Keynote lecture: Professor Andrea Cornwall, University of Sussex.

Title: ‘Addressing Discrimination on the Basis of Gender: Towards a More Just and Equal World for All.’

Time and venue: 22 August 2016, 14:00–15:30, Aula Magna

Abstract
In this presentation, I will reflect on the contribution that SDG5 can make to creating a more just and equal world for all. I will look at the way in which women’s empowerment is framed in the language and targets of the goal, drawing on the findings of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research programme which, over the last decade, has sought to understand what works in achieving women’s economic, political and sexual empowerment. I will analyse what SDG5 adds to previous commitments, such as MDG Goal 3, and will identify what’s missing - and why that matters. I will suggest that the concept of “gender equality” has contributed to making more visible the need to see changing power structures and relations as vital. But, I will suggest, the way in which questions of gender have been taken up by development agencies places limits on their capacity to address the injustices and inequalities that arise from the effects of multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of gender. 

Bio
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, where she is currently Head of School. She has worked for many years on questions of gender, sexuality and democracy. Her publications include Masculinities under Neoliberalism (Cornwall, Karioris and Lindisfarne, eds., 2016), Feminisms, Empowerment and Development: Changing Women’s Lives (Cornwall and Edwards, eds. 2014) and Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure (Jolly, Cornwall and Hawkins, eds., 2013). Her current interests include an action research project on gender in the neoliberal academy, developing training approaches to working with men to address patriarchal organisational cultures, and pleasure-based approaches to development. 

Keynote lecture: Professor Andrea J. Nightingale, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Title: ‘Global Challenges and Visions for Change: the politics of rescaling environmental governance and development practice.’

Time and venue: 23 August 2016, 9:00–10:30, Aula Magna

Abstract
There is great concern today over how to guide our responses to global challenges like climate change, urbanization, trans-boundary resource sharing and social inequalities. International conventions, institutions and conceptual frameworks are proliferating, all sharing a common objective: to bring ever larger groups of people together to agree on upon a set of goals and pathways to change. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) need to be seen as part of that wider endeavour to tackle the grand challenges of our time with a global response. These conventions, institutions and frameworks cannot be taken as simply positive developments in international development cooperation, however. Rather, they reflect a set of unacknowledged assumptions about the scale at which problems should be conceived and addressed, (the global scale), and the actors who should be guiding our responses, (those who travel in global circles). This emphasis on the international and the global is leading to a politics of rescaling. The agenda for change is increasingly being taken out of the hands of small groups of people, of local authorities and even nation-states and placed within global conventions and institutions. This paper probes some of the implications of this politics of rescaling. It takes the case of climate change adaptation and mitigation development programs in Nepal and east Africa and explores how they reshape the institutions, actors and logics that underpin governance of resources. It argues that while on the one hand we need to embrace global cooperation. On the other hand, we also need to be attentive to the implications for democracy, participation and smaller scale innovation that such a rescaling of governance entails.

Bio
Andrea Nightingale is a Geographer by training and presently Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. Her current research interests include: climate change adaptation and transformation debates; public authority, collective action and state formation; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to theories of development, collective action and cooperation. She previously worked at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Edinburgh, Geography, School of GeoSciences, Scotland. Most of Nightingale’s research has been done in Nepal and Scotland, but she also has projects in Sweden, Kenya and Mozambique. Her PhD students have worked in Tanzania, Nepal, Burkina Faso, Brazil, the Cook Islands, Canada, and Scotland. She has a MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota, Department of Geography where she was also a MacArthur Scholars Fellow, and a BSc in Biology from Bates College in Maine.