Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice

What the Gene-Editing Revolution Means For Rural Welfare, Global Futures and Social Justice Speaker: Ronald Herring, Cornell University Discussant: Aniket Aga, SUNY Buffalo Chair: James Putzel, LSE

'Industrial Policy Challenges in the Developing World' Speakers: Arkebe OquabyGov of EthiopiaRichard Kozul-WrightUNCTAD Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

'The debt and climate change precipice: How can the global majority cope?' Speakers: Jayati GhoshNdongo Samba SyllaKevin WatkinsChair: James Putzel, LSE

'Bringing Cyberspace Down to Earth in China: From smart-cities to village digital projects' Speaker: Hong Yu, Mayling Birney Scholar from Zhejiang University Discussant: David Soskice, LSE Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

'Slavery and British Development'. Speakers: Bronwen EverillCambridge University Bank of England. Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

'Guest lecture on Palestine'. Speaker: Rafeef Ziadah, King's College London Discussant: Mai Taha, LSE Chair: James Putzel, LSE

'Development or Dependence?: China's Investment and development finance in Africa'. Speakers: Keyu JinYunnan ChenWeiwei Chen Chair: Tin Hinane El Kadi, LSE

The Latin American Left: Opportunities, challenges, and setbacks Speakers: Chair: James Putzel, LSE

Gender and Work in Global Value Chains: Capturing the gains? Speaker: Stephanie Barrientos, Manchester University Discussant: Kate Meagher, LSE Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

Making Anti-Corruption Real: A strategy for feasible reform in adverse contexts. Speakers: Mushtaq Khan and Pallavi Roy, SOAS Discussant: Jonathan Di John, SOAS Chair: James Putzel, LSE

The Russia-Ukraine War: Consequences for global security and development. Panel: Chair: James Putzel, LSE

In search of repair: The necessity of community development to mental health improvements in contexts of adversity. Speaker: Rochelle Burgess, University College London Discussant: Philipa Mladovsky, LSE Chair: Laura Mann, LSE

Professor Ha-Joon Chang and Professor James Putzel discuss the state of the world economy. Speaker: Ha-Joon Chang, SOAS Chair: James Putzel, LSE

Dirk-Jan Koch and Clare Short discuss Dirk-Jan Koch's new book 'Foreign aid and its unintended consequences' (Open access). Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. Speaker: Dirk-Jan Koch, Chief Science Officer of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs Discussant: Clare Short, British politician Chair: James Putzel, LSE

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? Speakers Nanjala 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 field Kecheng 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. Chair Laura 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.

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. Speaker Jayati 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. Discussant Kathryn 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. Chair Laura 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

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. Speaker Naomi 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. Discussant Raj 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. Chair Duncan 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.

This presentation explores the impact of the pandemic on workers across four key sectors of the Palestinian economy: health, education, agriculture, and construction. As with elsewhere around the world, Palestinian workers have experienced multiple challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated mitigation measures. In the occupied Palestinian territories however, it unfolded in the context of a captive, fragmented, and de-developed economy that has endured decades of Israeli military occupation. Speaker: Rafeef Ziadah, King's College London | Discussant: Dr Tiziana Leone, LSE | Chair Dr Laura Mann, LSE

Economics and science fiction share many interrelations that are rarely recognised. Firstly, a lot of economics is science fiction. Many economists believe in the fiction that they are practising ‘science’, while many also believe in the fiction that progress in ‘science’ (and thus technology) is the solution to virtually all economic problems. Saying that much of economics is science fiction doesn’t mean that science fiction itself is not useful for economics. It has been a powerful way to imagine alternative realities in which very different technologies have changed our institutions and even individuals, making us re-think our assumptions about economy and society. Extending this logic, we can say history is a dystopian science fiction even without memories of advanced technologies. Moreover, if studying history helps us to imagine other realities, so do comparative studies. In trying to understand the world, we can be immensely helped by science fiction, history, and comparative studies, because they allow us to see that the existing economic and social order is not a ‘natural’ one, that it can be changed, and, most importantly, that it has been brought about only because some people dared to imagine a different world and fought for it. Speaker: Ha-Joon Chang, SOAS | Discussant: Sinéad Murphy, SRHE | Chair Dr Duncan Green, LSE

Isabella Weber on How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. The lecture is part of the LSE ID Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice series.