By Louisa Hann

It’s the beginning of a new year – a time when many of us are looking to the future. Whether you’re trying to stick to a resolution or counting down the days until spring, January is often charged with a combination of renewal, resolve, and trepidation.

If you’re leaning more towards anxiety than optimism this year, you’re not alone. The early 2020s have proved distinctly rocky at a global scale thanks to rising authoritarianism, new and emerging health crises, escalating geopolitical rivalries, and – perhaps most worryingly – intensifying climate breakdown. As Gindo Tampubolon explains in a recent blog, trust in climate science can have a detrimental effect on our mental health, with those in highly vulnerable countries feeling especially anxious.

With 2025 now in full swing, it’s no surprise many of us are feeling a little apprehensive. We’re likely to encounter more surprises and challenges this year – both within the development space and beyond. However, while this constellation of global pressures can feel disorienting, it’s also energising theories and movements towards a better future. Within the Global Development Institute, such urgency is pressing academics to ask tough questions that interrogate harmful orthodoxies and develop knowledge to help tackle some of the world’s many injustices.

Here are just some of the ways GDI researchers are using their expertise to conceptualise future threats and reimagine some of the ways we organise the world…

 

Reckoning with the past, present, and future

Development projects and organisations are typically beholden to targets and frameworks designed to guide their future success. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for example, represent some of the most widely recognised targets against which governments and other relevant actors can measure their progress in addressing issues like hunger, educational disparities, environmental degradation, poverty, and gender inequities.

While the SDGs are widely adopted by governments, civil society organisations, and the private sector, they have attracted sustained criticism for their relative alignment with the political and economic status quo. Some, for example, have noted that the SDGs’ commitment to economic growth (SDG 8) contradicts their ecological goals (SDGs 13, 14, 15). Others have expressed scepticism about their vague and non-binding constitution, which may fail to incentivise the redistributive actions necessary to drive real change.

In other words, the SDGs (and similar frameworks) fail to address – and in some ways subscribe to – the colonial foundations upon which the global economy is built. So, how can critically minded scholars maintain a historically literate and justice-focused approach to development that heeds calls for decolonisation?

Of course, the notion that unjust orthodoxies of the past continue to shape injustices in the present has become common-sensical to many within Development Studies. However, such legacies can be obscured in novel, sometimes inadvertent ways by scholars and practitioners, thereby inhibiting the potential for real systemic change.

For Uma Kothari, the answer to this problem lies in looking beyond the abstract and theoretical and taking concrete action to alter unjust structures. By way of example, she explores how the repatriation of objects pilfered by colonialists represents a generative step towards decolonising development. As she explains in a short essay:

a critical engagement with understandings of heritage might generate a more progressive development, instil solidaristic principles and forge practices of care. This involves a shift in focus towards how formerly colonised people and places continue to be represented through a Western imagination in museums, through curation and artefacts. (271-2)

Objects are imbued with symbolic weight that can change and mutate depending on the context within which they are held and displayed. Returning stolen objects emphasises the exemplifying ‘a progressive, transformational, decolonial approach to heritage from which development might learn’ (273). In other words, as well as confronting past injustices, we must start to tackle the complex structures and institutions from which they arose and continue to reproduce injustices. Only then can we build a fair and prosperous future.

Further reading and resources:

• Article: ‘Is the Study of Development Humiliating or Emancipatory? The Case Against Universalising “Development”’ by Pritish Behuria – A contribution to ongoing debates surrounding ‘Global Development’ as a framework. The article argues that proponents of Global Development overlook development’s Southern origins, ignoring emancipatory frameworks such as those set out in the famous Bandung Conference of 1955.
• Lecture video: ‘A Political Epistemology of International Development’ by guest lecturer David Ludwig – Examines how we can counter a legacy of so-called ‘epistemic paternalism’ within Development Studies.

 

Juggling intersecting challenges

The climate crisis has crashed through the first half of the 2020s, causing extreme weather events and ecological destruction at an unprecedented scale. In response, scholars are urgently analysing the success and viability of mitigation and adaptation strategies, such as forest restoration and renewable energy transitions.

While such approaches are vital for protecting humanity’s future, they’re inextricably entangled with socioeconomic concerns that may impact social justice efforts. How, for example, can we ensure that conservation strategies improve biodiversity while also delivering benefits to local people whose livelihoods are connected to conservation areas. And how can decision-makers navigate difficult trade-offs?

GDI’s Resources, Environment and Development research group aims to improve our knowledge of how political and economic interventions influence society and the environment. Key projects include Sustainable Forest Transitions (SFT), which examines how forest conservation efforts impact both nature and livelihoods; Just Earth Observation for Conservation (JEOC), which aims to develop our understanding of the social risks and benefits of increased use of Earth Observation in conservation; and the establishment of a research observatory to study the role of land rights in simultaneously conserving forests, securing livelihood benefits, and advancing decarbonisation agendas. Such projects will enrich understandings surrounding environmental justice, ensuring we don’t sacrifice social justice efforts in the present as we work to protect future societies and ecologies.

Further reading and resources:

• Journal article: ‘Socio-economic and environmental trade-offs in Amazonian protected areas and Indigenous territories revealed by assessing competing land uses’ by multiple authors (including GDI’s Johan Oldekop and Katie Devenish) – Explores the impacts of protected areas on socioeconomic development in Indigenous communities.
• Podcast: ‘Panel Discussion: Sustainable Forest Transitions Project Launch’ – A recording of last year’s SFT project launch.
• Journal article: ‘Long-term landscape structure change in contrasting land occupation strategies of the Brazilian Amazon’ by Lucas Alencar and co-authors – One of the most recent articles published by the SFT team, this examines the effects of land occupation policies on landscape structure and biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon.

 

Imagining utopian and post-capitalist futures

As criticisms surrounding the SDGs demonstrate, many of the social and economic structures upon which we rely are ill-equipped to deliver the changes required to nurture a fairer world – especially in the face of accelerating climate breakdown. While working with and within such systems is vital for improving lives around the world, looking beyond the status quo can help us critique its flaws and generate novel solutions to deep structural problems.

As Maria Rusca and co-authors note in a new open-access paper, approaching socioecological scholarship in more experimental and speculative ways could illuminate political possibilities for change. While conventional practices within political ecology can uncover extant political dynamics underpinning the climate crisis, the authors warn against falling into entirely negative modes of knowledge production. Such tendencies, they argue, may overemphasise capitalism’s power, while failing to acknowledge the social and ecological novelties of our fragile era.

Inspired by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s examination of the performative dynamics of knowledge production, the paper encourages political ecologists to adopt more ‘reparative’ modes of critique open to the power of speculation and imagination. By way of example, the authors explore the potential of science fiction, queer and feminist critical theories, Black geographies, and multispecies ethnographies to inform political-ecological praxis. In so doing, they attempt to lay the groundwork for more hopeful, creative, and cross-disciplinary efforts towards a better future.

Another scholar peering beyond the here-and-now of late capitalism is Heather Alberro, whose work broadly covers radical and decolonial environmental politics and the potentials of green utopianism. Alberro’s recent book, Terrestrial Ecotopias: Multispecies Flourishing in and Beyond the Capitalocene, makes a case for utopian modes of thought, arguing that

the myriad crises we face require more than mere technical fixes but, crucially, fundamental ethical and political transformations, changes in how we perceive, value and relate to others, particularly other species. These crises require a radical rethink of how we define and conceive of “the good life”. In so doing, we ought to continually ask ourselves: Who matters and why? How ought we (re)arrange society so as to enable all – human and all terrestrials – to live the “good life”? Who might be included as well as excluded in our (re)definitions of the “good life”? (4-5)

While imagining alternative realities may feel like a distraction from urgent problems, disrupting capitalism’s destructive cycle requires fundamental shifts in how we live our lives and treat each other. In this respect, utopianism plays an invaluable role.

Further reading and resources:

• Journal article: ‘Towards a future-oriented political ecology of climate change’ by Maria Rusca – Lays the foundations for an urban political ecology that embraces experimentalism and speculative modes of thought.
• Journal article: ‘Plural climate storylines to foster just urban futures’ by multiple authors (including GDI’s Maria Rusca, Marcellus Mbah, and Diana Mitlin) – Proposes a framework for imagining climate futures in a way that influences more transformative policymaking.
• Book: Radical Environmental Resistance: Love, Rage and Hope in an Era of Climate and Biodiversity Breakdown by Heather Alberro – Examines the role of direct action in nurturing better and more abundant futures.

 

Keep up with the Global Development Institute in 2025

Do you have a New Year’s resolution to stay on top of all things global development? Remember to check out our research outputs on the GDI website or via Research Explorer. You can also keep track of the latest updates from the institute via X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky. If you haven’t done so already, we recommend signing up to our newsletter to receive monthly updates and commentary.

Top photo by Roman Kraft 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.

Please feel free to use this post under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full information is available here