Conference Program

Despite trillions of dollars in aid, and decades of good intentions and innovations, global development has largely failed to disrupt structural injustice, and in many cases inequity has worsened. By addressing symptoms rather than root causes, development and philanthropy have often served to reinforce global power and wealth hierarchies rooted in colonialism, racism, and extractive capitalism. Moreover, amid deepening global crises including climate collapse, displacement, militarization, and widening inequality, there is growing recognition that technical fixes and inclusion rhetoric are insufficient without reckoning with historical and ongoing harms.

This interactive workshop, building on the global movement to decolonize development, invites colleagues to explore how a reparations framework can help us integrate accountability and healing in our work today, and contribute to a more just future.

Through facilitated reflection, dialogue, and collective sense-making, colleagues will be supported to: (1) ground concepts of harm, accountability, and repair in personal experience; (2) explore international frameworks for frameworks and case studies; (3) examine how development and philanthropy reproduce global power imbalances and systems of extraction and harm - and understand why repair is part of our responsibility working in these sectors; (4) imagine what reparative practice could look like in these sectors; and (5) consider their own power and spheres of influence to influence shifts now.

Overall, the workshop supports practitioners and scholars to understand and integrate accountability and repair into their current work, while contributing to a growing global reparations movement made up of colleagues around the world who want to imagine, strategize, and build together towards a decolonial and just approach to global solidarity.