Development Experts Gather for IGERT Symposium
Development Experts Gather for IGERT Symposium
Globalization has the potential to be a powerful engine for development, but in many countries, it has instead meant rising poverty and inequality. This paradox has given rise to many heated debates, including the question of whether we can rely on standard economic theory to solve the world's most pressing problems. Students in the IGERT Program in International Development and Globalization (IGERT-IDG) are skeptical about the panacean role of economic prescriptions. They believe that the implications for understanding development are too important to be left to one discipline.
On November 11th and 12th, 2005, the program hosted a conference that offered alternative perspectives on a range of contemporary development issues. The Second Annual Symposium on Globalization and Development featured the research of over thirty experts and was comprised of six panels: governance and institutions; international flows of labor, capital, and goods; growth and equity; health and education; issues in political economy; and current issues in development. Panelists included faculty, students, and other researchers from the social sciences and cognate fields. Presenting a diversity of views, the event enabled cross-disciplinary dialogue and brought new tools to bear on the challenges of poverty and underdevelopment.
Health and Education Panel: Margaret McLeod, Miguel Urquiola, Brendan O'Flaherty, and Michael Emch
"The symposium provided a fertile environment to test and discuss ideas," explained IGERT Fellow Ernesto Castaneda (Sociology). "I presented my ongoing research, which connects global unequal development to remittance economies. Many developmental experts mention that remittances can bring about development, but my field observations in Guerrero, Mexico contradict this view."
IGERT-IDG organized the first symposium a year ago when the program welcomed its first cohort of doctoral fellows. The program was founded at ISERP in 2003 with major funding from the National Science Foundation and is directed by Nobel laureate and University Professor Joseph Stiglitz. Each year, the fellowship selects several Ph.D. candidates from diverse disciplines and trains them in new models and methods for studying international development.
For IGERT fellows, the forum was a valuable occasion to showcase their work alongside an established group of development and policy experts. "The symposium and the program in general force us to move outside of our personal academic comfort zones, which is absolutely requisite in development work," said IGERT fellow Gabriella Carolini (Urban Planning). "We gain a certain knowledge currency in other disciplines which we are then able to digest and apply to our own research."
In addition to the IGERT fellows, a number of ISERP-affiliated discussants took part in conference proceedings. They included Akbar Noman, Shari Spiegel, and Joseph Stiglitz of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue; Jeronimo Cortina of the Project for Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race; David Epstein of the Center on Political Economy and Comparative Institutional Analysis; Faculty Fellows Sumila Gulyani, Macartan Humphreys, Brendan O'Flaherty, and Miguel Urquiola; and Health & Society Scholar Michael Emch.
The breadth of expertise was important not only for the IGERT program but also for the University more broadly. According to IGERT fellow Ngonidzashe Munemo, "For Columbia students, the symposium offers a rare glimpse at the multifaceted dimensions and processes behind this thing we call development and how it is mediated-positively and negatively-by globalization. As a political scientist, my own research on government responses to the threat of famine in Africa has benefited from taking seriously the economic literature on the sustainability of responses."
Each week, Munemo meets with his colleagues for an interdisciplinary seminar. Together, the IGERT Fellows analyze such issues as global institutions, multilateral treaties, non-governmental organizations, and mobilizations of public protest. For them, the symposium goes on year round. The rest of us will have to wait another year.
