Theme

Contests over power and agency are intensifying across the globe — from digital and ecological domains to struggles for sovereignty and justice — forcing development into a moment of reckoning amidst deepening uncertainty. The 2026 DSA Conference invites critical reflection on whether and how development theory, practice, and policy can be reimagined — or even transcended, in ways that address their epistemic limitations and complicities in perpetuating inequality in response to shifting global power relations, reconfigurations in state support for development funding, and new forms of agency emerging across scales.

This moment of rupture offers a space not only to question whose visions of the future shape development agendas, but also to ask whether the framework of development itself remains adequate or whether it must be fundamentally rethought, deconstructed, or even abandoned in favour of alternative paradigms of justice and collective wellbeing. If development has carried normative promises of progress and uplift, for as long as it has been subject to resistance and critiques of these claims, today’s world calls for a deeper interrogation of the politics – both structural and immediate – underpinning these narratives. Can development be a meaningful framework for justice and transformation in a rapidly changing world?

We invite contributions that examine how power is being reconfigured and reinscribed – through digital technologies, decolonial movements, environmental resistance, and everyday practices of survival and care – and how different actors are asserting or reclaiming agency in this flux. The conference will explore how development might be reimagined beyond conventional binaries: global/national, expert/local, state/grassroots, North/South.

Key areas of exploration may include (but are not limited to):

• Decolonising Development: Are current approaches to decolonisation meaningfully shifting power — or reproducing old hierarchies in new forms? What tensions and divergent understandings shape this ongoing struggle?
• Digital Futures and Inequality: How are AI, digital platforms, and data reshaping who benefits from development – and who is left behind?
• Climate Justice and Systemic Change: Can development move beyond adaptation and resilience toward more transformative, planetary futures?
• Geopolitics and Multipolarity: How are changing global alliances and economic orders redefining aid, diplomacy, and sovereignty?
• Community Agency and Alternative Futures: How do social movements, indigenous struggles, and informal actors challenge top-down paradigms?

This theme encourages contributions that interrogate not just the constraints and possibilities of development, but also the limits of the development paradigm itself. It invites radically different imaginaries, vocabularies, and political commitments that may lie outside, or in deliberate refusal of, its frameworks and – rethinking how we frame futures, build solidarities, and enable justice-driven change. The DSA2026 conference welcomes panels, papers, and interventions that engage critically with these dynamics, as well as those aligned with broader development studies concerns.