Common challenges for all? A critical engagement with the emerging vision for post pandemic development studies

The COVID-19 pandemic motivated calls for the field of development studies to be recast. In this article, we analyse two prominent, future-gazing ‘pandemic papers’ to illustrate salient features of the ascendant trend towards a new ‘Global Development’ paradigm. By unpacking and interpreting major lines of reasoning put forward by two agenda-setting papers, our contribution appraises how these papers make the case for the future of development studies. Through this analysis, we question the papers’ core arguments that seek to shift the contours of the discipline, and thus the study of development generally. In making their call to adopt a universalist or global development framework that includes a focus on Europe and North America, the papers overlook the Southern origins of and justifications for the North-South framework they seek to overturn. We urge the importance of returning to and advancing –rather than jettisoning – intellectual lineages anchored in non-Truman understandings of development, including as a popular project of Southern emancipation from colonial, imperial, and structural subordination. Rather than de-centring the global North-South framework, we suggest that the analytically more useful way forward is for development studies to (re)centre the global South and use global South theories and lenses to better understand the world economy and the majority world.