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About

Geoformations is the study of how, why, and in what ways organisations engaged in development cooperation and humanitarian action cooperate and collaborate to deliver development outcomes. It studies interactions between international and national non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, and civil actors assembling governance structures and how these interact to ensure effective and appropriate governance of sustainable development programs.

These include programs to alleviate extreme poverty, intersecting and interacting inequalities, declining ecosystems, and accelerating climate breakdown.
Research indicates that interacting and intersecting socio-political, economic, and environmental crises destabilise international cooperation and shared efforts to attain the global vision entailed in UN Agenda 2030 and the sustainable development goals at multiple scales
International BodyLocal PartnersNational receiving governmentNation baseddonorINGOcountry officeINGO headquartersLocalgovernmentLocalgatekeeperAffectedpopulations
The need for practical, inclusive, decolonized, and locally driven international development cooperation has never been more vital.
Geoformations examines how relationships form and flow and the processes that underpin transnational collaborations established to address complex challenges and contexts, including humanitarian, development, peacebuilding, conflict prevention, and civil protection contexts.
To achieve greater development effectiveness, the international development cooperation sector is shifting towards new working methods, including increased localization, decolonization, greater coherence across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, and adapting development practice to support deeper engagement with locally based civil society actors.
However, how these changes affect governance structures and processes within non-profit, non-governmental, and civil society organisations (CSOs) is not yet well understood.
Such understanding is critically important to trust and legitimacy in this sector.
Operating through networks of partners to design and implement development solutions, actors and organisations in the civic space are positioned to lead in the transformation of this sector towards more significant localisation, enhanced local ownership, and improved coordination and coherence across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus (the triple nexus).

Using core geographical concepts of place, space, and scale, drawing upon methodologies of assemblage thinking and critical realist evaluation, combined with innovations in organisational theory through issue framing, Geoformations is seeking to provide radical new insights into the governance geographies of place-based development cooperation practices which can be used to inform and enhance international development cooperation governance theory, policy, and practice.

The overarching aim of Geoformations is to understand how governance processes and structures within and between non-profit private organizations operate, how they are conceptualised and understood in those organizations, and how they should operate in this age of complexity, interdependence, and interconnectivity.

Meet our Research Team

Dr Susan Murphy

Cian McMahon

Dilyana Kiryakova-Ryan

Elaine Elders

Ruby Paterson

Maeve McGandy

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