Tracing the River  

I want to begin with a small exercise, particularly for those of us studying, teaching or working in development.

Imagine your journey into development as a river, winding through quiet creeks, across open plains, and down sudden waterfalls, each turn shaped by moments, decisions, and relationships that have led you here.

This exercise, Rivers of Life, was introduced to me in my first class of the Gender and Development (GAD) MA at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). What stood out were the deeply personal stories underpinning our motivations for studying GAD. This framing, where the personal is political, began to shape how I approached learning.

Yet, it did not travel evenly across the institution. In core GAD sessions, gender was treated as a critical lens for understanding power. Elsewhere, it appeared as an add-on, often confined to a single week, introduced through limited readings and not revisited. These contradictions led me to question development not just as a field of study, but as a broader political project.

Development’s Dirty Underbelly  

Development education shapes how future practitioners understand the world and their place within it. Though often framed as a universal good, development rests on Western-centric knowledge and assumptions while marginalising other perspectives. It presents itself as neutral and technical, which allows power to go unquestioned and narrows the perspectives through which development challenges and their causes are understood, and what solutions are considered possible.

Through this framing, development has become known as the ‘anti-politics machine' (Ferguson 1994), where complex realities are flattened into technical problems, stripped of history, power, and lived experience. This reinforces ‘quick-fix’ approaches over deeper structural engagement. In this context, gender too becomes flattened and mainstreamed, reduced to a secondary concern rather than a lens capable of exposing how inequality is produced.

In contrast, critical theoretical approaches treat gender not as an isolated variable, but as critical to how power shapes knowledge itself. They show that what appears ‘neutral’ is rooted in historical and political assumptions. In doing so, they shift attention towards those most affected by inequality, bringing marginalised experiences to the centre of analysis and action. Without these approaches, development risks reproducing the very problems it seeks to address.

The images in this blog capture moments from care-informed learning spaces at IDS. They represent one approach to more relational and reflexive development education - not a model to replicate, but an invitation to think differently about how we learn together.

Exclusion in and of the Classroom

These dynamics play out in the classroom. Where reflexive engagement is limited, learning becomes an exercise in memorising fixed truths rather than engaging in critical inquiry (Freire 2000). Students’ ‘rivers of life’ are rendered peripheral to knowledge production, creating a sense of detachment in a field so concerned with the lives of others.

This also shapes whose knowledge is recognised. GAD peers spoke about being positioned as the ‘gender people’, with their contributions dismissed, redirected, or considered outside the scope of class topics. Over time, this shapes who feels able to contribute. It narrows the perspectives that inform how development is defined, which approaches are prioritised and which are overlooked (Bhambra 2018).

This reflects a wider pattern, where responsibility for engaging peripheral perspectives is unevenly distributed. Often, already marginalised students or educators carry the emotional and intellectual burden of highlighting sidelined perspectives, while others can remain detached (Mackay 2014).

Crucially, these dynamics point beyond the classroom itself. Development education exists as a highly elite and exclusionary domain shaped by structural inequalities in access and longstanding epistemic hierarchies (Bhambra 2018). As such, questions of care and epistemic justice extend beyond class spaces, to those structurally excluded.

This reflects the persistence of a technocratic model of development education rooted in colonial, heteronormative and Eurocentric histories (Mignolo 2007; Raghavan 2024). It not only shapes what is taught, but also whose knowledge counts and is legitimised in the first place. Even within institutions committed to critical inquiry, this model continues to marginalise alternative ways of knowing and being.

I began to recognise how development education reproduces the very hierarchies it seeks to critique – not only in how learning is taught or structured, but in how access, participation, and knowledge production are organised. It shapes what kinds of practitioners the field produces, and the limits of what development can imagine or transform.

From Reflexivity to Care

In GAD core sessions and modules including Creative and Reflexive Practices for Social Change and Unruly Politics, I encountered a different way of learning, one centred on reflexivity through relationships of care.

Reflexivity alone risks stopping at self-awareness, becoming absorbed into fixed categories of identity rather than challenging the structures that produce them. An ethics of care moves beyond this by asking not only “where am I positioned”, but “how am I relating to others within these structures”.

This shift was not abstract. Practices such as mind-body check-ins, sitting in circles, and engaging in creative work softened hierarchies and made space for different forms of knowledge to emerge. Learning unfolded through dialogue, situated knowledges, and shared experience (Haraway 1988; hooks 1994), with decolonial, feminist, queer, and Indigenous scholarship treated as foundational rather than supplementary.

These were some of the most meaningful learning spaces I encountered at IDS. They made it possible to engage with development as something we are already implicated in rather than distant. It opened space for forms of knowledge that centre lived experience and marginalised perspectives, reshaping who defines development issues and solutions.

Structural Constraints of Care  

The conditions shaping higher education often constrain the pedagogies that seek to transform it. Time pressures, large classes, and institutional priorities limit the extent to which reflexive and care-based practices are utilised. What is dismissed as a ‘misalignment of content’ often reflects deeper pressures that favour measurable outcomes over relational forms of learning.

These constraints are inseparable from the broader neoliberalisation of universities, where privatisation, competition, and measurable outcomes overshadow relational, process-oriented learning that requires patience and openness. Moreover, high university fees and limited scholarship opportunities structurally control who has access to these spaces.

But this is precisely why care cannot be treated as optional. Taking it seriously means asking not only what limits its application, but where it can still be practiced, however partially, within these constraints. At a time of rising far-right politics and mounting anti-gender backlash (Edström 2024), the stakes of development education are only becoming higher. The question, then, is not whether care is easy to implement, but whether we can afford not to try. 

From Care to Solidarity

Returning to our rivers, this approach offers a recognition that our trajectories are shaped in relation to others rather than singular. To take care seriously is to remain attentive to those relations, whether in the classroom, in research, or in practice.

My experience within care-based learning spaces showed what becomes possible when alternative ways of knowing are taken seriously, not only in more inclusive classrooms, but in deeper critical engagement and a greater capacity to question dominant biases. These approaches reshape how problems are understood, shifting them from technical issues to structural questions of power, history, and inequality.

A redistribution of responsibility is required. As it stands, engaging marginalised perspectives often falls on a small number of students or educators. If development education is to move towards more relational and critical forms of learning, this burden must be shared more broadly.

This requires recognising who is accessing spaces in the first place, and how commitments to care and redistribution might extend beyond them. It also means paying more attention to access, representation, and whose knowledge can enter and shape these spaces.

Without this shift, development risks being reduced to a technical exercise, where complex social inequalities are treated as problems to be managed rather than challenged, allowing existing power structures to remain intact. In this sense, sidelining critical perspectives does not make development neutral, but enables the continuation of the status quo.

What is at stake, then, is not only how we learn development, but what development is able to see, respond to, and ultimately become.

Classroom activity in the Creative and Reflexive Practices for Social Change module at IDS.

References 

Bhambra, G., Gebrial, D. and Nisancioglu, K. (2018) Decolonising the University, London: Pluto Press

Edström, J; Edwards, J; Skinner, C; Lewin, T and Nazneed, S. (2024) 'Introduction: Understanding Gender Backlash Across Regions', IDS Bulletin 55.1: 1-15, DOI: 10.19088/1968-2024.102

Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. Continuum.

Ferguson, J. (1994) The anti-politics machine: "development", depoliticisation, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press

Haraway, D. (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14.3: 575–59, DOI: 10.2307/3178066

hooks, B. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: education as a practice of freedom, London: Routledge

Kothari, U. (2022) Keynote 2 Professor Uma Kothari, recorded at DevNet NZ

Mignolo, W. D. (2007) 'INTRODUCTION: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking', Cultural Studies, 21.2: 155-167, DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162498

Raghavan, P. (2024) 'Dismantling Development: Towards an Abolitionist Theory of Development', The European Journal of Development Education, Special Issue Article, DOI: 10.1057/s41287-024-00666-5

Weiler, K. (1991) 'A Feminist Pedagogy of Difference', Harvard Educational Review 61.4: 499-473, DOI not available

Disclaimer 

The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IDS.