In the last issue of the EADI Newsletter (the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI))., there is an interesting blog COVID19: De-colonising Development Research? with interesting reflections, some of them touching very close our practice as experts in transition and developing countries.

Melanie Pinet and Carmen Leon-Himmelstine identify five points that don't do well in the current research cycle and make six proposals to change for the better.

 

I invite you to read it and if it provokes you some reactions, share your thoughts in here.:

Comments (7)

Xavier Matheu de Cortada
Open Space Member • 5 years ago

"Northern researchers and donors usually consider the foreign outsider as the ‘expert in the field’, while local researchers and partners are mere field assistants, in charge of the logistics or acting as brokers between Northern researchers and participants."

Xavier Matheu de Cortada
Open Space Member • 5 years ago

"The rhetoric of capacity strengthening and capacity-building fails to acknowledge how much Northern researchers and practitioners can learn from their Southern peers"

Xavier Matheu de Cortada
Open Space Member • 5 years ago

"Covid travel restrictions are transforming partnerships. Local researchers are taking the lead in collecting data using different modalities such as remote interviews. This offers us a unique opportunity to reduce power imbalances, to re-establish relationships of trust and to support local researchers at gaining the skills that they consider they need."

Iván Martín
Open Space Member • 5 years ago

Dear Xavier,
Thank you for sharing this highly relevant reflection. Having been involved in different capacities in North-South research and cooperation projects and partnerships, I cannot exxagerate the accuracy of these insights. Now of course the next step would be to promote a reflection on which are the implications of such a reality for an international organization such as the ETF, which is working with and on developing and transition countries, often with local experts and researchers....and what concrete action could be taken in this respect....I am sure within ETF you have very valuable insights on that.

Xavier Matheu de Cortada
Open Space Member • 5 years ago

The new four-year project Decolonising Development hosted by Kassel University, will work on reconstructing the concept and practice of development after its deconstruction. It aims for a resetting and diversification of the actors, structures, institutions and spaces in which knowledge about and for development is produced, shared contested and put into practice. A first blog post describes what the project can, and what it cannot achieve:

https://decolonise.eu/what-a-cost-action-network-on-decolonising-develo…

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