Fostering a Reparative International Development Cooperation System: Transformative Learning in a Master’s Degree in Development Cooperation

The international development cooperation system has traditionally had a vision of development aligned with the universal humanism from the Western worldview. Its top-down projects and politics deliberately have avoided the existence of different forms of domination in the past, such as colonialism and racism, and seek a homogeneous development which reproduces them. Consequently, from a critical development approach based on decoloniality, social justice, and environmental concerns, the master’s degree in development cooperation at Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) looks to train practitioners who can think and reflect on their practice to promote an international development cooperation system which not only recognises the injustices of the past but tries to repair them. This chapter analyses how the action-learning methodology and an internship abroad stimulate students to experience a transformative learning process, as Mezirow’s theory conceptualised: a process of transformation of meaning perspectives and critical reflection. From the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the learnings that students acquire are knowledge, skills, and competencies that contribute to expanding the capabilities they value as future professionals: developing and using critical thinking, reformulating their ethics and values, and understanding deeply the issues in different contexts. Based on the dialectic of transformative learning and restorative learning from Elizabeth Lange (Adult Education Quarterly, 54(2), 121–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713603260276, 2004), this ‘transformation is not just an epistemological process involving a change in worldview and habits of thinking; it is also an ontological process where participants experience a change in their being in the world including their forms of relatedness.’ After finishing the master’s degree, students are able to change their vision of the international development cooperation system to be more oriented, as professionals, towards reparative futures.