International Development and Religion Unit
Roundtable: What comes after the SDGs? Faith actors and the post-2030 discussions
In 2015 the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replaced the earlier Millenium Development Goals, which ran from 2000-2015. The time frame for the SDGs is also 15 years, and discussions about the post-2030 global development framework that will replace them are beginning and will intensify over the next few years in the run up to 2030. While the MDGs were decided unilaterally within the UN, in the lead up to 2015, for the SDGs there was a consultation process, involving states, civil society and the private sector. This informed the UN’s decision about the shape of the new goals. However, although civil society actors were included in the consultation process this was not very wide ranging and did not engage intentionally with faith actors as distinct group within civil society. Where faith actors were involved, this was incidental and reflected their engagement in development and humanitarian action more broadly.
In the run up to the post-2030 discussions, this roundtable invites academics, faith actors and those working with faith-based organisations to reflect upon the following questions:
- To what extent and in what ways were faith actors involved in the consultation to set the SDGs?
- What has been the experience of faith actors engaging with the SDG framework?
- Should the involvement of faith actors in the post-2030 discussions be better facilitated than it was for the SDG consultation process? If so, how do you think this could be achieved?
- Are there aspects of the SDGs framework that could have been designed better with greater input from faith actors?
Paper panel: Methodological discussions in religions and development: combining quantitative and qualitaitve research
Qualitative approaches have methodologically dominated research in religions and development. Qualitative methods are well suited to the depth needed in examining the complex interactions between religious beliefs and practices and humanitarian and development work. Nevertheless, this has led to some critiques of the field as lacking a balance of methodological approaches and the observation that “quantitative evidence is particularly hard to come by” (Marshall 2021, "Impressions and Implications," 21). Quantitative methods present a complicated range of issues for religions and development. There have been a limited number of randomized control trials in the field but a wider number of knowledge, attitudes, and practices-style surveys that mostly identify the influence of religious beliefs on various development topics. The practical and ethical implications of quantitative methods (such as their expense or issues with maintaining a control group in community contexts) make them unfeasible in many cases. Yet there are many ways in which analysis of existing data sets, for example, or mixed methods approaches, could advance the state of the evidence in religions and development. This panel seeks papers that a) use mixed methods or quantitative approaches to examine topics relevant to religions and development, b) explain the development of tools to employ in quantitative and mixed methods research, or c) discuss methodology in religions and development research, including analysis and review of methods used by researchers in the field.
Since its establishment as an academic discipline in the 1960's the field of International Development Studies (IDS) has evolved from a fragmented topic, contained within the many silos of different academic departments, into an interdisciplinary field that draws on knowledge from across the humanities and social sciences. Despite this growing trend, until recently, religious and theological studies have found it a challenge to contribute to this growing conversation. The International Development and Religion Unit was established at the AAR in 2009 as one avenue through which religious and theological studies could engage in this emerging constructive dialogue with development studies. The primary objective of our Unit is to use the AAR’s interdisciplinary and international reach as a focal point to gather scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, including those outside the AAR, who are engaged in the study of the space and place of religion in the context of economic, political and socio-cultural development in the global south. We wish to support theoretically robust and practically oriented research that interrogates the post/de/colonial, theological, religious and missionary assumptions and mentalities of the global confluence of international development and religion in the developing world, including, but not limited to the investigations of current faith-based NGO’s and their projects in the field, practitioner-based research and reflection from the field and the encounter between private and public religion(s) in the developing world.