The Emperor’s New Clothes? Why Localisation Still Leaves Power in Northern Hands
Nicola Banks and Gijs van Selm
Localisation. Locally Led Development. Shift the Power.
These phrases have become fixtures in the language of international aid. They promise a simple but powerful idea: put resources and decision-making closer to the communities they are meant to serve.
But our new research suggests something uncomfortable — localisation, as it is often practised, can strengthen the grip Northern NGOs (NNGOs) have on the system, rather than loosen it.
What to expect from Welcome Week 2025 at GDI
As the start of term approaches, GDI is looking forward to welcoming our new students.
To kick off the semester, we will be hosting a Welcome Week on campus (22nd – 26th September) where we will provide induction sessions, meetings and mixers to get to know your teachers, peers, and the course content you can look forward to.
Silence, Dust and Oblivion: Reflections on Extractive Legacies from the Atacama Desert
Remains of the Pampa Lina saltpetre offices (foreground) beside modern mining waste (background). Photo: Esteban Valle Riestra
By Esteban Valle Riestra, Postgraduate researcher, GDI
Call for Papers: Conference on the Future of Development Economics
December 11-12, 2025, University of Manchester, UK.
With support from The University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute Journal of Development Studies Conference Fund
Keynote speakers: Ravi Kanbur (Professor of Economics, Cornell University) and Anandi Mani (Professor of Behavioural Economics and Public Policy, University of Oxford).
Call for Papers – ‘(Re-)establishing Political Economy in Development Studies’
An Early Career-led and focused workshop from the PhD ‘Political Economy of Development’ working group.
Funded by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) and the Development Studies Association (DSA), linked to the joint EADI/DSA Politics and Political Economy of Economic Transformation Working Group.
Being a migrant: embodied experiences and bodily strategies
by Tanja Bastia, Erika Busse, Verónica Montes, and Andrea Souto Garcia
At the 25th IMISCOE conference, the largest migration conference in Europe, recently held in Paris, we (the authors) took the opportunity to meet and discuss our respective research experiences, using the migrant body as an entry point to guide our discussion.
“I’m a ‘privileged’ researcher from a Global North university”: When reflexivity becomes performative (and why that matters)
by Anuradha Ganapathy, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester
“Development” as a concept and field of study is far from being free of its colonial, patriarchal, and hierarchical legacies. In this context, questions of who researches and who is being researched need to be constantly examined and scrutinised. For many of us in development studies who undertake fieldwork as part of our research, these are not abstract questions of a technical nature. They form the substance of the research process – starting from the nature of questions that are asked, through data collection, analysis and writing, to how findings are received. They require us to pay attention to our own positionalities, i.e., markers of our identity – be it gender, class, race, and geography – and address how they affect our views of the field, and how the field reacts to our presence – a process we have come to understand as reflexivity.
Participate in our upcoming communities of practice
This year, GDI’s Natalie Cunningham (Senior Lecturer in Leadership for Development) will be running a series of communities of practice (CoPs) designed to support development practitioners (and those interested in pursuing a career in development) in building their resilience during an especially turbulent time around the globe.
Affordable Housing, Financialization and Urban Statecraft
A lecture by Tom Gillespie at Cornell AAP explores the scale of the 21st-century urban housing challenge.
Introducing JEOC: why Earth Observation, why Conservation, why Justice?
By Rose Pritchard and Timothy Foster
The Just Earth Observation for Conservation (JEOC) project explores how Earth Observation technologies and data are changing biodiversity conservation and what this means for people living in or near protected areas. We work in four sites around the world (in Guatemala, Kenya, Spain and the UK), as well as engaging with EO data producers and analysts. This blog provides a brief outline of why we believe researching this EO/conservation/social justice nexus to be so important.