The theme of the conference is Crisis in the Anthropocene: Rethinking connection and agency for development.
The Anthropocene—and its conditions, structures and relationships under which we operate—potentially signals a new era in human development in which crises of environment and nature increasingly take centre stage. From climate change, to plastic pollution and biodiversity loss, to the emergence of novel viruses, new challenges continually emerge in an interconnected world in which uncertainty, risk and precarity are the ‘new normal’. The Anthropocene, therefore, unsettles, and potentially overturns, conventional ways of theorising and practising development that foreground and privilege human intention in the face of an unruly, dynamic and ‘creative’ natural world.