“Rethinking International Development” Workshop Themes
Compiled by Laura Martin
6/7/13
I. Introduction section: Key concerns about international development education
 Ethics of engagement in developing world. “Experts” trained in Global North
damage global south. Little sensitivity to context, sense of superiority. Skills for
students so they don’t become part of the problem, but part of the solution.
 Need for long-term, deep committed relationships abroad versus “quick visits” and
reproducing extractive relationships. Need equitable relationships. What does
collaboration mean in terms of teaching and research? How do we build institutional
relationships and institutional memory, and not just depend on individuals? How do
we have opportunities for students to participate and learn but make it a long-term
relationship?
 Role of universities in shaping abroad experiences: What is the value of sending
students abroad? What is our responsibility to shape that experience when they
come back? Is there a connection to the prep before and back? How do we help
them make sense of it? Ensure students understand the “third world within the
first world” first
 Are we just consultants or are we taking on the role of equity planners?
 Language/translation
 Carbon footprint
 Who is the client? How do we transition from serving a government agency to
serving an informal settlement as clients when they may be in opposition to the
formal city?
 Defining “international development” vs “international”
 Tension between international planning and international development
education. Is a global cities class on Shanghai and Dubai international
development?
 Problematize “development”
 What kinds of skills do our students need?
 Move towards competency-based education; need to teach how to intervene in
the world with faculty who are both practitioners and academics.
 Need to teach a critical and evaluative framework or what development is.
 Skills to be reflective practitioners
 Understanding the role of the private sector in the field. Private sector
consultancies de facto planners. How do we prepare students for these jobs?
 What should we teach our students?
 Balance between teaching “what is” versus “what should be”
 To what extent are we teaching US-idiosyncratic issues (participation, race &
class dynamics, government) as global, when they are local and have debatable
application abroad?
 Need semester-long class on theory to teach nuance
 How do we teach theory and link to practice?
 Trans-border flows. Focus on transnational, not just international.













 Scale
 Decolonize the mind of students. Focus on relational thinking and power.
 Focus on global justice, equity
 Institutions- need to address changing institutional framework with movement
away from multi-lateral aid organizations to bilateral aid organizations, NGOs,
private sector
Who are our students?
 Tensions with “who” is doing development work. Students can include
subpopulations like military and evangelicals.
 Schools like UCLA gets international students who want to stay in the US.
How can we develop a set of mentalities and sensitivities to broad, international,
contextual variables for people who plan to work in America so they are also open to
international issues? How do we do that when they are in a program for just two
years and they plan on staying in the US?
Changing world/ historical moment: technology, social media, globalization, crowd
sourcing, IT revolution, “virtual middle class.” Impact for education, online
education. What do we teach students in the classroom that is different from online
ed?
US planning academy is talking to itself in journals. We have to be more aware about
what’s going on elsewhere.
 How do we speak to international audiences? What is the language component?
What’s the added value of a US program over strong programs in the Global South?
Planning academics not part of international conversations on development and
economics, distribution, economic growth, debates on wellbeing and metrics.
Planning schools have ceded a lot of ground to the economists. Not talking about big
issues like industrialization. Are we shut out of certain journals because of our
approaches? Do we miss out on contributing to those areas of development?
How do we (planning departments) add value to other areas of the university? What
are our relationships with other disciplines increasingly engaged in the urban?
Similarly, why do departments within planning become to silo-ed?
 Cross-discipline partnerships to collaborate and make connections with different
disciplines
Comparative work- What are appropriate comparisons?
Nuanced differences between masters and PhD programs
Balance between faculty teaching and research. Need to be fair to our students.
Unhappy researchers make very bad academics.
Are we working at the appropriate scales? Mismatch between territorial scales of
intervention and territorial scales of determination of problems like inequality and
poverty.
How do institutional circumstances affect what you can do?
Finances
 What are the bottom lines of universities in terms of their financing models? What
role do we have as planners in smartening up the use of “internationalization” to
get more money? Need to explore what is possible within institutional constraints
with respect to meaningful “internationalization.”

 Who funds studios and what are the implications?
Tenure & promotions
 Setting up studios means opportunity costs in terms of research agendas
II. Survey session (just some key interesting points)
 The urban design finding is interested but it would be interested to compare this with
the response of the general planning student since all students say they would like more
urban design exposure. It’s not that they want to specialize in it but that they want to
get a taste of it. Seems like people want to have the language of design if not all the
skills…. Whether we follow market trends or we try to shape and develop them,
there’s a lot of talk around “employability” and something like urban design and GIS
are seen as the skills needed to get jobs.
 On the comparative planning side, students want student exchanges, years abroad, etc.
because they want skills that can move around the world because boundaries are
changing and austerity measures in Europe, for ex, mean you can’t necessarily get a job
where you live….. Students want to work in other contexts and they want more intnl
context classes
 Do we teach to the market or try to shape the market?
III & IV. Lunch sessions
 Relationship between planning and other disciplines
 Economics- Maybe we need to reclaim some ground ceded to business schools.
Need to reclaim territory not by putting down other disciplines but by putting
forward a planning approach to economics. We need to attack the ideas (e.g.
neoclassical economics does not work well for these reasons) and not the people or
the disciplines (e.g. economists are wrong)
 What are the sister disciplines that are working in the domains that planners work in
and how do we differentiate ourselves? What makes us special, and how is our
focus different from other disciplines?
 How can we speak to sister disciplines to make our work more relevant?
 Build a common language across disciplines to be heard better in those departments.
We are assuming that we’re relevant but maybe we really need to question that.
 Insecurity among PhD students because they don’t know which disciplines they’re
going to. They have to know who their audiences are at all times to be able to speak
to them.
 Planning faculty don’t know who to engage with. We need to identify certain
platforms to get a critical mass in those journals--we need many voices so our
approaches are not discredited in those debates. Maybe we need to make a strategic
concerted effort to push ourselves onto the stage. Where do we want to read our
colleagues’ work?
 Also, we want to teach planning students a cognate discipline that they’re working
in.
 How do we integrate the sister disciplines more explicitly into our curricula?
 What’s new? Should we push back against the sister disciplines for pulling us too
much one way or another?
 Need to teach how institutions have changed over time
 Increase in private sector involvement in planning
 What is the how and why of those other disciplines working in these spaces? Maybe
we need to rethink what the “public” is
 Do we teach our students how to have a conversation with the developer?
 Language of business. Not reaching a different layer of people who are influential,
because not speaking the language of business.
 What is central to an international development planning curriculum?
 Role of government
 Maybe one of the main questions is “What’s the role of govt?” Answering that
from diff perspectives is maybe the point of entry. That gives you an anchor in
which you can really engage with it. Everything leads back to govt
 Need for a minimalist approach and going back to the basics
 Need to look at the private sector as well.
 The landscape of what government is responsible for is important.
 Theories of the state--govt is a part of it but not the only part. Most planning is
either in response to the state or what the state did not do. Planning as a set of
preoccupations of process and strategy, not just as a profession. It’s a way of
engaging the discourse about goals and strategy.
 For the business solution to work, need the public sector for the basic
infrastructure. Need to stay on objective of vast inequality and how give them
services.
 Interest in forming partnerships b/w US and African schools.
 How fund African students? Funding from Rockefeller, Ford.
 Consortium of US planning schools schools. Need staff continuity.
 Consortium dealing with SDI
 How serve Chinese students?
 Chinese students often very wealthy
 Chinese students doing African studies
V. Session 1, Room A (Power Dynamics)
Gabriella, Jason, Brent, Neema, Larry, Vinit, Faranak
 Is it appropriate for the “US” to lead the way? What is the kind of relationship do we
want to have? What relevance does the US paradigm of planning have?
 What are the power inequalities today? Role of elite institutions.
 Institutions are situated differently, the faculty, the structure of the institution. Are we
all trying to do similar things? How are we doing things differently because of
institutional constraints?
 Should we be doing exchanges? Appropriateness of US bringing students to other
places, or should we be working in situ? Idea of multidirectional learning opportunities
with not just sending, but bringing back.
 With collaborations, questions of equity, trust, respect. Who are we relying on? Is the
burden on local civil society organizations/social movement structures?
 Need for a pre-departure semester long course for students that go abroad, or else they
are ill prepared. A MOOC could be used here. Preparation with deep contextual,
historical knowledge. Connection of AAPS and ACSP.
 Who manages this? Could have anchor schools for regional networks and then
other schools cluster around.
 Consortium of universities/ coalition of schools
 Proposal of partnering with SDI with a consortium of universities in the US for
engaged project, pool resources of faculty, students to make continued investment.
Having consortium could help with fundraising, for example, can also send the
best student & best commitment.
 If networks (Africa, Asia, etc) sustained through combination of schools, students
have more options
 Preparation courses done by coalition schools
 ACSP platform for ongoing collaboratives
 Management? Suggestion for anchor schools for certain amount of time, like
journals
 Question with quality of international programs with this set-up. Requirements
for quality control.
 Need for committed faculty, continually engage
 Bottleneck- financial incentives. Institutions can see these projects as cash cows.
 Rise of private institutions in the Global South. Demand for faculty totally outpacing
supply, example of U of Nairobi. Looking to legitimize themselves with relationships
with US faculty
 Concern: Institutional resources for exchange. Ability of small schools to engage in
resource intensive efforts, such as partnerships between institutions
 Suggestions for partnerships/projects
 Partnership with more than one local partner is a key piece: university collaborate
plus civil society groups.
 Experiential learning, really engaging with a case of problem solving in a real
place with real people
 Action research projects with sustained partnerships between planning schools
 Ex- Berkeley and U of Nairobi. 6-yr partnership, anchored with SDI. Commitment to
research, exchange of doctoral students at same time as masters students, with an
influence on teaching at the undergraduate level. Funded by Rockefellar, McCarthur
with bulk of funding going to U of Nairobi, helped them legitimize. 1 core faculty, 2-3
associated faculty, 4 PhDs, with cycle through of master students who make a year-long
commitment to project. Exchange with Kenyans coming to Berkeley. Coming as
equals.
 critiques of SDI, having received intl funding, changed dynamics of internal group
 Issue of who we are training- elites. How does this identity of students and researchers
impact the development of these relationships? Often we’re training elite folks to go to
elite places.
 India model- 4 large NGOs have set up development practice masters programs in
universities; incredibly well resourced programs. Interesting set of partnerships. all
these issue, but coming from the south. social movement NGO + very professionalized
NGO
 Planning is political, as a starting point must have some model of change.
VI. Session 1, Room B
Bish, Smita, Diane, Sunil, Meenu, Genie, Bruce, Smita, Michael, Tiwari
 Could GPEIG work with AAPS and SDI together?
 We are not preparing enough students to deal w private sector firms.
 Planning’s lost ground to other disciplines. What planning used to do is now being
done by other schools.
 Need to reclaim ground we’ve lost form business schools- more development and
economic planning.
 Planners not invited to “development” seminars because “development” in that
scenario means very specific economic parlance. What do we offer against this
increasingly powerful analytic front?
 Developers and transport agencies shaping cities in Latin American cities. Not
planners.
 JPAL
 What’s planning school’s comparative advantage? What expertise do we have?
 Planning about social justice, public interest, and creating a better outcome on the
ground. In this way, planning differs from JPAL, because planning is not just
about the methodology, but about the outcome. Another way to frame- Does
planning know how to assess/evaluate whether a plan is in the public interest?
 Planning different from economists, because considers different scales of state
institutions where policy gets made. Planners’ core should include public sector,
public administration, and organizational theory.
 Planning needs to reclaim a certain basic skill base- infrastructure, natural
resources, housing, density, landuse. Planning different from private sector in
these areas, because planning knows how to deal with the municipality, while this
scale is new to the private sector.
 capacity building
 linkages and integrated issues. Planning theory and political economy helps to
connect.
 planning as a process of engagement is our comparative advantage. Engaging the
public and municipalities.
 problem-solving
 Planning could offer frameworks to analyze data- help people understand it to
make better public policies
 International development is about financial characteristics of planning, not design.
 Conversation about planning’s methodology
 Planning differs because not bound to one methodology or methodology-driven.
Most other fields increasingly methodology-driven. Planning benefits from broad
set of methodologies it can draw from. Mixed methods.
 Planning’s methodology is stories, but hard to justify as a discipline
 If you are training someone in development planning, what methodologies do they
need? Econ, stats, historical analysis, telling of stories in a systematic way.
 Should planners focus more on evaluation and assessments? Why do people go to
JPAL instead of planners? JPAL’s reputation based on methodology, not a
sectoral knowledge. Others in room raise challenge to idea that planners should
focus on assessments.
 Planning as specialized knowledge or general framework?
 Spatial dimension of planning
 Planning’s ability to integrate different types of knowledge and disciplines
 Planning as an interdisciplinary profession can’t claim exclusive domain to
anything. Planning’s success predicated on adding value.
 Development planning is a different body of knowledge, with different types of
institutions and problems.
 We can overdo the questions of what’s the specialization.
 Employers looking for somebody with more than one area of expertise in an
uncertain world with muddying boundaries. Employers looking for people who
can solve problems.
 What is important to planning education? Suggestions for new courses
 Move beyond sectoral approach in planning, and go back to territorial planning.
Planning extends beyond the city.
 Importance of language in knowing a place.
 Importance of studying global histories- of the place and institutions.
 Critical institutional thinking
 Critical comparative frame
VII. Session 1, Room C (Promising Pedagogies)
Raj, Annette, Tribid, Petra, Gabi, Gavin, Clara, Joseli, Vanessa
 What could a new way forward for international education be? How do we
institutionalize it?
 Changing power relations
 Changing institutional landscape: students more interested in social movements,
technology, crowd sourcing than wanting to work at WB
 What to teach students
 Reinforce urban expertise w/in international pedagogy
 Planner brings skills for synthesis, creativity, innovation. More creative, instead of
just criticize, analyze, and enforce
 Changing nature of international relations
 Teaching how to intervene
 Difficult to settle on requirements, because no agreed upon consensus for
understanding international/global context
 Not about technical skills, but seeing the world’s structural factors/issues
 Global finance- global financial institutions
 Comparative urbanization- compare because need to understand something
common that is happening.. mechanisms of diffusion and acceptance
 We don’t have good epistemologies for what we can compare
 Issue of long-term engagement to communities
 Commitment to time and developing relationships
 Student composition
 Students as global elite
 Changing with more Chinese students- Chinese students interested in working
abroad
 Bringing practitioners and people into classrooms
 How fund people from Global S?
 Bring in foreign government people in US (for example, from Humphrey
program
 Example of potential for Global Sustainability Partnership at MIT, where
participants spend 6 months in Malaysia and 6 months at MIT. Could bring
these practitioners into the classroom in the US.
 Can people as community fellows come in to teach in the classroom? Ex of CoLAB at MIT.
 Skype, video conference
 Possibility to pay informal residents for time on skype
 Although importance of face to face interaction
 Concerns: language barrier; who sets the agenda; technological issues
 Corporate online education where courses co-taught by US faculty and grassroots
social leaders
 Concerns: how structure when institutions like MIT have intellectual
property; contracts can include a very involved process that could be
exploitative
 Bring students on research projects. RAship model.
 Best experience to integrate, create, apply. Empower students to make suggestions
for research
 How fund? Example of MIT professor funding students through research funding
 How to ‘internationalize’ curriculum? Concerns with requirement to ‘internationalize’
curriculum
 Create a group of readings on different topics (ex. transportation) that people who
teach these classes could use to internationalize
 Have a guest speaker for a week to teach international orientation on a topic
 Concern that no incentive to ‘internationalize’ curriculum, because professors
don’t want to add a new unit
 Concern with professors teaching something if they don’t understand it
 Favor case studies and studio teaching
 Collaborative studios w/ partnering schools- doesn’t always need to be with “Global
South.” Keep costs down by students hosting each other.
VIII. Session 2 (Relationships with International Development Institutions)
Gabriella, Joseli, Raj, Julio, Meenu, Clara, Brent
 How define international development institutions?
 Beyond Bretton Woods Institutions. WB no longer largest source of financingChina Development Bank greater
 Additional players such as bilateral aid agencies like DFID
 Shifts in who is leading development / opportunities
 Consultancies like Accenture making money in urban. Are we conducting that
research and prepping our students to be able to handle that?
 BRICs development banks over WB. Looser credit attached to fewer conditions.
 Universities are development institutions as well
 Do planning academics simply react to or are we helping set up research agendas of
those institutions?
 Ex of how academics help shape agendas of international development
institutions- industrial policy- academics promoting the idea of global value
chains been targeting international development institutions as partners, arguing
that if their agenda is to open markets, then need to know about global value
chains. Gaining traction.
 Paradigm shift in where students working
 Students previously working for large international institutions, now working for
NGOs, social entrepreneurship organizations/firms, etc
 Job markets very specialized with short-term perspective. Difficult to get a job at
the WB.
 Students also now working in consultant companies that do investment in cities.
Students often consultants for a firm for a few years before creating their own
firm. Students doing evaluations.
 Graduates employed with global trade unions working with municipalities, doing
work with corporate social responsibility
 Funding relationships between universities and institutions
 Universities looking to institutions for funding projects, for consultancies
 International Development Institutions (like ADB, Rockefeller, DFID) want to
fund capacity building for any research around urban projects (although NSF
explicitly states no funding for capacity building). Foundations also interested in
linkages (transnational organizations and flows) and corporate social
responsibility.
 Are we shaped by the money? Or are we ahead of the money? Can we shift their
agendas, and to what extent?
 From context of research in India, sees openness with what one can do with
funding. Just need to make the case to organizations like WB, USAID,
ADB, Rockefeller, Ford, DFID for projects
  reaction about how regionally specific this example of India is.
Argument that if there was more money, there would be more kinds of
collaborative projects
 Process of standard-setting and certification
 How are we addressing harmonization of efforts with this?
 Who is setting standards? Dispersed between private, public. Are the more
global, powerful institutions setting standards?
 Push to standardize to have third-party actors come in
 Opportunities
 Large employee unions that are more progressively managed with lots of money
(ex transit workers in India and SA that have $500 mill). City planners and
managers need to come up with ways to redirect these funds into new
opportunities.
 Alliances with people not directly involved with international capital. CSR world,
but limited in economies where majority of workforce is in the informal sector.
 Collaboration
 Importance of collaborative work- Place specific. Continuity, longer-term.
Benefits of a separate administrative structure.
 Need to question power dynamics/imbalances in collaborative projects and
intentions of leading institutions and host countries.
 Public-private financial model to fund collaborative centers (ex. of GSAPP
“global centers”)
 Model- German set up masters program with a university in Egypt. Funded by
Ger government. Students study in Ger and Ciaro. Challenges middle class in
Cairo to see the poor.
 MOOCS
 Skepticism on linkages, open education sector, global north opening satellites in
global south. Universities see this as a source of finance. MOOCs colonizing the
market by creating a market. Need to consider distributional effects of MOOCs,
with universities in the Global S being less motivated to build locally capacity
with online courses.
 Opportunity to address monopolization issue with faculty from leading
institutions (like MIT) teaching with faculty and activists from the Global South
 Publishing
 How do we position ourselves to address question of who owns the knowledge?
Big money industry
 Linguistic challenge- publishing in foreign languages even when it does not count
for promotion
 Problem of the prejudice towards Northern universities and journals
 Need to cite research from places where work, not just from journals that want to
publish in. Problem in relation to the tenure system.
 Question of accessibility- which publishers put on the web in different languages
or free. But once again, challenge with how these decisions relate to professional
promotion.
 Tenure promotion
 Need to consider indicators used in tenure promotion
 What are the types of knowledge or pedagogy that we value, and how do they
translate into our tenure promotion? How are the relationships that we bring into
our professional careers being exploited and not being valued in promotion?
 British universities- Research Excellence Framework where measure “impact.”
Questions on how measure impact.
XI. Session 2 (PAB)
Gavin, Larry, Vinit, Petra, Bruce, Smita, Neema, Weiping, Heather
from PAB: "global dimensions of planning: appreciate of interactions, flows of people
and materials, cultures, and differing approaches to planning across world regions"
 What does the “global dimension” aspect mean? What should it mean?
 One interpretation- “global dimension” means schools should teach how one local
place links to distant regions and global economic forces (ex. how manufacturing
in China affects the economy in rural NY). Idea that an “appreciation” of the
global is important for local work.
 Another interpretation- “global dimension” more about training students to work
in various places and cultures. Best practices to teach students to work in foreign
places.
 “different approaches” piece- need more explicit stance in coursework about
comparative techniques
 PAB (aka Larry) thought more about focus on international comparison in
preparing people to work internationally than in focusing on the global
dimensions to inform local, American planning
 Accreditation committee needs to address the mismatch if US schools have
foreign students and only teach planning in the US
 In the new version, emphasis on educational outcomes and outputs
 AAU and university presidents asked for focus on outcomes over inputs. Idea
that universities don’t want to be told how to deliver degrees, but just told what to
achieve, and then universities can figure out how.
 Outcome assessment is a good challenge to make faculty evaluate whether
students actually learn
 How do you assess/measure outcome?
 Use studios to see how students adapt
 What are appropriate end of term assessments? Examine students in
conditions that mimic practice.
 Accreditation criteria problematic because only about “appreciation” not actually
learning to do
 Learning process b/w PAB and universities
 One view- Historically this doesn’t happen
 Another view- Happens indirectly. Faculty share challenges in ACSP sessions.
 Cornell’s recent experience with PAB evaluation
 Process took too much time (18 months, 3 units at cornell) and wasn’t helpful.
Endless amount on training
 Sub-study report tedious
 Re-grading of papers as part of process insane
 What would be an acceptable form of compliance with international criteria, especially
for smaller programs?
 Half course in the core called global dimensions of planning
 PAB still needs clearer direction on how our programs change practitioners (How do
students who have work experience change over the course of the program?)
 Need to track graduates and examines whether we are producing effective
practitioners
 A qualitative approach better than a quantitative approach for evaluation
 Should PAG accredit foreign universities?
 What missing in curriculum in America?
 Informality
X. Session 2, Room C (History of Develop’t Planning)
Bish, Michael, Eugine, Diane, Faranak, Sunil, Ofer
 What are lessons? How has it evolved? What are the intellectual turns so that now we
can say where we should go? Did we conceptually focus on the right things?
 Have we looked at the right scale?
 People could argue that went so national with development economics that not
close enough to the city at all
 Community development (Sheela Patel) vs larger scale (Alice).
 Now trying to go inter-scalar, looking at the relationship between national
development plans and the neighborhood level. Also, importance of
dependencies between national and neighborhood.
 Current movement to go back to the ground level for rooted knowledge
 Importance of looking at the local is seeing how intervention comes from below
and changes national policies.
 Rural-urban; environmental
 Agriculture used to be core of international development. Now environmental
landscapes & infrastructure more under other disciplines like landscape
architecture because of the physical aspect. But they aren’t thinking about
institutions/politics.
 Current focus on peri-urban. Important places with violence and people
becoming rich off their land.
 Physical space vs. policy/econ development
 Can planners be involved with design (physical) and economic development?
 Today, more emphasis on the social/institutional arrangements, and less emphasis
on the built environment.
 Need to move towards a better grounding in physical space if trying to study
institutions that make space
 Claim that the planning field lost control of the concept of the urban
 Importance of history
 Students at GSD interested in the history
 Student’s aren’t aware of the contextual history
 Resistance
 We haven’t emphasized the history of resistance in the field of development
planning. Need to look at social movements. The problems we are trying to
solve are often instances of resistance to planning (squatting, property rights).
Resistance is not a new thing.
 Need to emphasize more the links between a policy intervention and what caused
the policy intervention
 Negotiation lit occurred because we needed a way to manage resistance
 Institutionalism and organization
 What is the trajectory of the intellectual focus on institutions within planning? Is
it just because that is where the money is or is it because of some larger metatrend?
 We need to be reflective about which institutions we are giving attention to, b/c
there is money to look at private institutions.
 Part of the shift of new institutional economics start from the WB, b/c realize that
can’t just go to market w/o institutions.
 What institutions should international development focus on? Difference between
planning and development planning. Industrial institutions not in planning, but
development.
 What is the domain of planning?
 Planning about creating a process of public interest
 Pushing the spatial context- for example, studying jobs within the spatial scale.
 Political economy of development- job creation in the Global S mainly being
service jobs or low wage subsistence