By  Caitriona Dowd and Supriya Garikipati, Co-convenors of DSA2026

Conferences often bring together a range of rich discussions and series of strong individual addresses by prominent scholars. More rarely, their plenaries appear to form a cumulative argument. Looking back at DSA2026, hosted by the UCD Centre for Sustainable Development under the theme “Reimagining Development: Power, Agency, and Futures in an Uncertain World”, we were struck by the intellectual journey charted by our three keynote speakers. Kaushik Basu invited us to imagine a more just world; Naila Kabeer asked us to reimagine that world through a feminist lens; and Mark Graham showed how research might help translate principles of justice into practical standards, institutions and forms of accountability.

As co-convenors of DSA2026, we had the privilege of helping to shape the conference around these questions and of watching the conversations develop across plenaries, panels, roundtables and informal exchanges. Our reflections here are therefore both intellectual and personal, emerging from the experience of convening the conference and witnessing the connections created by a diverse development studies community gathered in Dublin and participating online.

Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor at Cornell University, opened the conference by confronting the scale of the transformation now under way. Rapid technological change, shifting forms of globalisation and a declining demand for certain kinds of labour are producing levels of inequality that are economically damaging, socially corrosive and politically destabilising. These pressures are particularly acute in the Global South, whose needs are not always matched by an equivalent voice in global decision-making.

Basu’s central challenge was directed as much towards the development studies community as towards policymakers. The familiar analytical tools and policy responses are no longer adequate to the world they are being asked to explain. A more just future therefore requires intellectual reimagination: a willingness to question inherited assumptions, develop new ways of understanding economic and political behaviour, and consider interventions that may currently appear unconventional.

Imagining a just world, in this account, was not an exercise in utopian detachment. It was a necessary first step towards escaping the constraints of ideas that have ceased to serve us. Before a more just future can be built, it must first be possible to conceive of social, economic and political arrangements beyond those that currently appear inevitable.

LSE Emeritus Professor of Gender and Development, Naila Kabeer, delivered a plenary address on Day 2 of the conference that deepened and sharpened this challenge. If we are to imagine a different world, she asked, what values should organise it—and whose experiences should inform it?

Kabeer located today’s uncertainty in a model of market-driven growth that has intensified inequality, ecological breakdown and gender injustice. An economy organised around growth alone cannot adequately value care, social reproduction, human wellbeing or the natural world. Nor can it account for how risk, insecurity and protection are distributed. Societies may provide forms of protection, but they have always protected some groups more effectively than others.

Her feminist perspective did more than add women to an existing model of development. It questioned the model itself. Moving from growth to wellbeing requires us to reconsider what counts as productive, whose work is recognised, how resources and responsibilities are distributed, and whether economic activity supports the conditions in which people and the planet can flourish.

Feminist values – care, interdependence, equality and collective responsibility – were presented not as concerns at the margins of economic thinking, but as essential resources for navigating an uncertain future. A just world cannot simply reproduce existing hierarchies while distributing their benefits somewhat more evenly. It must confront the power relations through which labour, care, opportunity and vulnerability are structured.

Mark Graham’s closing plenary brought these questions into the rapidly evolving digital economy. Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, Graham’s research showed how generative artificial intelligence can reproduce and amplify long-standing geographical and economic inequalities. Some places become highly visible within digital systems, while others are rendered invisible, averaged out or reduced to stereotypes. At the same time, the apparently immaterial world of artificial intelligence rests upon material infrastructures, extractive supply chains and often-hidden forms of human labour.

Graham therefore posed a question that sits at the heart of development studies: who controls the means through which the world is represented, and who bears the costs of producing those representations?

Yet his lecture also offered a bridge from critique to action. Through initiatives such as Fairwork, action research can be used to make hidden labour conditions and power asymmetries visible, comparable and contestable. Fairness is not left as an abstract aspiration. It is translated into principles and standards against which companies, institutions and labour practices can be assessed and held to account.

In this sense, Graham showed how the just world imagined by Basu and critically re-envisioned by Kabeer might begin to be made concrete. Research does not merely describe injustice; it can help create the tools through which injustice is challenged. It can build evidence, establish benchmarks, amplify the voices of workers and communities, and provide practical mechanisms for accountability.

Taken together, the three plenaries offered more than diagnoses of an uncertain world. They suggested a sequence for reimagining development. First, we must retain the courage to imagine arrangements beyond those that presently appear politically or economically possible. Second, that imagination must be disciplined by feminist questions about power, care, inequality and whose wellbeing matters. Third, justice must be translated into research practices, institutional designs and accountability mechanisms capable of changing how economies and technologies function.

This does not provide a simple blueprint for a just world. Nor should it. Across DSA2026, speakers and participants repeatedly reminded us that development remains contested: a field of difficult questions, unequal power and competing visions of the future.

But the plenaries also demonstrated why reimagining matters. It is not an escape from the world as it is. It is a way of seeing its structures more clearly, refusing to treat them as inevitable, and building the intellectual and practical resources needed to change them.