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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Gendered perspectives vital for climate finance that supports development goals

As dust settles on negotiations at COP28, development researchers and climate activists continue to drive the need for real solutions. Shortly before COP, Leia Achampong, spoke at our webinar on development and climate finance on how the climate crisis is indebting women and how a lack of access to gender-responsive climate finance is exacerbating inequalities. Below, we highlight some of the key points Leia made to demonstrate how the current models of development and climate finance are impacting communities and particularly women.

You can watch the whole webinar here.

Access to finance must be available to all

Climate finance is part of the solution but it needs to be of a high quality. There needs to be greater access to new and additional, debtfree, gender-responsive, climate finance grants.

Middle income countries are not all eligible for ODA. All countries in the global South have access to UNFCCC climate finance, but there needs to be coherent, common rules of access across bilateral and multilateral climate finance contributors.

Gendered data is critical

To ensure climate finance has synergies with development goals, tag data on gender responsiveness of climate-related ODA and UNFCCC climate finance. This makes it easier to aggregate levels and determine best strengths. There is a lot of data that is missing.
Climate ministries in the global North must speak to their counterparts in development ministries to put structures in place to tag and report on data on gender responsiveness on climate finance. Development ministries in the global north have these systems in place because they are tagging data and information on ODA at far higher levels.

We must not replicate ineffective trends in development finance

It’s important not to replicate systems in development finance that have shown to be ineffective at achieving progress towards the SDGs e.g. blended finance, Private Public Partnerships.

These systems have been shown to increase indebtedness in the global South. At times they are more expensive than highly concessional finance. This has implications on the effectiveness of climate finance within a community.

With such high financing needs, a lot of countries seek finance from international finance institutions such as the World Bank, which has a history of using policy conditionalities. This is being replicated within climate finance spheres such as climate goals integrated into World Bank development policy lending (which uses policy conditionalities or green policy conditionality).

The policies this leads to are gendered, for example austerity leads to public service cuts to services which are typically used by women.

Find out more about gender and climate finance

You can read more about the need for greater access to climate finance and more engagement of women in decision-making in Leia’s recent paper for UN Women: ‘Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective’