By Professor Andy Sumner, Kings College London
In December 2025, GDI hosted the ‘future of development economics’ conference. One question that arose was the relationship between development economics (DE) and development studies (DS). Here’s my two cents.
In this blog I argue four things. First, that DS and the classical DE of Arthur Lewis and others share intellectual roots that are often forgotten. Second, that a rupture emerged in the 1980s/1990s as DE “became too much like economics” and DS developed “anti-economics” sentiment. Third, that many tensions sit within DE or DS themselves rather than between them. Fourth, that revisiting the Q2 mixed methods debates of the 2000s could prove fruitful in deepening the dialogue between DE and DS.
The shared history and the rupture
DE and DS have a clear commonality in their shared normative agendas. DE and DS are also by their very nature closely intertwined. It is impossible to address economic development questions without considering political and social dimensions. Similarly, is difficult to consider social or political development without understanding the economic processes.
Not surprisingly then, one starting point for a history of DS is that it grew out of classical DE. In other words, DS emerged from DE or was aligned so closely as to be synonymous at least to the 1980s/1990s.
Evidence for this is that early DS borrowed heavily from classical DE and Structuralist and other heterodox development thinking. Take, for example, dual economy models, structural change, and centre–periphery accounts of a hierarchical global political economy that originated in classical DE and is evident in ‘early’ DS and remains so today.
Another example is Arthur Lewis’s dual economy model, which remains a core reference point for DS debates about economic development. Raúl Prebisch’s foundational statement of Latin American structuralism still anchors DS arguments about external constraints, asymmetric power and the politics of industrialisation. Celso Furtado’s “myth of development” continues to unsettle linear, convergence-based narratives that reappear in contemporary policy cycles, and Hirschman’s emphasis on linkages and unbalanced growth is also part of DS’s genealogy, even when not cited much these days.
However, in the 1980s/1990s, a rupture happened.
The sidelining of classical DE by economics itself and rise of neo-classical economics and its association with Structural Adjustment Programmes led to a narrower form of economics that lost contact with broader social science perspectives, as Ravi Kanbur noted. That narrowing of DE alongside a pluralization of DS with emerging post-structuralist DS, led to growing anti-economic sentiments in DS as economics was seen as part of the problem rather than an ally. This anti-economics sentiment is anti-one specific form of economics for some. For others it is an ontological or epistemological problem with measurement and causation as an oppressive lens over the Global South.
What DE can offer DS and vice versa
Can DE still offer DS something? There is a clear shared agenda: inequality, poverty, employment, trade, and macro constraints in the Global South. There is also a deeper point. DE has methods for measurement and comparison, including cross-country datasets, welfare measures, and evaluation designs. Those often shape policy debates, and DS scholars engage them whether to use them, critique them, or reinterpret them (although they may do so reluctantly).
And conversely, does DS have value to DE? It’s not simply about understanding ‘context’. DE’s implicit assumptions about market exchange and power were flagged by a Ravi Kanbur paper too. DS can introduce power and politics more centrally. In the sense, this is about how a mainstream economics leans towards a view of transactions as voluntary, informed, competitive, and power-free. DS pushes back on this by treating colonial history, social hierarchy, race, gender, class, violence, and ecology as constitutive of development outcomes, not background ‘noise’ or just ‘context’. So, DS does not merely add politics or political economy, it brings theory to it through, for example, mechanisms that show how the politics of institutions and/or hierarchy and global political economy enter causal chains.
So, time for a reset or back to the future?
A question that arises is how to open more spaces for DE-DS exchanges and not just separate spaces at the same DS conference.
In the early-2000s the Q2 (or Q-squared) mixed methods project convened by Ravi Kanbur and Paul Shaffer successfully brought together DE and DS and created a shared space for economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other researchers to argue about what poverty is, how to research it, and how to interpret it. The published output offered more than triangulation. It treated method as a site of theory, where categories, indicators, and narratives are negotiated rather than assumed.
The Q-squared agenda and the set of papers left a clear mark on DS by formalising, and giving momentum to, the field’s long-standing cross-disciplinary instincts. Much of the early-2000s push for mixed methods came from development economists. At the time, it seemed that mixed methods were settling into a new mainstream position in development research, judging for example, by their prevalence in the research projects funded by the ESRC-DFID Poverty alleviation call.
Hentschel captured that mood back then in this line: ‘combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyse social realities was becoming broadly accepted, and the earlier “voices of segregation” had noticeably faded’.
Almost twenty years after the special issues of the Journal of Development Studies and World Development and the book by Hulme and Toye on ‘bridging the disciplines’, mixed methods is much less visible. That said, it is evident many PhD students in development studies are using mixed methods though it seems post-PhD many scholars tend to lean towards quan or qual rather than retain the mixed methods through their career.
There is scope then to revisit Q2 two decades on to bring DS and DE back into deeper dialogue. There are three shifts that make a “Q2 renaissance” agenda timely.
- One shift is the data abundance. Administrative data, remote sensing, platform traces, and new price and labour datasets expand what can be counted, yet they often weaken what can be inferred about agency, coercion, and lived experience. A Q2-style agenda could be well suited to this, because it treats qualitative enquiry as theory-building and measurement auditing, not ‘anecdotal illustration’. This is a timely reflection given that the rise of AI and its use in qualitative analysis raises big questions for theory-building and qualitative enquiry.
- A second shift is the resurgence of structural development constraints in the global political economy e.g. the surge in post-pandemic debt servicing, the centrality of climate risk, and the rise of or geopoliticisation of development. A revived Q2 agenda could bring together macro-structural diagnosis of external constraint, terms-of-trade vulnerability, labour absorption with grounded political economy accounts of how households and firms adapt under stress, and who bears the costs.
- A final shift is disciplinary questions of funding and publishing. The researcher’s incentive structure still rewards narrow excellence. Although this is true for publications, it may not necessarily be the case for research grants so the shift towards interdisciplinary problem-focused or challenge funding could be beneficial and that can reproduce the DE–DS divide. Q2 worked, in part, because it treated disagreement as productive and made it visible in shared outputs.
Revisiting Q2 would not mean recreating early-2000s debates. It would mean designing a new set of shared questions where mixed methods are substantively necessary. This might include how AI-mediated labour markets reshape segmentation and precarity; how climate finance and adaptation projects alter local political settlements; how industrial policy affects distribution across regions and social groups; and how new donor coalitions shape norms and conditionalities.
That said, for Q2 to work in practice there has to be broadly shared prior agreement about questions to pose, core analytical categories, validity criteria and so forth. So, it’s not a fix for those who stand fundamentally opposed on these types of issue.
A final thought
A final thought is this: Ravi Kanbur’s recent provocation on whether there is “a development economics anymore” shows that these kind of conversations could sit inside DS as much as between DE and DS. The implication for DS is to engage the plural strands inside DE and in political economy, and to be explicit about which economics it is rebuilding alliances with. A practical next step would be like the original Q2 approach: small, theme-based meetings with paired outputs (one methodological note, one substantive paper), designed from the start for co-authorship across DE and DS. This could lead to more space for thoughtful exchanges on a new shared agenda across DS and DE.