The EADI/IOB General Conference took place from 29 June to 2 July 2026 at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, in hybrid format. It's one of the largest European gatherings for development studies, usually pulling in over five hundred participants. This year's theme is Shaping Sustainable Futures: Global Challenges, (G)Local Solutions? The brackets around the G matter: local solutions rarely stand apart from global dynamics, and the conference leans into that tension rather than away from it. The conference brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students, with particular attention to comparative research on how different localities across the Global South and North are interconnected with global dynamics.
Localized innovations for sustainable futures
Peter Knorringa, of the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, convened the session: Localized innovations for sustainable futures. Three presentations, in the end.
The first came from Mirja Michalscheck of Agroscope and the International Livestock Research Institute, presenting work from the CIRNA project on digital extension tools for smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda. The challenge she started from is familiar: extension services in low- and middle-income countries are chronically understaffed, farmers are often remote, and most existing digital tools are either inaccessible or exclude women. Her team built two locally grounded tools: an AI-driven WhatsApp chatbot for Kenya, where smartphone adoption is higher, and an Interactive Voice Response hotline for Uganda, designed to work on basic feature phones. Early demand testing in Uganda had already reached over 29,000 farmers. The goal, as she put it, is not just to scale out in numbers but to scale deep, specifically targeting women and youth.
A question from the floor raised a limitation of that approach: if you only ask the people on the ground, you might miss the bigger regional picture, a changing microclimate, say, or a river drying up, things farmers wouldn't necessarily think to flag themselves. Michalscheck agreed. Digital scanning of the region was one workaround, though the tool wasn't built for that yet. A second question, about education, opened up a longer discussion: could local users become "validators" or "civic reporters," or could serious gaming reach people without internet access? She liked the idea, but added a caveat anyone working on localized projects will recognize. That kind of local capacity tends to disappear the moment the funding does, unless there's a real incentive for people to keep it going. She pointed to Uganda, where village health workers had taken on the role unpaid, simply because of the standing it gave them in their community. The incentive doesn't always have to be money.
The second presentation came from Dr. Yahaya Sekagya, a traditional healer and medical doctor from Uganda who directs his own institute for traditional medicine. As someone who works on both sides of the divide, his case for collaboration rather than integration carried particular weight. A striking moment was a reframing of the word "integration" itself. You can't integrate practice, he argued, before you've integrated theory and philosophy. And traditional and Western medicine simply run on different theoretical frameworks. What's realistic isn't integration but collaboration: two systems working side by side, sometimes treating the same patient, while remaining independent. He also touched on Uganda's 2019 Traditional and Complementary Medicine Act, still not fully operational, and on the tension between traditional healers who feel disrespected by exclusion and Western-trained practitioners who say there isn't enough evidence to justify formal recognition.
Last up was Knorringa himself. The panel description had framed frugal innovation around developing contexts, but he pushed it deliberately toward high-income economies. Sustainability and inclusion, he argued, aren't problems confined to the Global South. He defined frugal innovation as the combination of low cost and high functionality, simple and smart use of resources, often enabled by fourth industrial revolution technology. It's the opposite of what he called the postwar disease of over-engineering: products and services so complicated that people end up using a fraction of what they paid for.
His central example was M-Pesa, the mobile money success story out of Kenya, and how hard it is to transplant something like that elsewhere. When a similar system was piloted in parts of Eastern Europe, policymakers dismissed it as a second-rate substitute for a real banking system. That's the legitimacy problem of frugal innovation in a nutshell: it can look smart and simple on paper, and consumers and policymakers still refuse to accept it as good enough. He had a sharper anecdote for this too, from a Kenyan village with a new solar microgrid. He asked a woman there if she was happy with it. No, she said. This is fake electricity. I want what rich people in the cities have, the real grid, not this cheap NGO substitute.
Knorringa's pitch: start locally, co-develop with communities, resist the pull toward one-size-fits-all solutions. Fifty years of development studies should have already taught everyone that much. He sees a shift happening in younger people, who push back when sustainability comes up: of course, why are we still talking about this, just do it already. He doesn't think it's that simple, given existing political structures, but something has changed. His own generation built the system that is now unsustainable and extractive. The job now is moving toward one that's sustainable and inclusive. His pitch is to add a third leg to that pair: think with a frugal mindset too, not just inclusive and sustainable but simpler, smarter, less costly, which in turn makes the whole shift easier to accept. That third dimension is still largely missing from the European and American debate, he said, even as younger people, his own kids included, keep arriving at the same conclusions without needing the word "frugal" at all.
Of course, why are we still talking about this, just do it already!
He recalled a related moment from a guest lecture he gave a year or two earlier at the invitation of Joyeeta Gupta, professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam. Afterwards, she said to him: of course the rich world also needs frugal innovation, who would deny that. His reply: almost everybody, or at least everybody currently in power. A challenge, he added, either way.
Questions from the floor covered several angles at once. One audience member fired off three points back to back: could electric cars count as frugal innovation, do politicians lack the integrated thinking to act on any of this, and isn't resistance to localized solutions really about control, the unwillingness of system operators to share oversight. Short on time, Knorringa answered the politicians question, drawing on years of lobbying in Brussels. One-on-one, he said, people often agree it's interesting. That agreement rarely survives contact with the public lobby circuit. He remembered a former head of the EU's circular economy programme telling him over dinner that he was fully on board, but don't quote me on that, I'll get in trouble. Which, Knorringa said, loops back to the control question too: the discomfort of letting go of a system you're used to running.
A separate question pushed him further: are high-income countries actually ready for disruptive change, given that frugal innovation creates winners and losers by definition? Knorringa didn't soften it. Probably not, he said, not among European political leaders, who still see themselves as comfortable next to the Global South and aren't ready to accept that real change is needed.
Someone else connected the dots between the "cheapness stigma" around frugal innovation and culture. Can Calvinist frugality, specifically, be a possible explanation for why this kind of thinking took root in the Netherlands? Has anyone looked into that? Knorringa called it a recent shift in the field. It started with business school research on cheap, functional products for India and Kenya, then engineers and designers got involved, and only now are anthropologists, psychologists and historians joining in, the historians pointing out that before the first Industrial Revolution, all innovation was frugal by definition, full stop.
The session ended almost offhand, with a quick mention that this is starting to show up in formal education: a new interdisciplinary master's course on frugality and engineering now exists in India. It's spreading, Knorringa said. Slowly.
EADI Working Group on Frugal Innovation and Development
Localized innovations for sustainable futures was one of the sessions under that theme. It was organised by the EADI Working Group on Frugal Innovation and Development, a group that's been bringing together academics from different parts of the world since 2017, when it held its first seminar at the EADI conference in Bergen. Rather than getting stuck on definitions, the group treats frugal innovation as a matter of degree rather than a yes-or-no label, looking at it through technological application, economic sustainability and inclusiveness.
Its underlying concern is one a lot of development thinking shares: frugal innovation is often framed as inherently good for development, but it can just as easily lead to environmental damage or worse labour conditions if cutting costs means cutting corners. Moreover, when the technologies and strategies involved are developed entirely at the headquarters of Western or Chinese, Indian or Brazilian companies, without any interaction with local entrepreneurs, the chances of generating real local spin-offs, in production, innovation, technology or employment, are slim. More on this on the Working Group's own page.
The group grew out of the International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI), a joint initiative of TU Delft, Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, working together with the Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research in Kenya and the Transdisciplinary Research Cluster on Frugality Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.