Development Days Conference 2027
Empowering Development: People and Nature in the Era of New Technologies and Geopolitics

25-26 February 2027 | Päärakennus (Main Building), University of Helsinki

Concept Note

Development research concerns the well-being of people and nature. So long as there are threats to, and aspirations for, the flourishing of humanity and ecology, development studies will remain relevant. Despite politically motivated pressures to render our field irrelevant, our reason for being and the subjects of our inquiry endure.

During the previous Development Days 2026 conference, the Finnish Society for Development Research (FSDR) marked its 40^th anniversary under the theme “Development in Ruins, Hope in the Cracks,” confronting a discipline and a world under siege while insisting that possibility persists within the wreckage. The next Development Days 2027 (DevDays2027) conference takes up that hope under the theme “Empowering Development: People and Nature in the Era of New Technologies and Geopolitics,” asking what it demands of us in practice.

To empower development means, first, to resist collectively the pressures that obscure its purpose and reaffirm its necessity and virtues, not as the individualized capacity-building that liberal development discourse has made of “empowerment,” but as collective power to transform structures. It is also to rescue the concept from co-optation by state security agendas and corporate accumulation, reclaiming its original significance as a site of critical inquiry, radical solidarity, and transformative action centered on people, nature, and justice.

DevDays2027 invites scholars, practitioners, activists, and educators to share research, reflections, and advocacy addressing key questions: How do new technologies reconfigure power, precarity, movements, and resistance in the lives of people and nature? Amid shifting geopolitical fault lines, how do we cultivate relations of care, democratic governance, and alternative futures that empower human and ecological thriving? And how do we defend and advance the ethos and institutions of development against political hostility and governmental retrenchment?

At this juncture in world history, new dynamics in geopolitics and rapid progress in disruptive technology pose existential challenges to people and nature, and by extension to development studies as a discipline. Climate breakdown, war and the renewed spectre of nuclear annihilation, and a hypercompetitive race for energy, minerals, land, and resources under the banner of innovation, now compounded by public debate over artificial intelligence’s own capacity to inflict catastrophic risks on critical social infrastructures, including by lowering the barriers to engineering biological weapons, make this urgency material rather than rhetorical.

These dangers may not be unprecedented but can be regarded as capitalism and colonialism reasserting themselves through new technological and geopolitical forms. This moment calls on us to examine the contemporary forces bearing on the day-to-day and future existence of human beings and the natural environment. Dominant political, economic, and cultural trends and practices have disempowered development ideas, institutions, and constituencies. Yet amid the strong negative tendencies wrought by emerging technologies and intensifying geopolitics, this is also the time to reflect on, and act toward, empowering what lies at the heart of development research: people and nature.

Among other objectives of this gathering, our task is to assert our field’s vitality and cooperate with the development community in finding opportunities for collaborative endeavors. In an increasingly volatile world, our responsibility is not only to diagnose contemporary problems but to actively participate in building futures for human dignity, ecological integrity, and global solidarity.

The #DevDays2027 Working Groups

We invite researchers, practitioners, doctoral candidates, activists, and students to submit paper abstracts or expressions of interest to participate or present across 22 accepted Working Groups organized in a range of formats – academic panels, policy discussions, activist forums, poster sessions, or creative interventions.

How to Apply

Explore the Full List of Working Groups and follow their submission details.
Submit your abstract (max. 300 words) or expression of interest directly to the specific Working Group coordinators via the contact details listed on their respective WG page.
Deadline for Submissions: 25 November 2026

Abstract acceptance notifications will be issued by 4 December 2026.

Timeline

● 28.10.2026: Call for papers opens
● 25.11.2026: Deadline for paper abstract submission
● 04.12.2026: Notification of accepted abstracts
● 11.01.2027: Registration opens
● 15.02.2027: Registration closes
● 24.02.2027: Pre-conference events (DocShop, Master’s Workshop, Public Forum)
● 25.-26.02.2027: #DevDays2027 Conference in Helsinki

In line with our commitment to democratizing, diversifying, and decolonizing development knowledge, we welcome online participation and hybrid engagement. We particularly encourage collaboration with colleagues from the Global South.

For more information and updates, please visit the conference website regularly, follow FSDR’s social media pages (Facebook and LinkedIn), or write to us at info.developmentdays@gmail.com.

Join as Member of FSDR

If you are based in Finland and/or have longstanding affiliation with Finnish development research, you are welcome to apply for membership. A discounted conference registration fee is one of the benefits enjoyed by FSDR members.