Automation and digitisation are set to impact on many areas of work and livelihoods in developing countries and there is an urgent need for robust empirical work to address this issue. Participants at the 2017 Digital Development Summit, convened by IDS, called for research institutions to create cross-cutting partnerships across disciplines, geographies and sectors both to develop research and to play a brokering role in relation to solutions.

This seminar will be a space to discuss key issues and debates and explore the role IDS researchers might play in developing this research agenda.

Most development thought is based upon the assumption that the uplifting of the world’s poor is to be carried out by elite actors (states, corporations, NGO’s) , rather than the poor themselves. This way of thinking, paradoxically, helps justify new ways of oppressing and exploiting the poor.

In this talk Professor Benjamin Selwyn from the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, launches his book The Struggle for Development. He introduces the concept of labour-led development to illuminate, theoretically and empirically, ways in which the poor can be masters of their own development.

Advances in digital technology and artificial intelligence are transforming the future of work. Self-driving trucks are due to be tested on UK roads in 2018 and are already being piloted in the US where around 3 million people are employed as truck drivers, while in the Philippines 89 per cent of call centre jobs are now at risk from automation. Women are also likely to be disproportionately impacted by automation, and less likely to be shaping decisions in the tech sector where they are under-represented.

Technological advances represent significant opportunities both for the UK and the rest of world. With significant implications for the UK Government and the Global Goal to achieve decent work for all by 2030, this fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference seeks to explore:

The opportunities and challenges that advances in digital technologies present for the work place and workers in the future, both at home and abroad?

How policies across UK government – industrial strategy, education and skills, international development and trade - can help promote prosperity across the UK as well as supporting economic development globally?

Chair: Chi Onwurah MP

Speakers: Becky Faith, Digital and Technology Cluster, Institute of Development Studies;

Jenni Lloyd, Purpose Lab. and Wired Sussex;

Karen Cham, Academic Lead of the Brighton Digital Catapult Centre and Professor of Digital Transformation Design, University of Brighton.

Three years since the launch of China's flagship outbound investment strategy, One Belt One Road (OBOR), many are left uncertain - what is OBOR and what exactly is China trying to achieve?

Based on study of trade-related potential for win-win development between China and Africa countries, Dr. Lauren Johnston will explain economic push factors underlying China's outbound investment agenda, and the attractiveness of selective 'Road' countries in Africa.

Arguing that the timeliness of OBOR investments for particular African economies could help underlie sustained economic development, she adds a call for Australia, the only OECD member of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), to grasp related new challenges and opportunity.

In this seminar, the speakers will share their thinking on Participatory Accountability; how it connects to the surfacing and valuing other types of knowledge; and its potential as a more inclusive and transformative approach to monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals.

Speakers

Chair: Jackie Shaw, IDS Fellow-Participation cluster whose expertise focuses on integrating visual methods into action research processes

Jo Howard, IDS Fellow-Participation cluster working on social inclusion, citizenship building and processes of participation

Joanna Wheeler, storycrafter, researcher, facilitator working for social justice

Erika Lopez Franco, IDS Research Officer-Participation cluster working on building networks of social change through participation and action research

Wednesday 21st June 2017, 10:00 to 11:15, IDS Room 221

The Centre for Rising Powers in Development welcomed Paulo Esteves, the Director of the BRICS Policy Center, and Geovana Zoccal, IDS Visiting Fellow and researcher at the BRICS Policy Center, for a discussion on 'The BRICS Effect: The Impact of South-South Cooperation in the Social Field of International Development Cooperation ' The seminar was chaired by Lidia Cabral, Research Fellow.

You can find more information on the Centre for Rising Powers in Development on the IDS website (www.ids.ac.uk)

Professor Jan Selby will deliver a Sussex Development Lecture to discuss claims that climate change was behind Syria's descent into war.

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war - now entering its seventh year - has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change lay behind an extreme pre-civil war drought in Syria; this drought in turn caused large-scale migration; and this migration exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria’s descent into war.

This lecture will interrogate these claims and offer a counter-interpretation - one with important implications both for understanding the conflict and security implications of climate change, and for the politics of development more broadly.

About the Speaker

Jan Selby is Professor of International Relations, and Director of the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research (SCSR). His research focuses on peace processes; environmental security; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and International Relations theory.

Reducing inequalities is one of the biggest development challenges of our era, and a key focus of the current IDS strategy. The 2016 World Social Science Report on this theme, which IDS has co-led with the International Social Science Council, was launched in September 2016, bringing together over 100 authors from around the world.

This seminar share's the report's key findings and messages about the level of inequalities, their multiple and intersecting nature, their consequences and implications and what might be done about them - towards building pathways to a more equal world.

Precarious Lives : Food, Work and Care After the Global Food Crisis - Report Launch by Institute of Development Studies

Professor James Ferguson from Stanford University delivers the inaugural IDS Annual Lecture titled 'Not Working: Rethinking Production and Distribution in the Jobless City'. It is a public lecture and all are welcome to attend.

For more details visit:

http://www.ids.ac.uk/events/ids-annual-lecture-with-james-ferguson