Opinion: Here’s a starting point to decolonize development research

Morocco lost its semifinal World Cup soccer match to France last year. The game was a reminder that soccer is thoroughly globalized; France’s hero Kylian Mbappé, the son of a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother, is just one of many second-generation players from Africa playing in Europe’s premier leagues and on the top European national teams. Excitement in the Arab and African community about how far Morocco’s team got in the tournament pointed to something deeper as well. More than 60 years after Morocco became independent, its national team was seen (implicitly if not explicitly) by citizens of onetime colonies as a welcome and exciting sign of a world that is finally being “decolonized.” Morocco’s success hinted at a future in which it would be no surprise to see Morocco or Côte d’Ivoire beat their onetime colonizer France on the way to an African country winning a World Cup. But what can be said of football cannot be said of the development research community — a laggard, ironically, in the “decolonization” of top research on development. Through their own tax systems, former colonies in Africa now generate the great majority of the public funds that fuel their social and economic progress. In 2018, when African infrastructure financing reached $100 billion, 37% came from African nations’ budgets, with the remainder coming from African government borrowing. Yet it is still the theories, the ideas, the research, and mostly the people of the global north that dominate the discussion of development challenges and development progress throughout low- and middle-income countries, or LMICs. With almost all of the money for research on development issues coming from the advanced economies, and from the global financial institutions that they heavily influence, the result is not surprising: development research is dominated by scholars in the global north – including in academia and in the think tank community dedicated to development research and policy change from which we the authors come. This reality includes the many scholars from LMICs who reside and work in high-income countries, attracted by the personal (financial, collegial, security) benefits of residing where the money is, and trapped by the professional proximity and partnerships with other top scholars that is critical to their own success. We believe that can and should change. A first step would be to make decolonizing development and development research a priority of the research community itself. The OECD Development Centre, which supports research in LMICs, has made a good start on that. The OECD Development Centre The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a club of countries formed in 1961 that meet a standard of being open market democracies. Its initial members, largely advanced economies, finance think tank-like studies of their own economies. Over time, other mostly middle-income countries from Latin America and eastern Europe have sought and gained admission. Since 1962, OECD has also hosted its Development Centre, with membership open to all countries, OECD members or not, prepared to pay limited membership fees. Last year, the OECD Development Centre organized a “Group of Eminent Personalities,” of which one of us was a member, to advise it on its mission and its future priorities. The GEP’s report reflects the spirit of decolonization in two ways: First, it is forthright in describing the growing frustration of the world’s lower-income countries with their lack of voice in global institutions and with the wholly inadequate response of high-income countries to the effects of the ongoing polycrisis on LMICs’ fiscal situation. LMICs are facing a triple blow to their finances: the climate crisis for which advanced economies are largely responsible; the pandemic; and rising food, fuel, and fertilizer prices due to the war in Ukraine. The combined effect of these has reversed progress against the poverty that blights lower-income countries. We can only agree that the frank language from LMICs is a critical if modest step. Second, the report argues that the center should exploit its unusual ability to create space for open discussions on the above issues – that is its critical comparative advantage not only within OECD but among all the major international institutions. It can fill a unique role as an honest broker, creating a forum in which officials and experts from LMICs – Colombia, India, Nigeria — can engage in equal dialogue with their counterparts from China, Germany, the United States (which has not yet rejoined the center since it left in 1997 during the Clinton administration, but should), without the shadow of the enormous differences between them in money and time. The Development Centre has long relied on researchers from LMICs at home for its regional studies. It can build on this custom by encouraging its high-income country members (and their foundations) to provide long-term (10-year) research grants to independent think tanks in LMICs. This should include salary support sufficient to induce top scholars and policy experts from LMICs to return home. How China and the G-7 can help With its OECD member countries, the Development Centre can champion the provision of long-term grants to selected university departments of economics in low-income countries, paired with support for individual scholars. It can encourage support for the Global Development Network and other institutions focused on supporting development research in the developing world. As a member of the Development Centre, China could take leadership in supporting the Development Centre’s partnerships with regional centers and academic institutions in LMICs, with the goal of expanding their research and policy capabilities on development issues. China is in a good position to lead such an initiative as its own universities are increasingly a destination for LMICs students who will return to their countries. There are some basic steps that actors within the Group of Seven leading industrial countries that are (or are not) members of the center can take as well. African researchers seeking to present papers and attend academic conferences in high-income countries often face visa denials. By ensuring that these academic conferences are held in places that are accessible to participants from all countries, the development community can better incorporate the voices of experts from the societies it serves. (Back to the World Cup in Qatar: the event was unusually accessible to fans from LMICs because the visa process was simplified.) Support for research on growth and poverty reduction in LMICs has been heavily concentrated in universities, think tanks and other institutions in high-income countries for decades. Sixty-six years after Ghana gained independence – the first sub-Saharan African country to do so – and 67 years after Morocco did, it is past time for the global north to focus on decolonizing research on development issues and bringing them home. Update, March 23, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify that the U.S. left the OECD Development Centre during the Clinton administration in 1997.