International Development: Global Trends via Local Case Perspectives

The traditional North-South divide in international development is losing relevance as global challenges such as resource scarcity, newly emerged inequalities, food security threats, global warming, migration issues, and armed conflicts now affect both developed and developing regions.

Furthermore, globalisation has given rise to complex societal issues that require collaboration among diverse actors, leading to multi-stakeholder cooperation. However, this approach assumes that assembling the right stakeholders will automatically yield solutions, neglecting power imbalances and diverse interests that can lead to exclusion or domination of less powerful actors. Despite increasing collaboration, many development actors still view social change as a linear, controllable process. Organisations are now assessed based on their performance and value for money rather than good intentions. However, the intricate and unpredictable nature of development challenges calls for new and innovative ways to understand, manage, and evaluate development processes and outcomes.

We will zoom in on cross-cutting phenomenon like migration, conflicts, digitalization and newly emerging inequalities as key challenges that shapes current state and present the situation through local cases of Kenya, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Indonesia, etc.

The Centre for International Cooperation at VU Amsterdam emphasizes an integrated, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approach to global challenges, collaborating closely with VU faculties and international partners since 1955. It draws on the expertise of various experts engaged in coordinating and executing capacity-building, education, research, and outreach programs with partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Forms of assessment
Students will choose one of the topics and prepare a group presentation. This final group presentation and discussion will take place during the last meetings and will serve as final assessment.

This course is designed so that each of the learning goals listed is achieved through active participation in the course activities.

Group assessment: group assessments would be implemented during contact hours in the class. Students take one of the topic of the course and prepare a presentation on listed variants. They will receive the assignment in advance as well as the assessment form for the presentation. Groups will need to submit a one or two-pager on their chosen topic and idea for a go-ahead. Students also need to reflect on the work load and designated tasks within their group as part of the final assessment;
Blog assignment in pairs (depending on the amount of participants): each pair should write a blog about 1 of the topics/lectures. A blog will be shared with all participants digitally. A table and schedule will be provided on the first day.

Goal:
- Encourage students to discover an innovative, captivating, and concise way to convey the central concepts of the lecture to an external audience
- To invite them to critically reflect and contribute to debates

At the end of the course:
- Participants understand the complexities and key trends and debates that have historically shaped the sector of international development cooperation;
- Participants can recognize and critically reflect upon the concept of development and debate their position in international and global development practices;
- Participants are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the SDGs;
- Participants can identify different forms of power and describe how power relates to inequality and shapes processes of exclusion and inclusion;
- Participants understand the importance and can apply insights of local perspectives in thinking about international development;
- Participants can understand how to select and critically review the literature, extract key messages of different learning material (lecturers, literature) and share their insights via a blog with their peers.

Furthermore,