Global Development Institute Conference

Fresh assaults on overseas aid, trade relationships and the liberal international order during 2025 have led some commentators to proclaim ‘The End of Development’. This dismantling of development cooperation, and wider rules of international engagement, has generated new urgency around global dynamics that were already re-shaping global development. These stretch well beyond declining levels of aid to include increased levels of superpower rivalry and geopolitical fragmentation; new patterns of globalisation; collective action failures around the climate emergency, as well as health and migration; the rise of authoritarian politics; and heightened levels of conflict between as well as within states. All carry profound implications for the future of global development, for how development should be conceptualised and for how social and environmental justice can be promoted at the current juncture. Recent debates around global development futures have tended to adopt the language of ‘poly-crisis’ and ‘catastrophe’, unsurprisingly given the destabilising nature of recent events and rising levels of human suffering. However, such framings tend to obscure the systemic nature of some current dynamics, the problematic nature of the world order that is currently being displaced and the opportunities to rethink development that the current moment offers.

The conference is organised around three main themes:

1. The new geopolitics of global d/Development

The international project of Development was embedded within a western-led world order that has been visibly fraying for most of the twenty-first century, not least because the ‘rise of the East’ has shifted global patterns of wealth and power whilst a series of military misadventures and financial crises has undermined the legitimacy of the ‘liberal’ international order. Where some see this as a crisis for development, others see opportunities for global development to be renewed in more legitimate forms under global South leadership.

2. The global development architecture in polycrisis: adapting or dead?

Since 2015 the mainstream institutions that underpinned international development cooperation – from multilateral and bilateral aid agencies to international and local NGOs – have been increasingly side-lined. The global goals and organising principles that dominated the UN General Assembly in 2015, such as the SDGs and ‘leave no one behind’, have slipped from view and cuts to aid have received very little public pushback in OECD countries. Commitments at successive COPs to reduce global emissions and support climate adaptation in the global South have not been met. An institutional architecture that assumed nations would cooperate has failed to accommodate the ‘nation-first’ ethics of some great and middle powers that are increasingly setting the agenda. Where do things go from here? Amidst this change we welcome contributions and provocations that discuss this question and/or bring new ideas and innovative approaches within and across this architecture of development cooperation, among diverse actors, organisations and institutions.

3. Thinking from a global development perspective: potential and pitfalls

Major shifts in the global development landscape are being debated by academics, policymakers and civil society actors. However, development is ultimately experienced, lived, and contested by ordinary people in specific places and on the terrain of everyday life. It remains an open question what major geoeconomic shifts and new development paradigms mean for development as situated processes of social, economic, and political change. This poses a significant challenge for development researchers who must navigate the relationship between the general and the particular, the global and local, and the structural and everyday in their work. Moreover, Development Studies is at the forefront of calls for a ‘new geopolitics of knowledge production’, one that foregrounds global South over global North perspectives and directly addresses longstanding inequalities in how knowledge about development and development narratives are produced.

Attendance is free and we encourage scholars and students at all career stages to register. Please note that spaces are limited, so we request that you only sign up if you plan on attending, and cancel your order ASAP if you are unable to attend for any reason. Please also note we are not charging attendees for attendance at the conference dinner on the Monday evening.

A full agenda including paper abstracts and speaker details will be released in due course.

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Host or Publisher Global Development Institute (GDI)