Development, Crisis, and the Politics of Repair

Development has often promised progress while leaving damaged landscapes, unequal institutions, and fractured social relations in its wake. In many places, the central question is no longer only how development can generate growth, but how societies reckon with the harms that earlier projects of improvement helped produce.

This session invites papers that examine repair as a problem for development sociology. Repair may involve land, water, infrastructure, ecological relations, historical accountability, material redress, or the rebuilding of political and social trust. The session asks how development changes when its task is not simply to build the new, but to confront what has been broken, redistribute authority and resources, and make more livable futures possible.