This research programme focuses on new ways of understanding the developmental process in an increasingly interacting world. Recognizing the powerful influence of the global economy, international cultural production, the media and development interventions, the programme explores the constant creation of new interface situations between global linearity and local complexity.

Unifying and predictable global influences are negotiated and adopted locally in multiple ways. Under influence of what has variously been termed ‘global economy', ‘flexible capitalism', ‘trans-national social spaces', and ‘fluid modernity', people's life conditions are everywhere being rapidly transformed; Anthony Giddens calls this a ‘Runaway World'. Instead of clear-cut categories like First, Second and Third World, the earth is becoming a complex and interwoven social space, based on outsourcing, internationalization of the work-force, dissemination of meaning systems, migration, mixing of populations, and hap-hazard political decision making.

At the same time, development interventions have become concentrated on democratization, sustainability, good governance and local ownership, applying set strategies for multiple conditions while attempting special attention to ‘the cultural factor' and gender. Conventional development tinkering with an inherited tool-box of project management and policy implementation is outdated. The research group has as a common concern how external interventions (such as in the form of aid) are affecting local communities. Much development thinking is based on ideas of global causalities which do not take into consideration a heterogeneous and highly complex local context. The result is conflicting rationalities. Instead, unambiguous influences yield complex and unpredictable outcomes. Thus the interface between global causality thinking and local complexity is a key to understanding reactions, impacts and outcomes of external interventions.

The local context is everywhere determined by complex processes of economic and social strategy formation, social mobilisations, spontaneous creation of new institutions, ideological struggles, fluid cultural understandings as well as by environmental conditions and constraints. Individual interpretations and actions in relation to ‘system' on various levels result in non-linear processes.

Issues related to the interplay between environment, poverty and development are of particular concern to the group. This includes challenges of adaptation to climate change in developing countries as well as the discourses of governance on various levels that strongly influence development actors' approach to natural resource management, environmental sustainability and poverty eradication.

The programme spans both empirically derived approaches (cultural, economic etc.) and systemic, theoretical approaches; common to these is a stress on the large number of distinct groups in interaction, which makes social process indeterminable. 

The objective of the group of researchers is thus to uncover and understand local reactions to externally conceived interventions - economic, political and developmental - most often guided by causative thinking. Social processes such as the following are of particular interest:

• Local reactions to global influences and interventions in terms of:

  • Social mobilisations
  • Modifications of institutional settings
  • Perceptions of the state and civil society
• People's actions inside and outside traditional perceptions of culture
• Environmental consequences of increasing complexity and the need for new environmental institutions
• Local conceptualisation of and counter-strategies to external influences
• Changing livelihood capabilities and strategies

Click here to read more about 'Interfaces of Development'