Development Studies

Understanding development processes in times of global change Processes of development, change, and globalisation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are playing an increasingly important global role in this day and age. The interdisciplinary Master's programme "Development Studies" addresses the causes, conditions, and consequences of such processes. Here you have the chance to look at "development" from different perspectives, to link methodological and theoretical approaches, and to detect connections between social, political, and spatial conditions. Development Studies is a bilingual programme (in German and English) with an English track that can be completed as a full-time or part-time student. Master complexity through interdisciplinarity This interdisciplinary Master's programme provides a scientifically grounded yet practice-oriented approach to the chances, challenges, and contradictions in current development processes. The programme combines courses in development sociology and politics, geography, and economics. The University of Bayreuth's research focus on Africa and its comprehensive research on the Global South give you access to extensive expertise. You will benefit from the close integration of the departments involved, while having the freedom to choose your own area of focus to be pursued in development sociology or politics, geography, or economics. The core disciplines Development Sociology / Politics, Economics and Geography provide the following disciplinary competencies: Development Sociology / Political Science: Theoretical and methodological approaches from development sociology and development theories and their competing epistemologies Critical reflection of current approaches, measures, methods and tendencies of theory and practice in development politics and the critique of the term development Relevant actors, their actions and interactions within the practice of development politics Political and social structures and processes concerning selected states or topics Geography: Development issues and geographical knowledge of specific regions Spatial dimensions of processes in development politics Methods, concepts, programmes, and institutions in the field of development cooperation Regional economic structures and development concepts (spatial economy approach, relational concept, regulation theory, evolutionary economic geography) Approaches to urban and regional planning Theories of space, society and development including different epistemological approaches Intensification of methodological qualifications concerning questions of human geography Economics: Theoretical debates in political economy, debates in development politics from an economic perspective Knowledge about conditions of sustainable development processes from a political and economic perspective Economic and ethical foundations and debates on corporate governance