Uploaded June 2017 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
About the talk:
South Asian countries have until recently been predominantly framed within the international development community as recipients of aid and development interventions. Commentaries and criticism concerning donor-recipient relations from across the spectrum have therefore focussed on a classic 'North-South' axis, whether validating neoliberal adjustments (e.g. the IMF) or contesting mainstream development in a variety of ways (e.g. dependency theorists, postcolonial scholars). In fact, since the early 1950s, India has been a provider of 'development assistance', which while modest in scale, has been symbolically significant. Over the last decade or so, India in particular, has powerfully dismantled and re-worked its 'recipient' status, while rapidly and substantially increasing its own development partnerships in the South Asian region and beyond. Other South Asian states are also experiencing and leading changes in their identities, modalities and partnerships as recipients and partners with a variety of development providers. This seminar will focus primarily on India to critically appraise the changing contributions it is making to the concepts, practices and politics of international development.
About the speaker:
Emma Mawdsley is a Reader in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK. In the first part of her career, she worked extensively on environmental and regional politics in India, including what was at that point a rapidly growing field in urban and 'middle class' environmental politics. For the last decade or so her work has taken a different direction, and she is a leading international scholar of 'South-South Development Cooperation'. She has a particular interest but not exclusive focus on India. Most recently, she has started to work on how 'established' donors are responding to various domestic and international changes, including stronger explicit recourse to 'national interests', a stronger private sector agenda, and the turn to blurred and blended 'development finance'. These strategies could be framed as the 'Southernisation of development'.
About the talk:
South Asian countries have until recently been predominantly framed within the international development community as recipients of aid and development interventions. Commentaries and criticism concerning donor-recipient relations from across the spectrum have therefore focussed on a classic 'North-South' axis, whether validating neoliberal adjustments (e.g. the IMF) or contesting mainstream development in a variety of ways (e.g. dependency theorists, postcolonial scholars). In fact, since the early 1950s, India has been a provider of 'development assistance', which while modest in scale, has been symbolically significant. Over the last decade or so, India in particular, has powerfully dismantled and re-worked its 'recipient' status, while rapidly and substantially increasing its own development partnerships in the South Asian region and beyond. Other South Asian states are also experiencing and leading changes in their identities, modalities and partnerships as recipients and partners with a variety of development providers. This seminar will focus primarily on India to critically appraise the changing contributions it is making to the concepts, practices and politics of international development.
About the speaker:
Emma Mawdsley is a Reader in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK. In the first part of her career, she worked extensively on environmental and regional politics in India, including what was at that point a rapidly growing field in urban and 'middle class' environmental politics. For the last decade or so her work has taken a different direction, and she is a leading international scholar of 'South-South Development Cooperation'. She has a particular interest but not exclusive focus on India. Most recently, she has started to work on how 'established' donors are responding to various domestic and international changes, including stronger explicit recourse to 'national interests', a stronger private sector agenda, and the turn to blurred and blended 'development finance'. These strategies could be framed as the 'Southernisation of development'.
