CfP: Imagining Development - Comparing Theory and Practice of Development in the Post-socialist World

International Workshop

Imagining Development - Comparing Theory and Practice of Development in the Post-socialist World
Institute of Governance and Political Science, Tallinn University,
Estonia
8-9 November 2013

This workshop is part of the Marie Curie Project PIRSES-GA-2013-318961 (PSDEV): Imagining Development: A multidisciplinary and multilevel analysis of development policies and their effect in the post-socialist world.

The workshop will be composed of two parts

Young scholars section: PhD students and recent PhD graduates will have the opportunity of presenting their research and get feedback from more senior scholars.

Networking section: Participants will have the chance to present briefly their research and meet with other scholars from a wide network of universities. In addition to the project partners, we will invite scholars from two more networks Tallinn University is coordinating plus from other major European universities.

Focus of the workshop

The workshop will explore the way development (be this local ornational, political or social) in a series of post-socialist states has been conceived, implemented and applied to different political, economic and geopolitical realities across the region and the response that has generated from this implementation.

The three guiding research questions are

First, what are the main features of development policies conceived in the past 20 years in and towards the post-socialist region? What have been their main achievements and limits?

Second, what have been the effects of development policies conceived at the national and international level on the different segments of a society or a given local territory? Whilst policies may be regulated in details, and its rules are findable among official documents, little is known about the extent and the way in which those instructions are renegotiated and alternatives channels of distribution created in the cases where formal and informal rules do not overlap.

Third, what are the new interactions being created and what is the relationship with traditional spaces of economic development policies? Often failure to deliver the expected results is ascribed to the wrong measures adopted or the result of incompetence (or  corruption). Those two interpretations fail to consider the case when such irregularities persist in time and bring different results but not necessarily worse than the ones envisaged when conceived given policies or actions.

Technical details

There is no registration fee; we are unable to cover travel costs but we will provide accommodation and food for selected speakers (8-10  November).

Deadline for submission of abstracts (with a short bio) is September

25, 2013. Send everything to Emilia Pawlusz emilia.pawlusz@gmail.com (cc to Abel at ap@tlu.ee )