EADI Debating Development Research

By Elsbet Lodenstein and Sylvia Bergh | EADI/ISS Blog Series  Achieving social justice in service delivery in the health, social welfare, and humanitarian sectors is still a formidable challenge in most developing countries. Poor and marginalised people generally lack the voice to make their demands heard and the awareness to claim their rights. However, social accountability …

Continue reading "How social accountability initiatives are helping pursue social justice"

By Arpita Bisht Of all natural resources, mineral aggregates (sand and gravel) have been the fastest growing and most extracted material group over the 21st century. This growth has not only been associated with large-scale ecological degradation, but also with violent extractive operations on local levels. Given that sand and gravel are heavily used in …

Continue reading "Sand and gravel: Rethinking aggregate consumption and distribution"

By Adinda Ceelen | EADI/ISS Blog Series Research impact has become a strategic priority for many research institutes around the world, with an increasing focus on “bridging the gap” between research and society and positioning research in a way that ensures the knowledge it produces can contribute to bringing about change. Development researchers often find themselves …

Continue reading "Development researchers as advocates: eight tips for more engaged scholarship"

By Linda Johnson and Rodrigo Mena | EADI/ISS Blog Series A quick glance at who is out collecting data in ‘the field’, including in remote and sometimes hazardous environments, is enough to make our point clear: the main executors of in-situ research (also known as fieldwork research) are local researchers and research assistants, sometimes together with …

Continue reading "Risk dumping in field research: some researchers are safer than others"

By Jonas Bauhof Access to electricity is still a major problem According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 770 million people lacked access to electricity in 2019 – set aside sustainable energy sources. Three-quarters of these people – around 575 million – are living in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While the numbers declined over the past …

Continue reading "Sustainable energy supply: the case of health facilities in Ghana"

By Andrea Beck Just over 15 years have passed since the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB) published a plan that proposed, inter alia, the concept of Water Operator Partnerships (WOPs). In this plan, which was released in March 2006, WOPs were envisioned as “a structured programme of cooperation among water operators, …

Continue reading "Water Operator Partnerships after 15 years: Re-politicising the debate"

By Anna-Katharina Hornidge and Imme Scholz The political and economic environment in which development policy operates has undergone radical changes since the emergence of this policy field in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, newly independent nation states made their first steps in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Many of them are now …

Continue reading "Seven principles for making development policy fit for the 21st century"

By Karin Küblböck On 1 January 2021 the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation entered into force. From now on, companies importing certain minerals into the EU must ensure that their sourcing practices do not contribute to conflict and human rights abuses. The regulation therefore introduces for the first time mandatory human rights due diligence for companies …

Continue reading "The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation – a trial run for responsible sourcing of raw materials?"

By Basile Boulay | EADI/ISS Blog Series The closing plenary of the 2021 EADI ISS conference opened the floor to all participants, encouraging them to reflect on their changing research practices in times of Covid through a virtual fishbowl format. How has the pandemic changed our research practice? How do losses and gains balance out? What …

Continue reading "Changing research practices in times of Covid – Insights from an international fishbowl"

By Christiane Kliemann Development Studies requires “an epistemological and ontological change” write Elisabetta Basile and Isa Baud in the introduction to the recent EADI volume “Building Development Studies for a New Millennium”. The planned sequel of the book will take this analysis one step further and explore viable ways to build on both the critique …

Continue reading "Questioning development: What lies ahead?"

By Lize Swartz | EADI/ISS Blog Series In the face of increasing pressure on global water availability, a degree of inventiveness in finding just and sustainable ways to ensure access to water is required. The redistribution of water is one possible way in which this could be done. But ongoing research on elite responses to a …

Continue reading "For the redistribution of water, framing matters!"

By Christiane Kliemann | EADI/ISS Blog Series The absence of serious measures to protect citizens from the COVID-19 virus in countries such as India and Brazil, as well as vaccine grabbing by countries in the Global North, have created much avoidable suffering, mainly, but not only, in the Global South. Nearly a year and a half …

Continue reading "COVID-19: solidarity as counter-narrative to crisis capitalism"