Why is IDS a special institution?

The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex is celebrating its 50^th birthday this year. I have been working here for a shocking 40% of this time, and in the week of a major anniversary conference, I thought I should jot a few thoughts down on why IDS has been and remains special.

In 1966, the Institute was founded with Dudley Seers as the first director. It was designated a ‘special institution’ by the UK government, with a particular mandate for research and training. In the period following the end of colonialism, Britain had a special role and needed a special institution. The project of ‘development’ in the ‘Third World’ back then was not supposed to last 50 years. But today with a different focus and new challenges the need for critical, engaged research and training is needed perhaps even more than ever.

Critical traditions

But what for me is special, and why have I remained committed to IDS for now more than 20 years? There have been many tributes, reflections and summary histories offered, but none for me capture the importance of IDS’ radical, critical traditions: the ability to challenge orthodoxies, to speak truth to power, and to translate this into action. Being neither a purely academic institution, nor a NGO or think tank, but a hybrid, not fettered by the constraints and limitations of either, is very important. It can be uncomfortable; but that’s the point.

When I first came to IDS in 1995, there was always a classic set-piece debate between Michael Lipton and Robert Chambers at the beginning of each academic year. They represented two different views on development, held productively in tension. Of course they agreed more than the performance suggested, but it was a useful highlight of how a common normative commitment to progressive change could be looked at through very different lenses: between top-down and bottom-up, between macro-structural and micro-people focused analyses, between economics and wider social sciences, and so on. Using diverse approaches, encapsulated in the 1993 classic, States and Markets, IDS research over many years has challenged what became the dominant neoliberal paradigm, encapsulated in its most extreme ideological form by the ‘Washington Consensus’.

In the last 20 years, these debates have continued in different forms. There have been many excellent contributions that have taken the stance represented more by the Lipton side of the debate – from looking at industrial clusters and value chains to the economic role of the rising powers – as well as many that have emphasised more the Chambers-type perspectives – including the on-going work on participation, citizenship and popular politics.

But actually the most challenging contributions have been when such perspectives have been in dialogue. This is only possible in a cross-disciplinary institution, where the drag of narrow disciplinary specialisms – and the horrific metric-dominated assessment approaches that go with this today – do not limit interaction and creativity. Let me highlight a few of these areas (of many), where I think IDS work (and crucially that of its global network of partners) has been especially exciting.

Livelihoods

One area that I have been fairly centrally involved in, and I think is quintessentially IDS, is work on livelihoods. Indeed with both Chambers and Lipton involved, this was from the beginning a syncretic endeavour. When I produced the 1998 IDS Working Paper on the sustainable livelihoods framework, both reviewed it. And indeed the framework – with its long back history involving many people from Jeremy Swift to Susanna Moorhead to Richard Longhurst, among others – was the result of just these conversations: an approach explicitly aimed at involving economists, yet not forgetting the social, political and institutional. More recently I have reflected on the limitations, particularly as applied in development practice, and argued for a more structural, political economy perspective as central to livelihoods approaches.

States and citizens

This tension between wider structural, political-economic analysis and more locality-focused, participatory understandings was perhaps best illustrated during the 2000s when IDS hosted two of the early DFID Development Research Centres – one on the state and one on citizenship, led by two formidable political scientists – Mick Moore and John Gaventa. With IDS by then exclusively reliant on external, tied support from different donors, inevitably projects had to respond to the contours of the funding environment, and this slightly odd division reflected that in DFID at the time. But hosted within one institution it allowed for a productive, if at times tetchy, debate. Does citizen action construct states, or do states construct citizens? And what do states and citizens constitute anyway? Both centres provided an important challenge, once again, to the neoliberal versions being touted elsewhere.

Gender and empowerment

Work on gender empowerment has been a central feature of work at IDS and Sussex since the 1970s, and the classic contributions of Kate Young and Annie Whitehead. Naila Kabeer, Anne Marie Goetz, Andrea Cornwall and many others followed the tradition, offering challenging scholarship rooted in real struggles. But here too the important tension between structural change versus collective organisation from below played out again. In feminist analyses of course the personal is always political – and vice versa. However in discussions of ‘empowerment’ we see different strands, ranging from those focusing on economic empowerment and formal rights, versus those emphasising individual agency, the politics of the body and sexuality. Debating these dimensions has been a massively important contribution.

The politics of knowledge

Whether taking a more structural view or one more focused on individual or collective agency, knowledge framings matter. The politics of knowledge has been especially emphasised in IDS work on the environment, which really took off in a big way from the early 1990s. As Robert Chambers memorably asked: whose reality counts? The now classic 1996 book, The Lie of the Land, edited by Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, asked why it was that so often environmental management and policy in Africa – from the colonial era to the present – does not respond to realities on the ground, and systematically ignores local knowledges. The answer of course is politics – and how experts, embedded in institutions, understand the world.

Environment and sustainability

This theme of the politics of the policy process has been a central theme of IDS work on environment and resources over 20 years. Building on strong connections with IDS’ sister institution at Sussex, the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), also celebrating 50 years this year, we jointly launched the STEPS Centre in 2006, with ESRC funds, and with Melissa Leach and Andy Stirling I have had the privilege of jointly directing the Centre since then. Here a highly productive synergy between the concerns of development studies and science and technology studies has unfolded over the past decade. With knowledge, politics, and power central, we too have struggled with understanding ‘pathways to sustainability’ that at once capture the relational agency of diverse actors and the wider conditioning effects of political economy. Once again a cross-disciplinary engagement has been absolutely essential –and immensely exciting, intellectually and practically.

Making a difference

None of these research efforts, often lasting long periods, with multiple funders, and diverse research teams at Sussex and beyond, is aimed solely at producing outputs from esteemed academic journals (although there have been plenty of these). All IDS researchers are committed to change: generating ideas to make a difference. In the world of often pointless impact case studies and metrics this may sound glib; but political engagement matters not just to analysis, but also to practice.

The first two images of the official but rather selective IDS 50^th anniversary timeline are one of Stanmer House, a very English country house in the South Downs, near the campus of the University of Sussex where IDS was first based, and a Warhol-esque picture of Chairman Mao. It is these sort of contrasts, tensions and yes contradictions that keeps IDS on its toes, and makes it, despite the funding pressures, an exciting place to work – and really does make IDS a special institution.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and appeared on Zimbabweland

 

 

Resource politics: living in the Anthropocene

This week we are hosting a major conference at the STEPS Centre at Sussex on resource politics. There are panels looking at everything from mining to wildlife to carbon to water, with big themes cross-cutting on: Scarcity, politics and securitization; Resource grabbing; Governance, elites, citizenship and democracy; Financialisation and markets; Growth, waste and consumption and Gender, race, class and sustainability

Why is this important? As resources become more contested and incorporated as part of a globalised economy, politics take on a new form. We have seen this in the land, water and green grabbing debates, which provide the backdrop to the conference. The resource grabbing debates have each raised important issues around who gains from what resources, and how resources are constructed, regulated and shared, as we discuss in our ‘narratives of scarcity’ paper that will be presented at the conference.

Also at the conference, we will be debating the much talked about concept of the Anthropecene, and the notion of ‘planetary boundaries’, with Johan Rockstrom and Melissa Leach taking the stage to present their perspectives. These ideas have put the politics of resources at the centre of the debate, and the controversy generated has not been seen since the discussions around the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report.

Some argue that these concepts down-play politics, constructed as they are in the register of science. Yet at the same time, they also imply a top-down, authoritarian response, and particularly problematic form of undemocratic resource politics to ‘save the planet’ against impending doom. The return of Malthusian narratives of population catastrophe, ‘perfect storms’ and resource wars is significant but, as in previous renditions, problematic. Such rhetoric can easily be deployed to justify appropriation of resources, and imposition of rules, regulations and market mechanisms that hurt local livelihoods, but not the global capitalist system that generates the problems in the first place.

Others however suggest that the Anthropecene framing and the concept of planetary boundaries offers a more emancipatory vision, connecting not separating nature and humanity, and offering the opportunity for the negotiation of a new more symmetrical political bargain for the planet. This requires not rejecting the ideas but claiming them, and injecting them with a new form of democratic politics that simultaneously respects nature and its limits, as well as puts people, social justice, equity and livelihoods at the core. This doesn’t need an old politics of environmental summitry and global regulation, but, in the words of Chantal Mouffe, a vibrant agonistic politics, part of what Nancy Fraser terms a ‘triple movement’ – neither state protection nor market dominance.

So what do we mean by resource politics? If we understand resources to be not just ‘things’, but created, assembled and constructed in social and political worlds, then we must see resources and their politics as located within particular knowledge frames, and in contextualised political economies – of particular places, and involving certain people. A bit of carbon here, is different to a bit there – just as all resources – because of the social, market, cultural, political and other connections made. Resource scarcity, as Lyla Mehta argues, is inevitably constructed and relational. My scarcity may be the result of someone else’s abundance, and what I see as scarce may not be seen in the same way by others.

Resource politics is therefore about knowledge, about social and political relations and about contests over meaning and access. It is the agonistic hybrid politics of Chantal Mouffe, cutting across state, market and civic spaces, creating an emancipatory politics of transformation, as Andy Stirling argues. It is not therefore the formal, institutionalised politics of global agreements, elections and international relations – although of course all these spaces can become important sites for contest and radical politics, as Catherine Corson argues. As Nancy Peluso and Mike Watts explain in a great chapter in the excellent ‘keywords’ book, Critical Environmental Politics, understanding resource politics requires understanding regimes of accumulation (who gets what – the classic concerns of Marxist political economy), regimes of truth (who understands what in what frame – drawing in Foucauldian analyses of knowledge and power), and regimes of rule (who controls what through what form of governance – Gramsci’s concern with hegemony). Each of these regimes intersects of course, and together make up resource politics.

Understanding resource politics inevitably then requires a diversity of disciplines, connecting natural and social sciences, and importantly across the siloes of social science. At the conference we have people coming from development studies, geography, science and technology studies, international relations, security studies, social anthropology and sociology, politics and political economy, and many with backgrounds in biology, engineering, physics, psychology, information technology and so on. With this mix, the conversation becomes vibrant and challenging – just what we hope to encourage at the STEPS Centre.

If you want to learn more, check out the conference website where there will be papers, presentations and other material. After the conference there will be videos of key sessions, photos and a Storify commentary. If you want to catch the buzz live – starting in a few hours – then follow the conference on Twitter with the hashtag #resourcepol.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland