This is a special year for IDS and for the IDS Bulletin , and I am delighted to introduce this issue which brings together many of the special features that we are celebrating this year.
2016 is the Institute's 50th Anniversary: a year in which we have set ourselves to 'look back in order to look forwards'. This IDS Bulletin does that, offering an intellectual history of development and development studies from their emergence in the post-war period – on top of colonial antecedents – through successive eras to the present day. It tracks key continuities around concerns with poverty and social justice, as well as tumultuous changes in intersecting knowledge and practice in rapidly changing times. These bring us up to a present preoccupied by intersecting global challenges and a more universal framing, where development has come to mean – as we put it in our 2015–20 strategy – reducing inequalities, accelerating sustainability and building more inclusive and secure societies for everyone, everywhere. And it highlights many of the issues and uncertainties that lie ahead, to which development and development studies have the opportunity and the responsibility to respond.
Given its focus, it is particularly appropriate that this IDS Bulletin has been assembled and produced by our PhD students. At early stages in promising careers, they bring the time and ability to reflect deeply on key issues, as well as a unique, forward-looking outlook on the futures that they will help to shape. And by pairing with some of our more senior Fellows in a set of double-acts, they bring lessons from the past as well.
This is, of course, only one history amongst many possible, for histories are always partial. The core focus of this one is the interrelationship between ideas and practices at IDS, and those in the wider field of development and development studies. But even this cannot be a singular history. As the Institute's founder-director, Dudley Seers, argued in 1969, 'The starting point in discussing the challenges we now face is to brush aside the web of fantasy we have woven around "development" and decide more precisely what we mean by it'. These words in an IDS Communication titled The Meaning of Development still ring true, and the ongoing, reflexive search for meanings, with ourselves and with people around the world, has been a defining feature of life at IDS ever since. This is only right and proper; debate over meanings amidst multiple perspectives and changing times should be constant, a part of the politics and practices of development, and important to keeping it accountable. Inevitably, though, people within and outside IDS have contributed to these debates in different ways and from different positions. The Institute's own history is therefore multistranded, and can be told in multiple ways.
The histories recounted in this IDS Bulletin track some particular themes. One is the transformation of 'development' from an ex-colonial enterprise, and then one formed by the discourses and practices of an aid industry, to embrace far wider processes of capitalist change, the roles of states, markets and societies in them, and the diversity of peoples' accommodations and resistances – both organised and unruly. A second is the transformation of 'development studies' from an era in which IDS could be established in 1966 as a 'special nstitution' to support the UK government's assistance to its ex-colonies, to a far more networked set of knowledge practices, sensitive to issues of power, representation and difference. As this IDS Bulletin shows, work by IDS researchers and partners has contributed pivotal ideas and debates – around power, gender and ethnicity, for instance – which have helped to shape the last 50 years of development studies. But they have also re-shaped IDS over successive eras into the far more globally-networked institution that it is today, taking an 'engaged excellence' approach to produce and share research and knowledge, teaching and learning, and communications and impact, with questions around the politics of knowledge, practice and difference centre stage.
Third, an abiding theme, well-represented here, is the relationship between analysis and practice. Development studies has always sought to make a difference; its problem-focus explicitly set it aside from ivory towers academia from the start. Again, successive eras have seen more, and more productive, boundary-crossing, whether in work that engages development policymakers and practitioners in reflexive learning and change, that co-constructs knowledge with communities, agencies, businesses and others, or that opens up the possibilities of alternative, potentially transformative, pathways.
The IDS Bulletin has always had a distinctive niche, with its special issues focusing on policy debates of the moment, bridging the contributions and worlds of academics and practitioners. This issue tracks key debates in the fields of agriculture, climate change and social rotection, illustrating the kind of contribution for which the IDS Bulletin has become known and welcomed by academics and practitioners alike. A final theme is the value of Open Knowledge, and Open Access. IDS is committed to an open knowledge agenda that enables perspectives from around the world to be shared, and our relaunch of the IDS Bulletin in 2016 as a gold Open Access publication is a powerful example of this of which I'm especially proud. The final article, recounting some of the Institute's history and forward plans in this area, provides a fitting finale to this issue.
I hope you enjoy it all.
Melissa Leach
Director, Institute of Development Studies
© 2016 The Author. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2016.127
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International licence, which permits downloading and sharing provided the original authors and source are credited – but the work is not used for commercial purposes. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 2 May 2016: 'Development Studies – Past, Present and Future' ix–x; the Introduction is also recommended reading.