A sustainable future isn’t possible without equal participation
Dr Andrea Rigon, Associate Professor (UCL Bartlett Development Planning Unit) demonstrates how changes to the recent Development Studies Association Conference have encouraged equal participation and created a more effective space for discussing decolonising academia and halting the climate crisis.
UCL has hosted the largest ever Development Studies Association (DSA) Conference on the theme of “just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world” (6–8 July). The conference attracted 726 participants, amongst which over 43% were based and from the Global South. Participants came from 69 countries and, amongst the top 11 delegations, there were 5 African and 3 Asian countries (for example, there were 140 participants based in Africa).
Attendees addressed some of the global challenges we’re focussing on at UCL, including the Climate Crisis, Inequality, and Data-empowered Societies. However, these issues could only be discussed with a global community of scholars. This was particularly important given that traditionally, debates about global development issues affecting the Global South are dominated by scholarship produced by Global North universities. This more equal participation represented an important shift towards a decolonising agenda.
This was achieved with funding support from the UCL Grand Challenges, the UCL Global Engagement Office and the Bartlett, who provided fee waivers for Global South participants.
“Choosing an online methodology was fundamental to limit carbon footprint, while delivering the most diverse DSA conference ever.”
The methodology used a limited number of core hours for synchronous discussion and pre-recorded presentations available in advance. This accommodated for different time zones, caring responsibilities, different learning styles and disabilities. It dramatically reduced zoom fatigue and focused on discussion. Too many conferences have overrunning presentations, with almost no discussion. At the DSA2022, the entire synchronous slot was dedicated to discussion. This was very much needed, given that the last two years have radically changed the world: COVID, dramatic changes in the official development assistance, dramatic impacts of climate change, and unstable geopolitics and war. These changes added to the complexity of imagining “just sustainable futures”, and required the academic community to undertake a global discussion. As a result of the scale of the changes, participants felt we had just started scratching the surface when sessions ended.
In the opening plenary, urbanising futures and sustainability, Jo Beall argued the need for more theorisation of the link between urbanisation and development and highlighted how conflict and violence have been receiving little attention while Western aid lost importance to China and BRICS. Aromar Revi went back to 1972 limits to growth to show how their predictions were accurate. Aromar outlined current policies in place which mean we are very likely to see temperature increases of 2 degrees. In this scenario, there will be no difference between New York, London and Dar Es Salaam in terms of the collapse of ecosystem services. COVID is just a precursor, but we are likely to see much larger distortions and loss of livelihoods and health impacts concentrated in urban contexts. Aromar left us with the important question: How stable can an urban planet be in the context of endemic inequality, poverty and ecological crisis?
Bill Rees demonstrated how our current overshoot is a fatal condition. Cities are responsible for 75–80% of global consumption and pollution and need productive lands hundreds of times larger than their area to maintain their population. Tokyo alone requires 2.2 times the land mass of Japan to sustain itself. Humans are using Earth as if it were 75% larger than it is. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Bill highlighted the breakdown of the capacity to build a common-sense purpose about the fact that we all depend on the biosphere and need to change our way of life. He concluded by revealing a paradigmatic trap: what is ecologically and socially necessary for sustainability is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically and socially ineffective, if not catastrophic.
The closing plenary “just sustainable futures and knowledge production” attempted to address this trap by addressing the question: what knowledge and learning are needed for just futures? Mark Swilling argued that the idea of a “just transition” has been emptied of its transformative roots and became part of the hegemonic idea of lineal progress. He highlighted how risk analysis is central to direct investment of banks and public financial institutions. Still, such risk analysis leads these institutions to heavily invest in fossil fuels. This risk analysis contributes to the biggest existential risk of destroying our planet, revealing that there is something deeply wrong with the risk analysis. He suggested direct engagement with these institutions to reinvent the thinking around risk and the role of banks. Farhana Sultana reminded us that the Eurocentric, capitalist, patriarchal, techno-centric and racist knowledge systems have brought the world to this crisis of climate breakdown, calling for a deep decolonial process which requires alternative forms of epistemic justice by valuing other knowledge holders and their ways of knowing.
The Development Studies Association Conference was a joint effort led by the Bartlett Development Planning Unit and involved the Institute for Global Prosperity, the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy, the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction (UCL STEaPP), and the Centre for Education and International Development, Institute of Education.
