Our Aims and Objectives

We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues

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What is Development Studies

What is development studies and decolonising development.

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Our Members

We have around 1,000 members, made up of individuals and around 40 institutions

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Governance

Find out about our constitution, how we are run and meet our Council

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People

Meet our Council members and other staff who support the running of DSA

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About

The DSA Conference is an annual event which brings together the development studies community

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DSA2024

Our conference this year is themed "Social justice and development in a polarising world"

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Past Conferences

Find out about our previous conferences

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Study Groups

Our Study Groups offer a chance to connect with others who share your areas of interest

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Students and ECRs

Students and early career researchers are an important part of our community

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Publications

Our book series with OUP and our relationship with other publishers

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Decolonising Development

The initiatives we are undertaking that work towards decolonising development studies

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Membership Directory

Find out who our members are, where they are based and the issues they work on

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IDD, University of Birmingham: Event, Publications & News – March

Upcoming Events

  • Developmental Leadership Program event, Beyond the pandemic: learning from local leadership, will take place on 23 February 2021, 12.00 – 13.15 (GMT). Chaired by DLP Director, David Hudson, and in partnership with the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham, this event explores the lessons we can learn from emerging spaces of local leadership in the pandemic for tackling global challenges.

Publications

Other news 

  • Martin Ottmann – together with his co-author Felix Haass – has won the 2019-2020 Quality of Government (QoG) Best Paper Award for their paper, “The Effect of Wartime Legacies on Electoral Mobilization after Civil War”. The prize includes an award of €400 and a visit to the Quality of Governance Institute (University of Gothenburg) for a week as guest scholars to present the paper.
  • As part of an ongoing partnership between the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Developmental Leadership Program, and IDD, Nic Cheeseman and Rebecca Gordon launched a report on “Legislative Leadership in the time of COVID-19“, which includes a Legislative Responses to COVID-19 Tracker that captures the extent of legislative oversight over key policy decisions in 65 countries. There is also an accompanying blog outlining the main findings of the report.
  • David Hudson is part of an ESRC Methods Grant as Co-I, led by Dr Cassilde Schwartz (RHUL) as the PI and Dr Miranda Simon (Essex), to develop a technique to evaluate the secondary effects of development interventions that flow through peoples’ social networks. These second order effects are missed by traditional RCTs that pay little attention to the spill overs for the wider community. The project will develop an online simulation tool (an ABM, essentially the same as the epidemiological models used to model the pandemic) that will model the flow of interventions across different kinds of contexts and settings and through different community structures. The project was one of twelve funded out of 163 proposals. The research will build on the MIGCHOICE project headed by Richard Black, which is examining how the impacts of a training and cash grant programme flows through would-be migrants’ networks.
  • Paul Jackson (PI) and Sanne Weber’s research project on ‘Mapping Mental Health Resources for Young People Living in a Conflict Con-text at The Colombian Pacific Region’ started on 14th February 2021. This is a Newton Fund research grant jointly supported by the Colombian Government and the ESRC.
  • IDD is playing a leading role in the University of Birmingham’s Forum for Global Challenges. Fiona Nunan, as the Programme Lead, is overseeing the programme development for a major conference in 2022, and activities and dialogue in the lead-up. See https://community.forumforglobalchallenges.com/home for more information. Everyone is welcome to sign up to the Online Community and join in the discussions.
  • Early findings from DLP’s latest portfolio of research on how leaders emerge, work together to push for change, and how this can be supported have been published on the DLP website. One project, exploring why women working in grassroots politics or development organisations are under-represented in state or national assemblies in Sri Lanka and Indonesia has nine key findings from interviews conducted in Medan, Indonesia (findings also available in Bahasa Indonesia). Another project, researching the impact of the Civic Champions leadership development program in Cambodia, finds that leaders employ different strategies such as delegation and perseverance and adapt practices for differ target groups to promote sanitation in their respective communes.
  • Based on prior DLP research on political decision making, Jasmine Burnley published a DLP Opinion piece on the role of leadership, from both civilian government and the military, in Myanmar’s military coup. She argues that the power of individual leaders has been underestimated all along.