Logo: IDOS

Sustainable Futures

Jahr: 2020

  • We mourn Professor Stephan Klasen

    Professor Stephan Klasen died on 27 October 2020 following a long and serious illness. Stephan Klasen shaped and changed the German development economy like no other. He stood for research that is analytically precise and methodologically rigorous, without losing sight of the fact that development research needs an ethically sound compass and is particularly valuable if it makes evidence available for societal decision-making processes.

    Stephan Klasen was also a great university teacher. The number of PhDs he supervised as a first reviewer (76!!) alone shows his commitment in this field, but also the way he always managed to inspire intellectually and provide sensitive individual supervision.

    Many of his students today are leading figures in development research themselves. Stephan Klasen has also founded the Courant Research Centre „Poverty, Inequality and Growth in Developing Countries“, thus helping development research in Göttingen to achieve international renown. For years, he also played a decisive role in shaping the discussions in the most important German expert committee, the Development Economics Committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik. In this respect, one can justifiably speak of a „Göttingen School“ founded by Stephan Klasen.

    The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) has also benefited greatly from Stephan Klasen’s work. Some of our senior researchers have completed their PhD with him while working at DIE, others joined us as Post-docs or cooperate with us in other forms today. They have all repeatedly expressed their gratitude and appreciation for Stephan Klasen’s competent and constructive supervision – and also for his modest manner without any professorial conceit. We also fondly remember an internal evaluation in which Stephan Klasen critically examined our research portfolio and provided inspiring impulses for further development.

    Stephan Klasen will always remain a great role model for us.

  • Wir trauern um Prof. Dr. Stephan Klasen

    Am 27. Oktober 2020 ist Professor Stephan Klasen nach langer und schwerer Krankheit verstorben. Stephan Klasen hat wie kein anderer die deutsche Entwicklungsökonomie geprägt und verändert. Er stand für eine Forschung, die analytisch präzise und methodisch rigoros ist, ohne aus dem Auge zu verlieren, dass Entwicklungsforschung einen ethisch fundierten Kompass braucht und besonders wertvoll ist, wenn sie Evidenz für gesellschaftliche Entscheidungsprozesse verfügbar macht.

    Stephan Klasen war zugleich ein großartiger Hochschullehrer. Schon die Zahl der von ihm als Erstgutachter betreuten Promotionen (76!!) zeigt sein Engagement in diesem Bereich, aber auch die Art, wie es ihm immer gelungen ist, intellektuell zu inspirieren und einfühlsam individuell zu betreuen.

    Viele seiner Schüler*innen sind heute selbst führende Persönlichkeiten der Entwicklungsforschung. Stephan Klasen hat zudem das Courant Forschungszentrum „Armut, Ungleichheit und Wachstum in Entwicklungsländern“ gegründet und damit der Entwicklungsforschung in Göttingen zu internationalem Renommee verholfen. Zudem hat er jahrelang die Diskussionen im wichtigsten deutschen Fachgremium, dem Entwicklungsökonomischen Ausschuss des Vereins für Socialpolitik, entscheidend mitgeprägt. Insofern kann man mit Fug und Recht von einer, von Stephan Klasen begründeten, „Göttinger Schule“ sprechen.

    Auch das DIE hat sehr von Stephan Klasens Wirken profitiert. Einige unserer Wissenschaftler*nnen haben arbeitsbegleitend bei ihm promoviert, andere sind nach der Promotion zu uns gekommen oder kooperieren heute mit uns. Sie alle haben sich immer wieder sehr dankbar und voller Wertschätzung über Stephan Klasens kompetente und konstruktive Betreuung geäußert – und auch über seine bescheidene Art ohne jeden professoralen Dünkel. Auch erinnern wir uns noch sehr gerne an eine interne Evaluierung, in der Stephan Klasen unser Forschungsportfolio kritisch durchleuchtet und inspirierende Impulse zur Weiterentwicklung gegeben hat.

    Stephan Klasen wird für uns immer ein großes Vorbild bleiben.

  • Digitale Podiumsdiskussion „Protected areas in a post-COVID world“ im Zuge der Global Landscapes Forum Biodiversity Digital Conference „One World – One Health“ am 28.10.

    Am 28. Oktober veranstalteten die Biodiversitätsexpert*innen Ina Lehmann und Jean Carlo Rodríguez vom Deutschen Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) eine digitale Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema „Protected areas in a post-COVID world“ im Zuge der Global Landscapes Forum Biodiversity Digital Conference „One World – One Health“.

    Wissenschaftler*innen warnen vor einer Zunahme zoonotische Krankheiten wie COVID-19 – die ihren Ursprung in einem Virusübersprung von Wildtieren auf Menschen hat – als Konsequenz der zunehmenden Zerstörung von Ökosystemen und des immer tieferen Vordringens der Menschen in die Habitate von Wildtieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund befasste sich die Podiumsdiskussion mit dem potentiellen Beitrag von Naturschutzgebieten zur Gesundheit von Umwelt und Menschen. Zudem thematisierte sie, wie die natürlichen Ressourcen in Naturschutzgebieten in der Pandemie unter Druck geraten – sei es, weil arme Bevölkerungsgruppen im Globalen Süden, die in Lockdowns ohne Einkommen sind, andere Wege zur Befriedigung ihrer Grundbedürfnisse suchen oder weil Länder mit Blick auf den ökonomischen Wiederaufbau nach der Krise Umweltschutzstandards absenken.

    Die Podiumsdiskussion wurde durch eine Videobotschaft von Marciela Fernandez eröffnet, einer Indigenen-Vertreterin der Cabécar Gemeinschaft im Talamanca-Wald in Costa Rica. Sie erläuterte, wie ihre Gemeinschaft ein Netzwerk zum Tausch lokaler Lebensmittel etabliert hat, das in Lockdown-Zeiten Nahrungssicherheit garantiert, dabei aber die lokalen natürlichen Ressourcen des Schutzgebiets nachhaltig nutzt. Diese Präsentation war das Sprungbrett für die weitere Diskussion zwischen Herbert Lust, Senior Vice President für Global Public Partnerships und Senior Vice President und Managing Director von Conservation International Europe, Adrian Martin, Professor of Environment and Development an der University of East Anglia, und Anna Spenceley, Gründungsdirektorin und Direktoriumsmitglied des Global Sustainable Tourism Council und Vorsitzende der IUCN Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group. Trotz ihrer unterschiedlichen Hintergründe und einigen Meinungsverschiedenheiten waren sich die Podiumsmitglieder einig, dass Naturschutzgebiete weiterhin eine zentrale Rolle für den Naturschutz spielen sollen, dass aber auch ein systematischer Strukturwandel in der ökonomischen Nutzung natürlicher Ressourcen dringend erforderlich ist.

  • Digital roundtable on ‘Protected areas in a post-COVID world’ at the Global Landscapes Forum Biodiversity Digital Conference ‘One World – One Health.’ on 28 October

    On 28 October, biodiversity researchers Ina Lehmann and Jean Carlo Rodríguez, both German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), hosted a digital roundtable on ‘Protected areas in a post-COVID world’ at the Global Landscapes Forum Biodiversity Digital Conference ‘One World – One Health.’

    Scientists warn that zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 – resulting from a virus spillover from wild animals to humans – are likely to become more frequent due to the destruction of ecosystems and of humans’ ever-closer encroachment into wildlife habitats. In this light, the roundtable addressed protected areas’ potential contribution to environmental and human health. Moreover, it considered how protected areas’ natural resources come under increasing pressure during the pandemic as poor people in the Global South who lose other income opportunities during lockdowns seek alternative ways to meet their livelihood needs and as countries lower environmental protection standards for the sake of post-crisis economic recovery.

    The panel discussion opened with a video message from Marciela Fernandez, a leader of the indigenous Cabécar community in the Talamanca rainforest of Costa Rica. She explained how her community has established a local food sharing system that guarantees them food security during lockdown while sustainably using the protected areas’ natural resources. This presentation kicked off further discussion among Herbert Lust, Senior Vice President of Global Public Partnerships and Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Conservation International Europe, Adrian Martin, Professor of Environment and Development at the University of East Anglia, and Anna Spenceley, funding member and board member of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and chair of the IUCN Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group. Despite their different backgrounds and some differences in opinion, all speakers agreed that protected areas should continue to play a vital role in conservation but that broader structural changes in natural resource use patterns are urgently required.

  • 56th Course of the Postgraduate Training Programme: Who are we, what do we do and why?

    This is a contribution by the participants oft he 56th Course of DIE’s Postgraduate Training Programme reflecting on the plenary phase and the topics dealt with in this phase.

    We, as the participants of the Postgraduate Training Programme, would like to invite you to recap the last few weeks of the course. We dealt with a large set of topics such as democracy and peace, corruption, flight and migration, gender – to only name a few. With all these questions, fundamental and ethical reflections are inevitable. Do external actors have a right or maybe even an obligation to intervene in processes within other countries? What should this ideally look like? Dealing with these topics, we identified some answers but also even more questions. In any case, one important conclusion to us was that a blueprint will never be the right answer! In addition to the importance of the “bigger picture”, we should keep an eye on the uniqueness of each case. Context is key! Development cooperation approaches should be more about “best fit” than about “best practice”. Context specificity, partnership, and mutual learning should be in the foreground. At the same time structural conditions, path dependencies, project cycles, and pressure to present results will not make this easy for us in practice. But let’s be honest – if we had wanted to go the easy way, we would not have chosen this field of work, would we?

    Other modules and units also gave cause for reflection. A particular highlight was the two-day workshop on Critical Whiteness. This enabled us to reflect on our own patterns of thought and to analyse existing racist structures in development cooperation. We discussed the meanings of all of this for our future professional life and learned why racist structures are prevalent everybody’s (and thus also our) thinking – and why this realisation is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it is an important step towards reflecting on our attitudes and positions and ultimately being able to change our language and actions. The path to anti-racism is characterised by reflection and unpleasant realisations. However, this is necessary in order to take small steps in the right direction and to grow together. In our opinion, it is essential to be aware of our role and our privileges so that we can use them to overcome existing structures and not to unintentionally strengthen existing patterns of thought – in everyday life but also especially in the field of development cooperation.

    The workshop, as well as the findings from previous modules, encouraged us to deal more intensively with our own language. Language is powerful – it is not only a mirror of our thoughts, it also shapes them. That is why it is important to us to be sensitive in the way we speak. Development cooperation terminology often implies “we vs. them“-approaches and implies unwanted hierarchies. We would therefore like to critically question established terms. Acknowledging the fact that „nobody’s perfect“, we therefore started to collect terms that we consider problematic and to exchange ideas about possible alternatives. Along with this, we would like to deal more intensively with topics such as diversity and gender – in general but also specifically with regard to the DIE and the Postgraduate Training Programme. If you are interested in becoming part of our learning process or want to provide input or food for thought, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

    Despite the growing COVID-19 numbers and the related restrictions, we have continued to bond as a group. The plenary phase is soon coming to an end and we are looking forward to the research team phase with excitement but also with some sadness. But until then, we will still experience the notorious simulation on government negotiations with Kenya in the upcoming week… and we’re looking very much forward to that!