Policy & Practice - A Development Education Review

 

 

Development Education and Decolonising International Partnerships in Higher Education: Insights from the ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ Research Project

issue39
Development Education Silences
Autumn 2024

Simon Eten Angyagre

Abstract: The focus of development education (DE) has historically been centred on awareness raising about the inequalities inherent in international development cooperation, as well as the development efforts facilitated by third sector actors.  One of the key sites for such development cooperation is higher education, where universities engage in teaching and research partnerships.  However, such partnerships, particularly between Western universities and those based in the global South are known to bear colonial dimensions as they are often characterised by power imbalances and extractive modes of engagement.  The author draws from an internal review project undertaken at University College London (UCL) to underscore the significance of decolonising international partnerships in higher education within the framework of equality and mutuality.  The author observes that, while there are many innovations to decolonise teaching and research in universities in the UK, these are mostly the initiative of individual academics, without any structural efforts to embed decolonisation in an institutional ethos.  Given the Freirean roots of DE and its affinity to post-coloniality, the author sees a role for the field in drawing attention to the coloniality in academic partnerships in higher education and calling for the legitimation of decolonisation in the policy and practice of the sector. 

Key words: Cultures of Decolonisation; Development Education; Higher Education; Academic Partnerships; Freire; Research.

Introduction

Since its emergence in the 1960s as a response to the political decolonisation movement, some of the central arguments of DE have been built on insights from decoloniality and post-coloniality (Andreotti, 2006; Bourn, 2008; 2020).  The field is also inspired by Freirean critical pedagogy; an educational approach for examining and addressing the development ideologies within which global and international development cooperation is conducted (Bourn, 2014; Dillon, 2018; McCloskey, 2022).  Drawing on these critical theoretical traditions, DE has grown into a distinct pedagogical field for raising awareness of global injustice, often centred around North-South relations, with a focus on addressing the marginalisation of communities and groups in both the global North and South (Andreotti, 2006).  Over time, four main discourses emerged from the policy and practice of DE, including value-based and solidarity approaches, as well as the development-as-charity model and the approach centred on development cooperation (Dillon, 2018; Fiedler et al., 2011).  These different DE discourses have also brought about shifts in language, with a gravitation towards the ‘global’, and the adoption of terminologies such as ‘global citizenship’, ‘global education’ and the ‘global dimension’ (Bourn, 2015).  In these shifts, there are attempts to move away from disempowering language around ‘developing countries’ and the ‘global North-South’ binary to a recognition of globalisation, the interconnectedness it facilitates and the need to prepare learners to critically engage with the global structures that underpin unjust systems around the world (Dillon, 2018).

The shift towards the global notwithstanding, criticality in the way global issues are addressed in DE remains a key concern.  Dillon (2018), for example, notes that in the context of Ireland, the shift from binary North-South discourses to a ‘global’ paradigm has not necessarily resulted in more critical approaches, given that such change in language has not been reflected in DE practice in that context.  A key concern in calls for criticality in the linguistic categories of DE is to foreground empowering representations of less economically developed countries (LEDCs) and marginalised communities, as well as recognise the cultural agency of these countries/groups.  As such, much of the criticality expected in DE is geared towards addressing Eurocentrism, cultural subordination and the universalist assumptions that underlie dominant development narratives (Andreotti, 2006).  In this respect, there is a growing tide against the dominant narratives of development which have held sway in the West for many decades.  In the cognate field of development studies, for example, there are calls for hegemonic conceptions and approaches to studying international development to be decolonised (Kothari et al., 2023; Develtere, Van Ongevalle, and Huyse, 2021; Kapoor, 2023; Kim, 2023; Richards, 2014; Sen, 2023; Sultana, 2019).

Considering partnerships in research in higher education as an essential component of international development cooperation, this article engages with the topic of decolonising research in higher education in the UK context, drawing on an internal review conducted at UCL.  The article briefly reviews some of the debates on decolonising international partnerships in higher education.  This is followed by an overview of the ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ research project, including two case studies from the project which are showcased as examples of decolonising research in practice.  Some of the key themes that emerged from the project are also discussed.

Decolonisation and international partnerships in higher education  

Academic partnerships and collaborations constitute a key component of development cooperation given that such collaborations are instrumental for addressing global challenges.  These partnerships also come with the supposed advantage of strengthening the provision of higher education in the global South; a mechanism for accelerating economic growth, socio-political development, and modernisation, all linked to the global knowledge economy (Waham et al., 2023; World Bank, 2000).  Even for countries in the global North, development cooperation in higher education is, among other things, viewed as an indirect approach to tackling some of the socio-political issues in those contexts.  For example, the European Union’s Development Cooperation policy recognises support to higher education in LEDCs as one way for addressing migration and asylum from these countries (Greco, 2023).  The aforementioned considerations notwithstanding, the rationale and approaches that drive development cooperation have been called into question within different theoretical frameworks, including, dependency theory, development theory and world systems theory (Teferra, 2014).

The ideas that underpin dependency theory, for example, provide a strong basis for decolonising academic collaborations in higher education in LEDCs (Heleta and Chasi, 2023; Ocholla, 2020).  Partnerships in higher education between the global North and South go back to the colonial era, when the first modern universities in LEDCs were established as extensions of universities in the colonial metropoles (Teffera, 2014; Woldegiorgis, 2020).  In many ways, these universities have evolved in the intervening years after the wave of political independence in the 1960s, linked to internal socio-economic and political factors, but also owing to the forces of globalisation.  However, given that these universities were moulded from the Western university archetype, their academic structures, knowledge paradigms, disciplines and languages of instruction are still in the most part Western, and based on Western higher education traditions.  The impact of this is a continuous dependence and mimicking of Western higher education practices, with little or no Indigenous innovations to make higher education in these contexts locally and culturally relevant.  Academic collaborations between the global North and the South in contemporary times are known to reinforce the Eurocentrism that originated from colonialism, as they are characterised by various forms of inequalities, and evince colonial patterns of power and extractive ways of engagement (Chetty, Gibson and Reilly, 2024).  A decolonial approach to international academic partnerships is therefore one that disrupts these colonial forms of engagement and recognises the agency and right of self-determination of partners in the South.

The ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ research project

The ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ research project was an initiative of the Cultural Understanding Working Group of the UCL Grand Challenges, a unit within the university set up to promote interdisciplinary research and engagement for addressing national and global issues.  The ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ project was undertaken to map decolonisation efforts at UCL and to assess the extent to which the institution’s norms and practices support decolonising research.  Researchers shared their views and case studies on research they undertook to investigate issues that impact marginalised communities and groups in society, whilst also addressing questions on paternalistic research attitudes and extractive research cultures in universities in the North, including addressing power imbalances in international research collaborations.

Participants in the project included 46 academics, twelve professional staff, and eight doctoral students who participated in in-depth interviews. The approach to recruiting participants for the research was open-ended as the aim was to invite any persons involved in or offering support to decolonising research projects within UCL to share their views and experiences.  As such, an open call was sent through UCL communication channels to register to participate in the research.  The open-ended approach allowed for individuals with different perspectives and experiences on decolonising research to participate in the interviews. Interviews were held online, with the aid of interview guides developed by the researchers with members of the project’s steering committee. In addition to the in-depth interviews, nine academics and eleven students responded to two separate online surveys. 

Case studies on decolonising research projects

This section outlines brief overviews of two decolonising research projects which are presented as case studies.  These were shared by some participants to demonstrate how they approach decolonisation in their research practice.

Case study one: Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP)

The Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP) (n.d.) project was implemented by a group of researchers at the UCL Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, together with university partners and civil society organisations in the global South. The project centres principles of intersectionality to address the social inequalities faced by women and girls.  GRRIPP is described as a global collaboration and a knowledge exchange project.  It is grounded in the recognition that too often humanitarian and development programmes have ‘gender equality’ as a ‘value added’ aspect of projects rather than as a central goal.  In addition, too few organisations engage with how overlapping aspects of discrimination, such as gender, race, and class interact and exacerbate development challenges for women and girls.  These challenges increase in situations of urban-based disasters and conflict, where pre-crisis resilience may be low.  GRRIPP brings together partners from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), southern Africa, south Asia, and the UK to disrupt mainstream development discussions on gender.  The project is developed around four overarching themes: resilience, intersectionality, critical theory, and infrastructure.  The themes related to intersectionality and critical theory are directly related to a decolonising research framework.

The GRRIPP project was guided by a decolonial ethos, including a critical reassessment of power relationships between and within countries, communities, and social relations more generally.  The structure of management is flat and horizontal, and all the partners follow a code of conduct that ensures a diverse, fair, and safe working environment. Through this approach, the GRRIPP aims to foster an international collaboration that brings to the forefront initiatives from the global South.  With this change of focus and methods, the project aims to contribute to renewing theory, and to the implementation of better policies and practices in the fields of gender-responsive disaster risk reduction, climate change action and development.

Intersectionality is adopted in the project as a research approach for examining the root causes of discrimination and inequalities at the intersection of social identities.  Through this, the project examines and questions existing ‘hierarchies’ and ‘categories’ to better support a focus on power relations and imbalances that have historically undermined equal opportunities for all.  Using an intersectional approach to the research helps question how knowledge is produced and embedded within specific epistemic communities and cultures of knowledge.

Case study two: Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW)

The Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) project (n.d.) is a large-scale research project implemented by a consortium of higher education institutions and community-based organisations in the global North and South, with the UCL Faculty of Built Environment as one of the consortium members.  The project was designed as a response to growing inequalities in cities globally, with implementation focused around six working packages, including: city knowledge co-production; comparative inquiry for urban equality; ethics of research practice; translating research into practice; multiplying translocal learning in higher education and expanding UK Official Development Assistance research capacity.

One of the key objectives of the project was to co-produce knowledge to activate transformations towards urban equality in selected cities in the global South.  This was undertaken with a focus on redistributive and integrated actions to address prosperity, resilience, and extreme poverty.  The project was also focused on building and strengthening research capacity in selected Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries and the UK to tackle the challenges and opportunities of vulnerable urban communities through partnerships with equivalence between networks and organisations of the poor, government, the private sector, and academia.  A third objective that underpinned the project implementation was the co-creation of responsive Urban Learning Hubs in target countries.  They were aimed at co-producing relevant knowledge for the analysis, planning, monitoring, and comparison of city progress towards national and global goals on urban equality, in particular, the SDGs and the Habitat III New Urban Agenda.

Though the project did not explicitly identify its goals, strategies, and outcomes as decolonising, it employed language affiliated with decolonising approaches, including transformative research, knowledge co-production, partnerships with equivalence, capacity building/strengthening and urban equality.  Decolonial approaches could be seen in the project’s emphasis on participatory and collaborative interventions for co-producing urban design towards addressing inequality.  In deploying these co-production processes, the project also aimed to develop the capacity of institutional partners based mostly in the global South and enhanced the institutional capacities of local actors to advance an urban equality agenda in their individual localities.

A key novelty in the project that aligned well with decolonising research is the concept of partnerships of equivalence which underscores the significance of horizontal relationships in research and the need to pay attention to the power dynamics that play out in co-production processes.  In interviews, there was the understanding from a UCL researcher that an important consideration that underlies the notion of partnerships with equivalence in the KNOW project is that ‘equality’ is not framed as ‘sameness’ but valuing the unique contribution that each actor can bring to the research process.  Additionally, an extended innovation in the KNOW project was a Doctoral Training Course developed around the principle of co-producing research.  The course was titled ‘Co-producing Doctoral Urban Research in the Global South’.  One of the stated aims of the course was to mobilise urban equality and epistemic justice as critical lenses for engaging with urban development challenges for the diverse student body in UK universities.  The course also provided the space for a critical discussion about the theory and practice of knowledge co-production as well as generate a supportive co-learning environment for students to reflect on the current or potential contributions of knowledge co-production to their doctoral research.  And more broadly, contribute to the development of a UK Urban Learning Hub which brings together urban researchers who engage with issues of knowledge co-production and urban equality.

As indicated from the outset, the two case studies presented were shared during the ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ research to demonstrate how decolonising research is undertaken in practice.  The case studies highlight some tenets and values that should underpin decoloniality in international research projects that involve collaborations between partners in the global North and South.  In the following section, there is a discussion on some of the key themes that emerged from the project based on analysis of the interview and survey data, as well as a consideration of case studies.

Key themes emerging from the project

We identified several themes relating to decolonising research in the context of international academic partnerships, research ethics and funding and support for research in the global South.  Our interviews with UCL academics showed that although the explicit language of decolonisation is seldom used, many researchers guide their practice with principles and values that fall within a decolonising framework.  These include practices that centre on co-production, relationship-building, and capacity development, equitable participation in research, and promoting intersectionality in research.  A related issue that many participants spoke about is the interface between decolonisation and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) activities in universities. Many participants felt that the work of EDI committees was key to promoting a decolonisation agenda.  But they also called for decolonisation to go beyond the conventional EDI framework, as it poses wider questions of power, and knowledge construction and production.

The research also revealed principles of practice that guide the way decolonial research is undertaken.  Whilst some principles aim to promote critical reflexivity and a critique of traditional research assumptions, others require researchers to be guided by values of reciprocity and respect for self-determination for the groups and communities they research. There are also decolonial principles that require researchers to embrace other(ed) ways of knowing, whilst also engaging in transformative praxis. Some research approaches and principles are more naturally aligned with decolonial research practice; these include co-production, co-creation and capacity strengthening and development. For example, Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodologies are noted as decolonising because they move away from deficit approaches that view researched communities as ‘objects’ to be studied, and towards valuing communities as equal collaborators and partners in the research process.

Decolonising research ethics

One of the key areas for undertaking decolonising research is through ethical frameworks for research.  As such, many participants thought that the research ethics review process at UCL should be an appropriate platform to encourage academics and doctoral students to use decolonial methodologies and approaches in their research.  In terms of examples of ethical research practices that fall within decolonising methodologies and approaches, participants called for ethics review processes to demand that researchers: challenge the assumptions related to sole ownership over their research relative to co-ownership with researched communities/groups; articulate how their research will benefit researched communities; ask whether researched communities see and want the benefits often ascribed to research projects; and articulate their positionality and subjectivity in the research they undertake.  There were suggestions for these elements to be included and strengthened in the ethics review processes at UCL.

Pertaining to the fitness for purpose of the research ethics review processes at UCL, and whether these align with decolonising research methodologies, some researchers pointed out problematic elements in the ethics review processes in some faculties that appear to be (neo)colonial. A specific case cited is the Informed Consent provisions in the British Educational Research Association (BERA) ethical guidelines for research with children, which were considered to be Eurocentric and not flexible enough to accommodate the socio-cultural norms of non-Western societies.  The issues and tensions that pertain to the application of Western research ethical codes such as those developed by BERA and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to non-western contexts are discussed in much detail by Shamim and Qureshi (2013).

Funding and support of research and teaching on the global South

At the time of our interviews, participants indicated that the national funding landscape for research was for the most part not conducive for decolonising research, given the lack of funding for research with a social justice focus and research funding inequalities in the UK higher education sector (Rivas, Raymond-Beckles and Simpson, 2021).  Within UCL, participants in the project cited bureaucracy involved in managing research projects that involve partnerships and collaborations with researchers in global South contexts.  This includes due diligence requirements, especially at the post-award phase of research project implementation.  These requirements are not flexible enough to contain uncertainties that often accompany partnership research projects based in the global South.

Additionally, there were concerns that teaching and research on certain regions of the world appear not to be prioritised, and as such were under-resourced and not given the required attention.  Specific cases cited were of MSc and MA programmes in African Studies, for example, which had not yet begun because of under-resourcing.  This is reflected in the lack of institutional support available at UCL for research centres whose research focus is on regions such as the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.  Though there are many research centres that focus on different regions of the world, including regions in the global South, there was a call for UCL to offer more support to these centres – to strengthen their research portfolios and enable them to undertake more collaborative work with institutions in the South.  The relevance of such collaborative work lies in the capacity strengthening and development it offers institutions in the global South as demonstrated in the partnership of equivalence model featured in one of the case studies.

Conclusion

One of the key challenges to promoting a decolonial approach to international engagement in research is the lack of institutional buy-in from universities, which is essential for embedding a decolonisation agenda in institutional policies and ethos (Shain et al., 2021).  The ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ project shows that, by far, a decolonising research agenda in universities is speared by individual academics within their research activities.  However, at the institutional level, there remain obstacles relating to bureaucracies in research management regimes that do not allow for research partnership and collaborations to take on a decolonising turn.

The ‘Cultures of Decolonisation at UCL’ report therefore raises broader questions about the ways decolonising principles can be embedded in research, support services for research and doctoral training in universities.   At UCL, to continue these conversations, the UCL Grand Challenges instituted the Cultures of Decolonisation Special Initiative Funding that funded projects that take forward themes from the report. An institution-wide forum was held to disseminate findings from the report.  In addition, engagement sessions were convened with EDI committees in selected faculties to discuss aspects of the report that address the activities of the committees.  It is anticipated that these efforts will contribute to gradually opening up space within institutional set-ups across the university for pursuing the transformative goals of decolonisation.

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Simon Eten Angyagre holds a doctorate from the University College London Institute of Education.  His research interests are in internationalisation and global citizenship in both schooling and the higher education levels.  He is currently undertaking research on youth activism and global citizenship. 

Citation: 
Eten Angyagre, S (2024) ‘Development Education and Decolonising International Partnerships in Higher Education’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 39, Autumn, pp. 87-100.