The title of this article is knowingly immodest. Who, you may think, says development research needs to be reinvented? Who is IDS to encourage a series of meetings on such a theme?
To tell you the truth, I do not think many at IDS had given the first question enough systematic thought – I certainly had not. And while IDS is one of the largest and oldest development research institutes in Europe, we fully recognise that in the UK alone there are 160 other organisations undertaking development research (Haddad et al. 2006).
But any organisation that prides itself on challenging the status quo has to also challenge itself, especially in its fortieth year. And taking on the current state of development research is surely the key element in such a self-assessment.
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