Prof. Dr Oliver Serfling, Taisiya Romanov and Paula Cagnolatti-Chiavarino attended the EADI-IOB 2026 conference in Antwerp, which was held under the title ‘Shaping Sustainable Futures: Global Challenges, (G)local Solutions?’ and was organised by the European Association of Development Research and
In two academic presentations and a poster presentation, the team outlined their ongoing research into sustainable development, capacity building and computer-assisted approaches to development programming.
Oliver Serfling and Taisiya Romanov presented their research on capacity building in multilateral development cooperation and introduced a computer-assisted text analysis approach. This approach is used to examine how different manifestations of capacity development are reflected in World Bank project documents and how these relate to project performance. The findings highlight the complexity of capacity development measures and provide new insights into the relationship between project design and evaluation outcomes.
In a second presentation, Oliver Serfling and Paula Cagnolatti-Chiavarino presented the findings of a study co-authored with Hanna Berzau, which examined the local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Lower Rhine region. The study examined local authorities, businesses and non-profit organisations, identified examples of sustainable transformation and highlighted the need for a more strategic integration of the SDGs as well as for cross-sectoral learning.
In addition, Taisiya Romanov presented her doctoral research project, ‘Quantifying Intervention Design in International Development: Computational Evidence on Project Effectiveness and Decision-Making’, in a poster presentation. She is developing computer-assisted methods to measure latent characteristics of development interventions using extensive text data from project documents.
The conference provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with international researchers and practitioners, receive valuable feedback on ongoing work and forge new collaborations.