For as long as development has been discussed and debated, poverty, and with it global income inequality, has been a very significant point of reference. With the current global mega-crises, the situation has consistently worsened:
- The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existing imbalances: the very richest have become even richer, while many people living in precarious situations have lost jobs and incomes.
- The climate catastrophe continues unabated, hitting the poor particularly hard, while the wealthy can afford expensive climate change adaptation measures.
- Current military conflicts such as the war of Russia against Ukraine create many war losers and few war winners. The resulting geopolitical changes in turn have an impact at the global level and reinforce existing inequalities.
Thus, even in the 21st century, the world remains far from ridding itself of the adjective „unequal.“ Rather, growing rates of inequality in the Global North in the wake of the financial crisis since 2008-09 have led to more intensive discussions of their causes and possible counterstrategies. The widespread success of publications by inequality researchers such as Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth, Branko Milanović, Kate Pickett or Anthony B. Atkinson show that the topic is burning under the nails.
With the – controversially discussed – Goal 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this circumstance was also explicitly taken into account by the UN: „Reduce inequality within and between countries“. For addressing Global Inequalities, the following key questions arise:
- Understanding: What is global inequality anyway? How great is it? Is it growing or is globalization reducing inequality? What were the consequences of the COVID19 pandemic on global inequality? What is the impact of geopolitical conflicts?
- Acting: What can and what must be done about global inequality? What role does development cooperation play in this? What scope for action do the SDGs or alternative approaches open up? Can inequality reduction serve to prevent violence and conflict?
- Learning: What can be learned in the Global North from the Global South? What inspiring strategies, forms of action and networking exist? What can be learned from dealing with defeats and setbacks?
As Austria’s largest event on development policy, the Development Conference offers space for debate and reflection on current challenges: Here you can find engaged science, dialogue between science and practice, reflection on burning issues of development policy, networking of policy fields and political education in a broader sense. At the development conferences, we want to initiate a dialogue at eye level, following the pedagogy of Paulo Freire, instead of finding a conference monopolized by celebrities from above. We pursue the idea of a double dialogue, between engaged science and critical civil society on the one hand, and between global North and South on the other.
Mattersburg Circle and Paulo Freire Centre have been focusing their work on the topic of „global inequalities“ since 2018. The aim is to create a broad awareness of the various facets of global inequalities. The following publications were produced for this purpose:
> Volume 19 of the GEP series („History – Development – Politics“) of the Mattersburg Circle is dedicated to the topic of „Global Inequality“.
Every year, an issue of the JEP (Journal for Development Policy) focuses on the topic:
> 2018: „Fußball and uneven Development“
> 2019: „Waste and Globalised Inequalities“
> 2020: „The Global Political Economy of Green Finance and Socio-Ecological Transformation„.
With this in mind, the aim of the choice of topic for the Development Conference 2022 (#ET2022) is to create a broad awareness of the various facets of global inequality. The largest networking meeting of the Austrian development policy scene will take place in November 2022 at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and will focus on the topic of „global inequality“. Not only the current status quo will be explored, but also the potential for combating inequality. Here, the conference sees itself as an active North-South dialogue in which experiences from the Global South and the Global North can be shared.
