Dear readers,
With much pleasure, we invite you to read our Annual
Report for 2016!
We ended last year with IOB’s brand new Policy Plan
2017-2020 on our desk. The plan closes a series of
reflections between ourselves and with others. While
the IOB underwent an education audit, a research audit
and a general audit quite successfully, we also had
ample opportunity to discuss our plans with a variety of
audiences. Concretely, over the coming years, we would
like to pursue two different but related mind shifts.
Firstly, we would like to pursue education as development,
not just for development. We want to intensify the
global character of our Master programmes by co-
producing parts of the programmes with some of IOB’s
institutional partners in the South. Such an initiative
intends to realise our own, as well as a southern agenda
of internationalisation, and thereby contribute to the
decolonisation of development studies. We have won a
five-year grant from VLIR-UOS to realise our plans for the
three current Master programmes at IOB. You can read the
details of our ambitions further in this report.
Secondly, we would like to pursue research as
development, not just research for development. The
‘valorisation’ of research activities has become a new
catchword in the academy – also connected to university
agendas to find ways of increasing private sources of
finance for their academic activities – but research
uptake is one thing, development impact still another.
As a development studies institute, we are only too well
aware of the political economy of processes of change
and it is only logical – though not so common – that we
also apply these ideas to ourselves. We honed our ideas
by co-organising a seminar on the politics of valorisation
of scientific research (Amsterdam, May 2016) and by
reflecting on this with all IOB’s researchers, led by people
from IDS’s knowledge mobilisation and impact unit, in
preparation of our policy plan.
These ideas will have to prove their value in the midst of a
period of rapid change in the thinking about globalisation,
sustainability and inequality in all parts of the world. By
the end of 2015, the international development community
celebrated the birth of the sustainable development goals
as a new global consensus, both about the meaning of
development and about our shared responsibilities to
contribute to it. Some months later, the world reached a
global consensus on halting global warming. But paper is
patient. Let our policy plan be read as our own strategy to
rise to the concrete challenges.
Antwerp, 22 April 2017
Tom De Herdt
Chair
ANNUAL REPORT 2016 • 5