Research

Critical research on development cooperation has concluded that despite its commitment to partnership (manifest already before SDG 17 in the principles of the Paris Declaration of 2005 and in earlier concepts) it suffers from at least three problems: 1) Its benefits are distributed unevenly and seldom reach marginalized groups (in particular women and indigenous people) (Kabeer 1994, Townsend 1995, Young 1995, Visvanathan et al. 2011, Radcliffe 2015). 2) It sometimes has problematic or even catastrophic side-effects (e.g. development-induced displacement) on its supposed beneficiaries or other project-affected people who can do little about it because of asymmetrical relations of power (Seabrook 1993, Ferguson 1994, Fox/Brown 1998, Clark et al. 2003, de Wet 2006, Easterly 2013). 3) Its mechanisms of participation are confined by the structures of the development apparatus (Cooke/Kothari 2001, Hickey/Mohan 2004, Mosse 2005, Li 2007).

Therefore, the GPN will focus on:

• Access to development cooperation for marginalized groups (women, indigenous people, ethnic minorities, LGBTIQ persons, disabled people)
• Accountability of development organizations towards beneficiaries or project-affected persons. Out of a concern for equal partnerships and a high level of ownership, our research also focuses on transdisciplinary outreach (Fam et al. 2017) and on a transfer of research results. We, therefore, refer to debates on co-creation and co-production of knowledge (Mauser et al. 2013) for instance with regard to creating partnerships, project design, and implementation, and transformation knowledge.
• Together with civil society development organizations we will explore possibilities for and restrictions of "deep" participation which does not only include project implementation but also project design and even the definition of the problem to be solved by the project. This multi-level form of participation will increase the experience of ownership and therefore contribute to the durability and sustainability of projects. Focusing on these three fields will significantly increase the level of partnership in development cooperation.

Knowledge sharing between partners is also a part of SDG 17 (targets 6 and 16), but whose knowledge is envisioned to be shared? The post-development critique (Sachs 2010, Escobar 2012, Rahnema 1997, Rist 2014) has pointed out the Eurocentrism prevalent in development knowledge: Eurocentric ontologies assume a linear scale of social evolution, at the top of which we find the 'developed' (i.e. industrialized, secular, capitalist, democratic) European societies (including the European settler colonies in North America and Australia). This assumption, implying e.g. that knowledge about progressive social change which helps the global South to advance along this universal scale can be found in the North and that development experts possess this knowledge (Nandy 1988, Apffel-Marglin/Marglin 1990 and 1996, Mitchell 2002, Eriksson Baaz 2005, Ziai 2016), has been challenged by postcolonial theorists stressing mutual learning; alternative, local, non- Western (to be precise: non-hegemonic, because they can also be found in the West) knowledges; and pluriversal epistemologies (Connell 2007, Comaroff and Comaroff 2015, Santos 2007 and 2014, Bhambra 2014, Ndlovu 2014, Reiter 2018, Kothari et al. 2019) and alternative, participatory and decolonized pathways to knowledge production and co-construction (Smith 2013, Bendix et al. 2019).

The GPN will investigate these alternative knowledges, their generation, diffusion and translation, and the possibilities they provide for progressive social change from the bottom up. By providing fora and encouraging inter-cultural dialogue including marginalized peoples, it will contribute to mutual learning and foster partnerships in knowledge production. In this way, cluster 3 can also cross-fertilize and enhance the partnerships in development cooperation and global economic structures.