What?

The Humanising Development Collective is an emerging, collaborative process to support a global center and space for positive development practices and paradigms.

Why?

The “international or global development” system as we know it is in need of and ripe for a significant overhaul. 

Despite the fact that many fortunate people around the world are living longer, safer and more prosperous lives than ever in human history, there still exist major challenges that threaten billions of people as well as non-human living beings. 

Past and current global development paradigms have been the object of many sound and well-evidenced criticisms – that they are funded by extractivist capitalism, that they are dominated by Western or Global North norms and actors, that they are limited in their capacity to be systemically impactful, that they are reinforcing the very paradigms that led to global inequity in the first place.

The call for shifting power in global development is aspirationally trying to address the internal inconsistencies in this system. Yet, we believe that several critical elements are missing from these conversations to achieve actual evolution of the system. These, for instance, include:

• Most of these conversations do well at denouncing the current development systems but lack the concrete steps for shifting those systems;

• The few proposals for shifting development systems are largely driven by those already holding power;

• Dissenting voices that hold transformative imagination are relegated to pockets of resistance without a space to gather; 

• Conversations are siloed and bifurcated; and

• There is too little time to sit with the origins of these systems and their negative impacts and – most importantly – to create solutions collaboratively.

In a series of conversations that we held between 2019-2022 with civil society leaders and others in global development, we heard the need for a space that can foster an approach to development that sees all humans as wholly valuable, more than a means to achieve outcomes and funding. A place where the process used to work with humans is the goal, the outcome itself. A place where development is not just human, it’s human-ising, because it elevates and values people’s dignity as fully formed humans from birth. A place where power in the current development paradigm is assessed and re-aligned. A central place where the many individual groups and actors seeking to change the power structures in global development can find a home. A place where practitioners can listen and learn, so they can do development better, more justly, more equitably and also therefore, more effectively.

Built existentially on the feedback and collaboration of both powerful and non-powerful actors in the global development sector, we envision the creation of a place and space where real stories can be told, real experiences documented, real and practical options are explored to support changes in the current systems, dynamics, structures and practices of global development, so that they truly achieve the promise of solidarity that the sector holds.