyway? CDS researchers have engaged with the evolution of thinking towards a more multi-dimensional definition of development for many years, including through the Wellbeing in Developing Countries research group, and more recently through research by Aurelie Charles into use of the Sustainable Development goals (SDGs). A more radical challenge is to decolonise knowledge production, not least by changing the way we collaborate with social movements and actors in the Global South - see the work of Ana Dinerstein, for example.

5. Humanitarianism, social assistance, or bust? The US dominated system of international aid and development cooperation is splintering before our eyes, giving way (perhaps) to smaller, leaner, and meaner forms of social assistance and patronage. Digital information and payment systems are transforming how these can operate, posing new questions not only about who ‘presses the buttons’ but who governs the algorithms (if anyone) that determine who receive what, and on what terms. CDS has a long and continuing tradition of research into the outcomes of social assistance and financial innovation, including the work of Joe Devine and Mathilde Maitrot in Bangladesh. A growing cluster of researchers is focused on humanitarian responses to conflict, including Jason Hart and Katharina Lenner, working in the Middle East, Oliver Walton (South Asia), and Naomi Pendle (South Sudan). A third strand of research, led by Neil Howard, works on universal basic income, and coordinates a network of action research based on basic income pilots.

This is far from a comprehensive review of past, ongoing and future CDS research. Missing, for example, are the contributions of many postgraduates, doctoral students and postdoctoral research associates – the latter including Asha Amirali (Pakistan’s energy transition), Joel Lazarus (strategies for community mobilisation) and Michelle James (governance, social identities, and trust in South African Townships). Doctoral students include both early career students doing traditional PhDs, and mid-career students doing the professional doctorate in policy research and practice (DPRP).

An ongoing challenge for CDS (as for many civil society organisations) is to secure funding for impactful policy engagement, while at the same time guarding its academic autonomy. One response to this is Bath Social and Development Research Ltd (Bath SDR) – a social enterprise focused on research and innovation in policy and programme monitoring and evaluation. In the last five years, alumni support has also enabled CDS to seed fund student placements, internships, field work, conference attendance, and innovative approaches to public engagement through the Bath Research in International Development (BRID) Fund. This provides an additional channel through which CDS alumni, and others, can support its work. But more important are fresh ideas about how it can build on the activities and trajectories described here in order to remain relevant and effective into its sixth decade - hence this call to widen participation in the 50^th Anniversary Conference.

To book tickets to the conference follow this link.

To submit a contribution to the conference click here.