Annual Conference 2021

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The 2021 Annual Conference of Development Studies Association Ireland (DSAI), will be held on November 11th-12th during the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) and intends to provoke a debate amongst scholars, development practitioners, activists, and others, to facilitate further thinking and study about what type of climate we need for development and how we place our climate concerns front and centre in our post-pandemic world.

We are delighted to welcome guest and keynote speakers:

• An Evening with Guest Speaker Gustavo Esteva (Wednesday 10th November - Pre-Conference Event)
• Dr Sarah Lister, Head of Governance, UNDP (Thursday 11th November Conference Keynote )
• Jonathan Glennie, Author , Researcher & Campaigner (Friday 12th November Conference Keynote) 

Read more about the programme here.

Conference Theme

The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Despite this ambitious agreement, political leaders everywhere have failed to take decisive action to achieve the goals. Large investment deals threaten forests, mangroves, and fishery reserves, destroying many carbon sinks and wildlife habitats forever. Those who contribute least to global warming have become most vulnerable to climate change through the loss of crops, housing and land in adverse weather events.President Higgins said:

“Such is the scale of the challenge facing us that the mere placing of a lens on the narrow, the disconnected, existing failed paradigms, or the tweaking of the edges of existing models is not sufficient to address the economic, societal and environmental transformations that are needed.” OECD Conference, 9 Oct 2020                                                                    

How can we play our part to reduce climate change and advocate for national and global action from governments, from corporations and energy producing companies? What can we do to protect those who are suffering the consequences of global warming? Heading towards the close of the SDG era in 2030 we need to ask if we have sustained the right climate for the transformative shift that is urgently needed by our planet and its inhabitants. Have we been sustaining colonial, extractive and unjust models of development or have we managed to establish transformative alternatives? What is the right climate of development?