Editorial

As the incoming editor and deputy editor of ODS, Gaston Yalonetzky and I would like to express very warm thanks to our predecessor, Professor Cheryl Doss for her hard work and dedication to the journal over the past seven years. We are committed to building on her contribution, as well as the contributions and reputations of the editors that came before, to ensure the continued strength of ODS in advancing the field of development studies.

Although both closely associated with the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID), we are the first editor and deputy editor not to be based within ODID. I am an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science where I am also a Distinguished Policy Fellow in LSE Cities. I am Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of SOAS and linked to this editorial role, a research associate in ODID, where in the past I served on its Advisory Council. Dr Gaston Yalonetzky is an Associate Professor at Leeds University Business School, having done his doctorate in Economics at the University of Oxford, and he too maintains a close association with ODID. We are both keen to continue the breadth and depth of scholarship represented by the journal’s association with ODID, while also expanding the reach and reputation of the journal in two key ways.

The first precedes us and relates to the relaunch of ODS in 2020, ‘to meet the current challenges and future demands of the field of development studies’ (Doss, 2020). At the time, the editorial advisory board was restructured to ensure broader representation and inclusion of scholars in the Global South. The Board remains committed to this and to vigorously advancing this trend. Already, the journal is open to submissions in Spanish and makes resources available for translation when papers reviewed by Spanish speakers are accepted for publication. We have ambitions, to extend this to other languages and regions, resources permitting, as well as to explore the potential for collaboration with regional development studies journals.

The second way in which our appointment as editor and deputy editor aims to enhance the reach and reputation of ODS, is to reinforce and underscore the journal’s overarching purpose, which is to embrace a range of disciplines and methods in better understanding and addressing the complexities and challenges that define our field. This commitment is little changed from when it was first outlined by ODS editor, Professor Frances Stewart, in her ‘Manifesto for Oxford Development Studies’:

Our aim is to produce a journal which incorporates a wide range of approaches, as well as disciplines, and which gives space to both orthodox and unorthodox analyses and the debates between them. We shall encompass both theoretical and empirical material … . Development studies is essentially multidisciplinary, seeking to bring together the contributions of economics, sociology and politics and other disciplines to the understanding of development (Stewart, 1996)

Reinforcing this, Cheryl Doss wrote in her editorial:

Our intellectual approach is open to work that is interdisciplinary or rooted in a single discipline, such as politics, anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, or history; however, we are committed to the idea that the journal should be relevant and accessible to a readership drawn from across the social sciences (Doss, 2020)

To this end, a range of disciplinary, methodological and regional expertise is represented across our associate editors and international editorial advisory board, as well as the referees who help us advance the journal’s rigorous and critical analysis of international development.

We take over the editorship nearly thirty years on from the ‘Manifesto for Oxford Development Studies’, and the nature and focus of scholarship and the world of development studies has changed. International development as a western-led project originating in the mid-20th century is over, and by the 1990s development was no longer predicated on the assumption of prevailing peace. Today there are at least thirty active conflicts around the world, with countries and regions preparing themselves for protracted conflict and war.

The soft power exercised by Western powers through spending on aid is being eroded through closer attention being paid to domestic priorities, at a time when power is moving east, and new economic and political alliances are being forged in a polycentric world. Many major objectives of development policy and practice have been met, such as declines in absolute poverty since 2000. However, the era of globalisation gave rise to increased inequalities. With the world’s poorest increasingly concentrated in middle-income countries, debates on the distributional dimensions of international development have been reopened, and new problematics have posed themselves. Clearly, the job of development is not yet done and a role for development studies continues.

Many of the issues that have preoccupied scholars in our field and in the pages of ODS since its inception have not gone away. By way of example, in the 1990s the impact of structural adjustment was a significant area of investigation, while the most recent special issue focuses on new perspectives on structural transformation (see Volume 51, Issue 4). Yet there is also a need to address new challenges as they present themselves, some that have developed and morphed from the old, and others, whether technological or political, that have taken us by surprise.

In an intellectual environment where many of the incentives are for greater disciplinary insularity in the name of rigour and excellence, development studies have long advocated multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research for decades (Hulme & Toye, 2006). This has never implied the development of individual polymaths but rather an openness of mind to understanding the light that different disciplines can throw on our insights and analyses (Kanbur, 2002). As such, multidisciplinarity is well advanced in development studies, with methodologies from econometrics to audio diaries complementing each other, and in some instances, disciplinary boundaries becoming quite porous.

It is probably fair to argue, however, that in development studies disciplinary border-hopping is most frequently observed between economics and the so-called ‘softer’ social sciences. Yet contemporary challenges require us to go further in transcending or transforming existing disciplinary structures and techniques. Along with other related fields of investigation such as climate change, globalisation, and urbanisation, development studies is having to embrace the full range of physical sciences, engineering, and computing, to address the complex and multidimensional issues at stake. Again this is not entirely new as attested to by previous articles and special issues in ODS, for example, on health, infrastructure and the law, and more recent articles on COVID-19 and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, these and other areas informed by the harder sciences are growing in importance.

Recent debates on interdisciplinarity have escalated in response to increased demands for science to be accountable to society, alongside normative calls from funding agencies and policy makers for greater user involvement and impact assessment (Barry & Born, 2014). In the case of development studies, already fairly well versed in this regard, this represents a matter of magnitude than substance, although of relevance and note is the fact that increased advocacy for interdisciplinary research has resulted in a growing interest in the role of the humanities in interdisciplinary research (Beall et al., 2019). In development studies innovative strides have been made in this area, a good example being in relation to literature, music and film in development (Lewis et al., 2014, 2022). Alongside engagement with science, it is hoped ODS can look forward to receiving submissions that will grow and advance these areas of enquiry.

In this issue and in the above vein, we publish in this issue, ‘Stories from the South: The interplay of climate science, “action”, and the implications for development’ by Coleen Vogel and Nadia Shah Naidoo, based on the ODS-sponsored lecture given by Coleen Vogel at the Development Studies Association conference in 2023. We will also continue with our series ‘Critical Issues in Development Studies’, intended to reflect critically on key themes and challenges in development and to help set the agenda for future research in development studies. A recent example is ‘The politics of preserving gender inequality: De-institutionalisation and re-privatisation’ by Anne Marie Goetz (2020), and we look forward to our authors and readers exploring other topics and challenges in this series.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).