Theorising 'Development' in turbulent times

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual 
Meeting, San Francisco, 29th March – 2nd April 2016

Session organisers: Jamey Essex (University of Windsor, Canada), Emma 
Mawdsley (University of Cambridge UK), and Sue Roberts (University of 
Kentucky, USA)

The last 10 to 15 years have witnessed a significant over-turning of 
some of the long-established hierarchies and taken for granted ideas in 
international Development. The 'rise of the South' has exposed 
credibility and legitimacy gaps within the mainstream institutions, 
while the Eurozone and global financial crises have put new pressures on 
the (so called) 'traditional donors' to cut aid and/or make it more 
palatable to domestic constituencies. Changing geographies of global 
wealth, poverty and inequality mean that donors and partner countries 
are confronting different and often contradictory needs and interests in 
their programmes and relationships. The launch of the Sustainable 
Development Goals in 2015 gathered world attention, while the less 
visible and but arguably just as fundamental meeting took place earlier 
in the year at Addis Ababa, in which development financing 'beyond aid' 
was the target of change. The trend is towards more blurred and blended 
forms of state-private sector hybridity, at a time when many OECD-DAC 
donor agencies and governments are reasserting nationalistic and 
self-serving objectives as legitimate and 'good'. Amidst these changes, 
we also see convergence and consolidation across 'traditional' and 'new' 
actors, as well as emerging forms of national and transnational 
solidarity and resistance.

Practitioners, theorists, and commentators from across the ideological 
spectrum are exhuming aspects of older development theorising - 
sometimes critically, and sometimes not - in an effort to make sense of 
continuities and changes within the global 'Development' sector. These 
frames include the 'new scramble' for Africa, modernisation theories, 
neo-dependency, a Washington Consensus with Chinese characteristics, the 
return of geoeconomics, and so on.

We invite papers that engage critically with the new challenges 
confronting theorists of international development, in the context of 
shifting geographies of wealth and power, the deepening nexus of 
state-capital interests, and the growing plurality of development 
financing, actors, practices, and ideas.

Submissions:  Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by email to 
Emma Mawdsley ([log in to unmask]) by 20th October 2015. Successful 
submissions will be contacted shortly afterwards, and will be expected 
to register and submit their abstracts online on the AAG website by 2nd 
October 2015 ahead of the session proposal deadline which is 18th 
November 2015.

Please note, a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid 
before the formal submission of abstracts to the AAG.