The pressures of a global climate crisis, increasing disasters, and rising inequalities demonstrate the urgency of effective action for global change. International humanitarian and development organizations are increasingly interested in partnering with religious actors to work on these issues. Research in this field is now establishing that much of the work of "religions and development" has become constrained within certain normative expectations, with faith-based organizations regularly navigating the complexity of their identity to participate (or not) in international organizations' efforts toward global change. This panel will explore how norms of international humanitarian and development work affect our research and understanding of religious engagements in this field. Papers will consider faith-based organizations' climate advocacy around the COP processes, a critique of the "religions and development" research field, and an ontological argument of ways techno-optimism influences the “depoliticization” of religion and global change.
Faith-based organisations (FBOs) are increasingly visible in climate action with growing numbers at the UNFCCC and the UNEA. The role of FBOs in climate action has been framed variously through their social, economic and moral capital, yet these are complicated by the diversity of FBOs in secular climate spaces. As such, the following questions arise: What role do FBOs play in climate action at the UN and to what extent are these roles distinctively ‘faith-based’? How do FBOs navigate with and within this ostensibly secular arena? I draw on findings from fieldwork conducted online and at COP26. These findings demonstrate the strategic ways that FBOs engage with the UN on climate action whilst still seeking to carve out a distinctively faith-based voice through moral, though not always confessional, framings of climate change. I suggest the post-secular provides a fruitful way to frame these developments in faith-secular collaboration on climate action.
Religions and development research over the last twenty years has centered around some major common themes: that religions matter but are side-lined or ignored; that there are surges of interest in religions from international development policymakers and practitioners but that these can lead to instrumentalization and unfair co-option of religious assets; and multiple definitions and categorizations of faith-based organizations. While these major themes have advanced the field previously, recent emerging themes update and re-frame these previously dominant debates. The analysis in this article finds that the new emerging themes push for engaging with the complexity and contextuality of religions, working with a fuller diversity of religious actors, and using a range of research methods. Ultimately, the article finds that researchers in religions and development can move beyond questions of “added value” of religions to development, and instead focus on the nuance of religions for development goals in contextually specific ways.
Data driven conclusions, complex technological infrastructure, and engineering knowledge have served as the politically “neutral” harbingers of contemporary progress narratives. Alongside this practice, science and technology studies have described the ways political neutrality is constructed in technological development, serving to elide value-driven intentions, even when well meaning. But how is this neutrality affected when developments are undeniably value driven, ones that have political stakes in international development, with religious actors serving as the main drivers for their creation? Using the field of engineering for community development as an empirical case for exploring how technology, religion, and development are all co-constructed, this piece argues that optimisms inherent in both technological development and religious engagement efforts can and do both compound and hybridize. This piece articulates new and varied forms of secularity and religiosity constructed when technological logics are embedded in international development efforts.