As our sister organisation, EADI rounded up their conference on Shaping Sustainable Futures last week, DSA member Prof Nicola Banks, gave a talk on Hope. We thought it was a powerful rallying call for those going into DSA2026 and with permission from Nicola, we publish her talk:

Hope is not something I’ve come to through my academic work. I’ve never researched it, though a striking lack of hope and its devastating implications have been a defining feature of much of my work. But I’ve come to believe that hope is one necessary and ever so powerful ingredient if we’re to move beyond these dark times that create paralysis rather than change. Not the simple wish that things were different because you don’t know what else to do. But a deeper, more grounded hope that fuels action, collaboration and the ability to bring new futures into view.

Yet it’s hard to be hopeful. Perhaps it’s even harder as academics, when we’ve trained and dedicated a lifetime to thinking critically. To criticise. If we’re honest, that’s much easier than navigating, nurturing and sustaining the profound changes that we want to see in the world.

We’ve also actively lost hope. So much is hitting us, from all sides. These repeated blows affect our personal lives, our professional lives and our collective psyche. Many are not accidental. We’re much less of a threat when we’re hopeless, fractured and powerless.

So perhaps we need to start thinking about hope not as a luxury, but as one of our greatest resources.

Part of that loss of hope, at least from where I stand in the UK, comes from placing too much faith in institutions and systems that have proven unwilling to lead the kind of long-term change we know is needed. This is not a universal story, and I want to be careful not to pretend that it is. I speak from the standpoint of a society that has become so individualised that we’ve gradually outsourced our collective agency to institutions, while forgetting much of our own power to act together.

Of course, there are things in our professional toolkits that stop us from becoming completely paralysed. We’re very good at understanding what’s happening. We can place current events in historical context, identify patterns, distinguish what’s genuinely new from what’s cyclical, and we can analyse the structures that have brought us to this point. Our discussions throughout this conference have been deeply valuable here.

But perhaps we’re less well equipped to answer a different question: what next?

We can analyse the past and present with extraordinary sophistication, yet often struggle to imagine a future that’s structurally different from it. We touched on this in yesterday’s discussions around Development Humanities. I was struck by the shared sense that many are searching for something that helps us understand and navigate this moment, while recognising that our existing intellectual tools don’t quite get us there.

To a limited extent, universities now encourage us to look forwards through the language of engagement and impact. But this has never really been at the heart of academic life. Our incentive structures still remind us that it’s peripheral, and some colleagues would argue that it should remain so—that our role is to understand the world rather than imagine what comes next.

This is where I disagree.

Because I increasingly think that moving from despair to action requires something more than understanding the present. It requires us to believe that another future is genuinely possible. If we cannot imagine and fall in love with a different future, we’re unlikely to find our way towards it.

So I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about where I found my own hope. More accurately, with whom I found it, because I don’t think hope is ever an individual pursuit. And then I’d like to reflect on what that experience has taught me about our role as academics, and on how we might begin to use the many privileges of an academic career in ways that help make those different futures just a little more possible.

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One thing that can be difficult to see as we lose ourselves in collapse, destruction and retrenchment is that these moments do not only take things away. If we can look through the darkness, we’ll see that they also create space. Space to ask different questions. Space to imagine alternatives that previously felt impossible.

That crack, right there. That’s where the light gets in.

I’ve seen this very clearly over the past year as colleagues across the world have responded to the collapse of international aid. Again, I don’t want to over-generalise, but I’ve noticed a striking difference. Among many colleagues in the Global North, the dominant response has been grief. Lives will be lost. Organisations will close. The world will be poorer because of it. I share those fears.

But among friends and colleagues in the Global South, alongside the anger and uncertainty, I’ve also encountered something else. A cautious optimism that perhaps the collapse of one system creates the possibility of building another. Not because suffering is somehow worthwhile, but because many of the people who’ve lived with the inequalities of that system for decades have long known that it was never going to deliver the future they wanted.

My own journey began in much the same place. For 15 years I’ve researched aid and charity finance, trying to understand why, despite repeated commitments to localisation and locally led development, so little has actually changed. We’ve had new language, new partnerships, new declarations, yet decision-making power and finance remains concentrated in the Global North. The evidence is remarkably consistent.

At first this produced frustration. Then cynicism. If we couldn’t even achieve the first steps towards localisation, how could we possibly imagine more fundamental change? It felt as though the system had become exceptionally good at talking about transformation, while quietly reproducing itself.

Then something unexpected happened.

One side research project ended up changing how I saw the whole landscape. We were mapping the UK’s development charity sector and its sources of income when one finding jumped out at me. The largest funder of international development wasn’t institutional donors, or governments, or foundations. It was the UK public. Every year, ordinary people collectively gave more than £2 billion because they believed that people, wherever they lived, deserve the chance to build better futures.

Suddenly, the question looked completely different. The real problem wasn’t that generosity didn’t exist. What was missing, was a way for that generosity to reach the people already creating those futures in their own communities. That possibility stayed with me.

Around the same time, I became part of a Social Lab called Reimagining the International NGO, where I met my now co-founder and close friend, Chibwe Masabo Henry. What began as conversations about aid reform gradually became conversations about possibility. Instead of asking why the existing system wasn’t changing, we found ourselves asking what it might look like if we stopped trying to reform it and instead built something alongside it.

That became One World Together.

In many ways, it’s a very simple idea. We invite people to pool modest monthly donations and we transfer them directly, with no strings attached, to four community-led organisations that we’ve known and worked alongside for many years.

We didn’t create those organisations. We certainly their solutions. We simply recognised that they were already building the futures we’d spent so many years talking about. We discovered a new way that we could stand behind them, helping to channel trust, resources and relationships towards the work they’re already leading.

Each donation doesn’t just support community-led action. It also becomes one more hand helping to build a new flow of long-term, flexible finance. Our Zambian partner put it best: One Fund. Many hands. Deep Impact.

That, more than anything else, is where I find hope as we usher in a new system of giving.

Not because we know One World Together is the answer, though we hope it is. We’re still learning every day. But because working alongside extraordinary community organisations reminds us that another future is not an abstract idea waiting to be designed.

It already exists, quietly, in countless places. Our challenge is not to imagine it from scratch, but to recognise it, learn from it and help it grow.

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Soon after, I discovered that what this journey we’d been on had a name. John Paul Lederach calls it the moral imagination: the capacity to imagine something rooted in the realities of the present, yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist. I love that idea because it reminds us that hope is not detached from reality. Quite the opposite. It begins by seeing the world exactly as it is, but refusing to believe that this is all it can become.

That has made me think differently about what it means to be an academic.

For much of our careers, we’re encouraged to think about what we’re good at. We become experts in particular fields, methods and disciplines. We learn to ask better questions, develop and extend new theoretical understandings, produce stronger evidence and make more convincing arguments. These things matter enormously, and they always will.

But increasingly I’ve found myself asking a different question.

What are we good for?

I don’t think that answer lies primarily in our expertise. I think it lies in the privileges that quietly accumulate across an academic career. The relationships we build. The trust we are afforded. The convening power we hold. The legitimacy that allows us to move between communities, policymakers, funders, practitioners, students, and the general public. These are extraordinary privileges, and perhaps we spend too little time asking what they are actually for.

For me, the answer has become surprisingly simple. They are there to be shared. To open doors that remain closed to others. To connect people who would otherwise never meet. To help shift attention and resources towards those whose knowledge, leadership and imagination have been overlooked for far too long. In other words, they are there to become a conduit rather than a destination.

And that is what hope really does.

It doesn’t remove uncertainty. It certainly doesn’t remove fear. There are many days when the scale of the challenges feels overwhelming, when I wonder whether any of this is enough, or whether I should simply be writing the papers that feel safer and more familiar. But somewhere along the way, hope stopped feeling like optimism. Instead, it became the knowledge that there was meaningful work to do alongside people I deeply trusted and admired. The uncertainty and fear may not have disappeared. But paralysis did. It became something much more practical.

The knowledge that there is always something we can do from whatever position we occupy. That our contribution is rarely to have all the answers, but to help create the conditions in which new answers can emerge through others. That the future is not something waiting for us somewhere ahead. It is already being built, often quietly and without recognition, by communities whose imagination has never been limited by the institutions around them.

If there is one thing I have learned over the past few years, it’s that the greatest privilege of an academic career is not simply the knowledge we accumulate. It’s the people we meet along the way. They change how we think, what we value and what we believe is possible. If we allow them to, they also change what we choose to do with the privileges our careers have given us.

So perhaps, at this particular moment, our challenge is not simply to continue explaining the world with ever greater precision. It’s to use everything our academic lives have afforded us to help bring into view the futures that so many people are already working to create. For me, that’s become the place where hope lives.

Not as a feeling. Not even as an idea. But as a shared practice of imagining, connecting and building something that does not yet fully exist.

And perhaps that’s the question I will leave you with. Not simply: what are you good at? But: what are you good for?