AFEDEV Pluralist Development Workshop: Between Development Geography and Development Economics
Development economics and development geography share many objects of study — the environment, land, infrastructure, mobility, agricultural and urban transformations — but they do not always approach them through the same scales, temporalities, methods, analytical frameworks, or forms of evidence.
This event proposes to bring these two disciplinary traditions into dialogue through three pairs of presentations, each bringing together an economist and a geographer. The aim is to highlight concrete points of convergence: how are environmental perceptions rooted in lived spaces? How do land policies reshape land use and relationships to territories? How do infrastructures transform mobility, urban-rural relations, and trajectories of structural change?
The programme preserves the spirit of the 2025 AFEDEV-APAD event: three thematic sessions, each built around two 25-minute presentations, followed by 30 minutes of discussion, and a final roundtable devoted to the conditions for an interdisciplinary dialogue between development economics and development geography.
Proposed guiding thread
Bringing causality, actors’ strategies, and territorial dynamics into dialogue
Combining quantitative survey data, spatial data, qualitative fieldwork, and historical approaches
Identifying shared objects of study rather than juxtaposing two disciplines
Discussing what economic and geographical methods make visible — and what they leave in the shadows
Organisers
AFEDEV and UMR Développement et Sociétés
