Event
Development Days Conference 2025: Development Transitions – Amidst Waste, Wars, and Maldevelopment
Date: February 27, 2025 - February 28, 2025
On 27-28 February 2025, the Finnish Society for Development Research (FSDR) will be hosting the ‘Development Days’ Conference 2025 at the University of Helsinki, with the theme ‘’Development Transitions: Admidst Waste, Wars, and Maldevelopment’’.
About the conference
Development is in transition as an academic discipline, a foreign policy, and a professional practice. How has this process of change unfolded over time? Is it transitioning for better or worse? What changes have occurred, and what transitions should happen? These are some of the questions that the Development Days 2025 conference (#DevDays2025) will explore.
While development’s trajectory varies across grassroots, national, and global levels, transitions toward alternative futures remain path-dependent. Achieving change—whether through reforms, innovation, or socio-ecological shifts—must account for historical and present contexts.
Despite advances in scientific knowledge and human rights, development remains shaped by modernization frameworks and persistent North-South inequalities. Yet, fundamental global challenges endure, with transitions unfolding amid waste, wars, and maldevelopment.
The #DevDays2025 conference will feature:
- a keynote lecture by Professor Ali Kadri (author of The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction)
- a Kapuscinski Lecture with Associate Professor Alina Sajed (McMaster University), and
- a plenary roundtable with Professor Manuela Picq (the 2024 recipient of the International Studies Association’s Outstanding Scholar Activist Award).
In line with their commitments to democratizing, diversifying, and decolonizing development knowledge, the organizers welcome online and hybrid participation. Colleagues from the Global South are particularly encouraged to join.
The organizers of the conference include:
The Finnish Society for Development Research (FSDR), in collaboration with the Finnish University Partnership for International Development (UniPID), University of Eastern Finland, the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), and the Inequality & Development Working Groups of the Young Scholars Initiative – Institute for New Economic Thinking (YSI-INET)
Please note that the deadline to register is 20 February 2025.