Nitya Rao, Professor of Gender & Development, School of Global Development, UEA.

The School of Global Development, University of East Anglia, in partnership with the Development Studies Association’s Gender and Development Study Group, hosted an International Conference titled Gender and Development: Debates for a Changing World on June 19-20, 2025. This conference brought together senior and early career academics, development practitioners, activists and students to think about contemporary challenges for us as a Gender and Development Community. The University of East Anglia (UEA) played host to similar conferences in 1994 and 2015. We reconvened in 2025 to collectively explore what has changed, what remains unchanged and what new dilemmas and challenges we experience today.   

Despite progress over the past 30 years, since Beijing 1995, critical challenges persist to the achievement of gender and wider social justice. These include persistent gender-differentiated inequalities in employment and livelihoods, especially in the context of a changing climate, political participation, health, education, sexuality and violence, amongst others. The aims of this conference were twofold: to reflect on the current state of the art in Gender and Development debates, and to foster feminist solidarities and collective action within a changing global context.

In an era of fake news and AI generated content, it is increasingly important to engage critically with processes of knowledge production, and how these relate to global economic, social and cultural processes, examining both their material and symbolic dimensions, challenging prevalent assumptions and hierarchies, but also privileging perspectives that are rooted in the lived realities of men, women and queer people, those who remain at the margins and whose voices are hardly heard.

The growing concern today is with issues of gender and social justice in research, policy and practice, in the face of a backlash against feminist gains. Reflecting on the different dimensions of justice – recognition, redistribution and representation – as articulated by Nancy Fraser in the late 1980s is critical today, distinguishing between intrinsic and more instrumental approaches to justice, but also the interconnections between them over time and space. How might we, as academics and practitioners, collectively navigate – and counter – the gender equality backlash, and build feminist solidarities for a more just future.

The conference had three plenary discussions, over the two days, reflecting on context, strategies for negotiation and change, as well as imagining feminist futures. With key thinkers in the field of gender and development – Ruth Pearson, Maxine Molyneux, Gita Sen, Diane Elson, Naila Kabeer, Sheila Bunwaree and Jennifer Piscopo – the plenaries further served to make an intergeneration link, reflecting on the past and looking to the future.

Additionally, the conference saw 54 presentations in 15 parallel sessions, diving deep into a range of themes relevant to gender and development. These included sessions on gender, climate and resilience, livelihoods, labour and environment movements, migration, education, health and social care, access to resources, gendered politics, conflict and governance, sexuality, violence and identity, amongst others. Apart from scholars based in the UK, we also had participants from Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria. Several DEV staff, PGRs and Master’s students participated as volunteers, helping organise the conference, as communicators throughout the conference, but also as presenters, engaging with the debates.

Several of the papers presented during the conference will form contributions to a Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements with Gender and Social Justice, to be published by Edward Elgar by the end of 2026/early 2027. Nitya Rao and Ulrike Theuerkauf of DEV are co-editors of the Handbook, along with Jasmine Gideon of Birkbeck and Shannon Philips of Cambridge, and took the lead in organising the conference.

Group photo of conference participants outside The Enterprise Centre, University of East Anglia.