Department of Geography Distinguished Harrison and Eva Bailey Alumni Lecture

Ed Carr is Professor and Director, International Development, Community, and Environment Department and Director, Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL), George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University

Despite considerable aggregate improvements in the human condition over the past century, global development is a persistent site of frustration and disappointment. Its outcomes remain highly uneven and often come up short of expectations, and its thinking appears adrift on a sea of increasingly aged, vague neoliberal ideas. Critical development studies, however, is equally unmoored, lacking a central paradigm around which to interrogate, conceive alternatives to, and therefore challenge and change contemporary development policy and implementation. This talk presents some notes toward a critically-informed global development for the anthropocene in which the rich and the poor, the marginal and the powerful, find their interdependence increasingly obvious. It argues for a agrarian development centered on risk reduction that might catalyze complex and indeterminate changes at the local scale such that broader development goals such as the reduction of hunger might be achieved, and points to the challenges that will emerge from such an effort.