YSI Experimental Panel @DSA2025: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Institutions and Development

In October 2024, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (AJR) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on institutions and how they affect economic development and prosperity. As highly influential as their contributions are in the field of economics, this award has been met with much criticism not just across disciplines and fields of study in the social sciences but also from heterodox schools of thought within economics.

Part of this criticism has been that their economic analysis is historically inaccurate and is not adequately informed by other fields such as development studies, political science, and history. This event proposal, by taking the momentum gained by institutional perspectives from the 2024 Nobel Prize win by AJR and acknowledging the need for discourse on economic development to be more meaningfully informed by different social sciences, thereby wishes to forge connections among Young Scholars working on institutions and development across different fields and through different perspectives by establishing a collaboration with the Development Studies Association (DSA) at their annual conference in June 2025.

The proposed YSI panel will take an experimental format given that the main objective is to establish theoretical nexus, empirical extensions, and concrete opportunities for interdisciplinary work in investigating the role of institutions on development. Thus, this panel will welcome papers highlighting how institutions have been theorised and operationalised across social sciences such as political economy and development studies, contextualised within the conference theme of navigating the present polycrisis. As a novelty, each participant will not present their own submission but will instead be in charge of discussing a paper submitted by another Young Scholar. Their discussion must focus on how their own research benefits from and informs the work that has been assigned to them. Young Scholars will then be able to provide clarifications and facilitate a deeper understanding of their own work. Thus, a concrete outcome from this experimental panel would be a network of early career researchers working on closely related topics, which can potentially lead to joint research projects and future collaborations.

DSA 2025 will also be a hybrid event, so we also welcome applications from participants who may not be able to join us in Bath in person.