Conferences
IDPM and the Global Poverty Research Group (GPRG) present
Reclaiming Development? Assessing the Contribution of Non-Governmental Organisations to Development Alternatives
27-29 June 2005
Hulme Hall, Victoria Park, University of Manchester
What roles can NGOs and civil society organisations play in reclaiming development? To what extent can they be seen as the agents for social justice, human realisation and social transformation, principles that have inspired so many to commit themselves to the work of NGOs?
IDPM has been organiser or co-organiser of three previous conferences that have addressed the scaling up of NGO impacts, questions of NGO performance and accountability, and NGOs and global change. It is now five years since the last of these meetings took place in 1999. It is now timely to convene a fourth conference .
Have NGOs Failed in Promoting Development Alternatives?
Changes in the global economic and geopolitical context present distinctively new challenges not only for NGOs but also the very notion of development. In many cases these changes seem to be reducing the scope of NGO autonomy, and are more than ever turning development into a business and an instrument of geopolitics. For these very reasons they seem to make more urgent the determination to find alternative ways of addressing human need and social justice. Alternatives are needed at local, national and international levels.
To engage in "development" is, for many people, to seek to build more humane, just and inclusive social systems. This commitment to alternative ways of organising society lies at the core of many NGOs' reasons for being.
Yet after decades of nongovernmental efforts to promote these development alternatives, "development fatigue" is real. Academic and activist critiques of development are as profound as they have ever been; citizens tire of seeing so much activity with apparently few results; activists argue that development has become a business rather than a socio-political programme; underlying structures of power, inequality and inequity seem resistant to any significant change. Development appears to have spawned few significant alternatives, meanwhile the development industry carries on. Have NGOs failed?
Reclaiming Development
This conference will ask what roles NGOs can play in reclaiming development and the principles of justice, social transformation and human realisation that have inspired so many to commit themselves to the work of NGOs.
The meeting will be both retrospective and prospective . It will consider the extent to which NGOs have secured the development alternatives to which they have aspired, and the extent to which these alternatives have spilled over into other institutions and geographical contexts.
A range of contributions will assess the extent to which NGOs have been responsible for "re-engineering the world". Other contributions will assess the factors that have limited NGOs ability to foster alternative forms of development or to move beyond local alternatives. Yet others will ask what these experiences mean for the future roles of nongovernmental action, for theories of development and for the very concept of development itself as something with which those committed to social justice might align themselves.
Overall, the conference will analyse the contribution of NGOs to the nature and direction of political, economic and social change. The particular areas of focus will be the role of and ways in which NGOs have helped foster alternatives in three principal spheres:
- Discourses and debates on development . How, for instance, have NGOs helped introduce new ideas of social justice and human entitlements into debates on and understandings of development? How have they fostered new types and styles of policy debate? How have they changed the very terms of development debates?
- Institutional arrangements for development . How, for instance, have NGOs helped shape or re-shape arrangements for promoting human security, for fostering participatory democracy, for financing development, or for arranging the provision of human development services?
- Development at the level of process, practice and intervention . How have NGOs triggered alternative processes of social and economic change? How have they opened up new interventions and strategies for poverty reduction? How have they changed the way in which development is done and unfolds?
Alternatives such as these and many others might be considered at international, national and sub-national levels.
Further Information and CALL FOR PAPERS
General Information
The conference will combine keynote addresses and thematic panels. Participants will come from academic, activist and policy backgrounds.
Attendance will be limited to 200, so early booking is recommended.
Completed booking forms should be sent to Debra Whitehead at the addresses listed below.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The conference organisers will consider both individual paper abstracts as well as abstracts for a set of papers collected into a panel. Abstracts should be submitted by 15 November 2004 , and authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by 30 November. For those authors whose abstracts are accepted, complete papers should be submitted by 1 May 2005. These papers will then be posted on a conference website and thus available to participants before the event. A background paper will also be circulated and posted by 15 March 2005.
Contact Information
For further details about the conference, to submit abstracts and to book places at the conference please contact:
Debra Whitehead
Research and Conference Administrator
Institute for Development Policy and Management
University of Manchester
Harold Hankins Building
Precinct Centre
Booth Street West
Manchester, M13 9QH
Tel: +44(0)161 275 2821
Fax: +44(0)161 273 8829
e-mail: debra.whitehead@manchester.ac.uk
Conference Advisory Board
Mike Battcock
Department for International Development
UK
Evelina Dagnino
University of Campinas
Brazil
Michael Edwards
The Ford Foundation
USA
John Hailey
INTRAC
UK
Jude Howell
London School of Economics
UK
Firoze Manji
Fahamu - Learning for Change
UK
Rachel Marcus
Save the Children Fund
UK
Imran Matin
BRAC
Bangladesh
Sheela Patel
SPARC
India
Maha Shammas
Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling
Palestine
Rajesh Tandon
PRIA
India
Pim Verhallen
Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation
The Netherlands