Global Development Institute Blog

Covid-19 is a global development challenge

by | Jul 30, 2020 | Comment | 0 comments

Covid-19 is a global development challenge

For the past few years, researchers at the Global Development Institute have argued that Development Studies needs to move on from its traditional international focus.

Rory Horner, David Hulme and others have been at the forefront of arguing that the idea of global development is a better way of thinking about complex, interconnected social, political and economic issues around the world.

In a new, open access World Development article, Johan Oldekop, Rory Horner and 44 other authors (drawn largely from GDI) set out the case that Covid-19 accentuates the case for a global development paradigm.

This is the abstract:

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the expertise and solutions to tackle global challenges, and has further highlighted the need for multi-directional learning and transformation in all countries towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We illustrate our argument for a global development paradigm by examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic across four themes or ‘vignettes’: global value chains, digitalisation, debt, and climate change. We conclude that development studies must adapt to a very different context from when the field emerged in the mid-20th century.

Read the full, open access article in World Development here.

Explore more research and commentary on the case for global development:

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

Note:  This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.