Abstract

This issue of Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review is devoted to the theme of ‘Professionalisation and Deradicalisation of Development Education’ and is centrally concerned with a number of paradoxes and contradictions that characterise the field in an era of neo-liberal shaped globalisation. It addresses, in particular, the question of why the development education sector endorses, tacitly or otherwise, the very ideologies and political-economic arrangements that are responsible for producing or exacerbating conditions of poverty and injustice, while simultaneously encouraging people to take action against this poverty and injustice? It asks: What are the implications of retaining a politically detached stance on crucial policy issues that the sector is ideally positioned to respond to? Why does the sector sometimes have surprisingly little to say about key development issues and crises as they are played out in local contexts? What are the consequences for development organisations that do take on divisive ‘local’ issues? What have efforts to ‘mainstream’ development education within formal education meant for the radical underpinnings of the field? What does it mean to ‘do’ development education in an era of financial austerity and insecurity, where people’s lived experiences increasingly clash with their inward expectations and desires for their (now blunted) futures — futures which were, for many, until very recently, imagined in far more positive and hopeful terms? How are government cuts to development education impacting on its practice? Do the long-term educative goals of informing citizens about the underlying structural causes of poverty and injustice inevitably become compromised or obscured within the context of more immediate ‘bread and butter’ tasks like fundraising for development programmes in the global South? How can those whose task it is to educate people about the structural and systemic features of global poverty best align themselves within organisations whose primary function is to fund raise and raise awareness about their projects overseas?