Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice

LSE Department of International Development

These podcasts are recordings from the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice lecture series 2023/24, 2022/23, 2021/22 and 2020/21, a visiting lecture series coordinated by Professor of Development Studies, Professor James Putzel and Dr Laura Mann. The Cutting Edge series provides students and guests with fascinating insights into the practical world of international development. Renowned guest lecturers share their expertise and invite discussion on an exciting range of issues, from climate change policy, to pressing humanitarian crises. In 2020, the series took place online, enabling us to host fantastic speakers from around the world and to stream the lectures on YouTube, opening them up to a global audience. Now we are back in person but still recording the sessions to share with our global audience. read less
Society & CultureSociety & Culture

Episodes

S3, E5  Panel on Platforms for deliberation or disinformation? social media and development
Dec 5 2022
S3, E5 Panel on Platforms for deliberation or disinformation? social media and development
This panel examines the record of digital technologies and asks what we might do to re-engineer them to fulfil their early promise.Fibre optic internet cables have now connected almost every part of the world into a giant web of networks. Pundits once claimed this infrastructure would allow everyone to raise her voice, speak her mind, learn from others and hold authorities to account. A decade on, a far more subdued mood has settled, with reports of targeted misinformation campaigns and nefarious surveillance the world over. This panel examines the record of digital technologies and asks what we might do to re-engineer them to fulfil their early promise. How might these infrastructures be used to generate more accurate information about contexts usually ignored or misconstrued by mainstream news outlets? How might we encourage users to actually listen and learn from those outside their own networks? How might we reconfigure these systems for deliberation and transparency, rather than divisiveness?SpeakersNanjala Nyabola is a writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology, media, and society. She is the author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed Books, 2018) and Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move (Hurst Books, 2020).Idrees Ahmad, is the Director of Journalism at the University of Essex. He is a founding editor of New Lines magazine and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of books. He writes for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Observer among others. He is on Twitter: @im_pulse.Amil Khan is a former Reuters foreign correspondent and BBC investigative journalist. He started working with right-based groups in the Middle East when the Arab Spring kicked off. In 2020, seeing online manipulation emerge as a critical threat to journalists, activists and political movements across the world, he founded Valent Projects with the aim of levelling the playing fieldKecheng Fang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include digital media, journalism, and political communication.ChairLaura Mann is a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda) but she has also worked on collaborative research on ICTs and BPO in Asia and has conducted fieldwork in North America as part of a project on digitisation within global agriculture.This talk is part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice 2022 series, a high-profile lecture series run by the Department of International Development at LSE and organised by Dr Laura Mann and Professor in Practice Duncan Green.The Department of International Development promotes interdisciplinary postgraduate teaching and research on processes of social, political and economic development and change.
S3, E4  Jayati Ghosh on Why Inequality is the Basic Driver of the Climate Crisis
Nov 23 2022
S3, E4 Jayati Ghosh on Why Inequality is the Basic Driver of the Climate Crisis
National and global approaches to climate change alleviation are very inadequate because they ignore the important role played by wealth, income and consumption inequalities. Reducing these will be essential for humanity to meet the climate change — and there are feasible ways to do this.SpeakerJayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and since January 2021 is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Recent books include the forthcoming co-authored book Earth For All: A survival guide for humanity; The making of a catastrophe: Covid-19 and the Indian economy, Aleph Books 2022; When governments fail: Covid-19 and the economy, Tulika Books and Columbia Univerity Press 2021 (co-edited); and Women workers in the informal economy, Routledge 2021 (edited). She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She is currently a Member of the UN Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All and the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, mandated to provide a vision for international cooperation to deal with current and future challenges.DiscussantKathryn Hochstetler is Professor and Head of the Department of International Development at the LSE. She teaches and researches at the intersection of environment and development issues, including teaching DV415, Global Environmental Governance. Her publications include many on topics including the participation of emerging powers in climate negotiations, the relationship of environmental issues with trade and finance, and environmental politics and policy in developing countries, especially in South America. Her most recent book is Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa (Cambridge 2021). Before that, she published the prize-winning Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke 2007), with Margaret Keck. Before joining LSE, she was a professor in Canada (University of Waterloo, Balsillie School of International Affairs) and the United States (University of New Mexico, Colorado State University). She is on the editorial boards of several climate and development series at Cambridge University Press, as well as multiple academic journals. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.ChairLaura Mann is a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of development, knowledge and technology. Her regional focus is East Africa (Sudan, Kenya and Rwanda) but she has also worked on collaborative research on ICTs and BPO in Asia and has conducted fieldwork in North America as part of a project on digitisation within global agriculture.This talk is part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice 2022 series, a high-profile lecture series run by the Department of International Development at LSE and organised by Dr Laura Mann and Professor in Practice Duncan Green.The Department of International Development promotes int
S3,E3 Naomi Hossain on The Popular Politics of 21st Century Food and Fuel Riots
Nov 15 2022
S3,E3 Naomi Hossain on The Popular Politics of 21st Century Food and Fuel Riots
Development studies frames food and fuel riots as the crowd response to the stimulus of price changes, as indicators of impact of economic shocks or policy reforms. In this dashboard view of the world, the masses respond automatically to spikes in the price of gas or bread, sending signals to governments and the international community that inflation is out of control, and Something Must Be Done.Food and fuel price protests evidently indicate a problem with pricing, but that is not all they say. They are more accurately read as commentaries on the politics that have left them in that position. People do not protest out of anger about prices: most people face daily struggles and juggles to feed, house, transport and care for their families, and most just cope, depleting their personal and social resources in the process. So food and fuel riots are not merely the angry response of hungry bodies. They are political statements, often highly effective and memorable, of shared outrage about elite corruption that breeds policies that enrich the powerful at the expense of the rest. Food and fuel rioters seek to assert the moral parameters of public policy, and to blame and shame political leaders that transgress them. This lecture will look at the political diagnoses articulated in recent food and fuel riot episodes, exploring how these moments share a commentary on the fused failures of economic and political governance across otherwise distinctively different settings. It is in these surprisingly broad areas of agreement between food and fuel rioters that a distinct and vocal popular politics has emerged, critical of collusion between political and economic elites and of actually-existing capitalism, yet without immediate political alternatives.SpeakerNaomi Hossain is a political sociologist and Research Professor at the Accountability Research Center at the School of International Service at American University. She researches the politics of inclusive development and how people get the public services they need, and has written about elite perceptions of poverty, food and fuel riots, disaster (including pandemic) politics, workers’ rights, women’s empowerment and the role of civil society in development, among other issues.DiscussantRaj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.ChairDuncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, Professor in Practice in International Development at the London School of Economics, honorary Professor of International Development at Cardiff University and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies. He is author of How Change Happens (OUP, October 2016) and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World (Oxfam International, 2008, second edition 2012).This talk is part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice 2022 series, a high-profile lecture series run by the Department of International Development at LSE and organised by Dr Laura Mann and Professor in Practice Duncan Green.The Department of International Development promotes interdisciplinary postgraduate teaching and research on processes of social, political and economic development and change.