Local-Global links in Development Education: the case of housing

Written by Éilis Ryan. Éilis is a development education practitioner and activist, with a particular interest in the area of global finance and development education. She has authored policy papers on housing finance and public solutions to the Irish housing crisis, and was a founding member of the Campaign for Public Housing and the National Housing and Homeless Coalition.

In Ireland and across most countries in the Global North, the past decade has seen an alarming rise in racist narratives and actions. Much attention has been given to the election of and support for Donald Trump in the United States, where a large minority of the population has been mobilised around ‘defending’ an insular and white version of the United States, building both real and metaphorical ‘walls,’ to prevent the entry of newcomers.


In Ireland, similar narratives, often driven by far right, online media coming from the United States, have also begun to take hold. An important starting point in understanding how we might counter this development, is to consider why growing numbers of people find such narratives compelling.


The housing crisis has played a major role in causing disillusionment. Over 60,000 people are waiting for social housing in Ireland, and of those almost 17,000 have been waiting for more than 7 years. A further 60,000 people receive Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) to subsidise their insecure private rented accommodation, because of a shortage of public housing. There are 8,200 people homeless, of whom 2,200 are children. In Dublin, the average tenant in private rented accommodation pays 41% of their income on rent, and 20% of tenants spend more than half their salary on rent. Such levels of exclusion and inequality have provided fertile ground for those who want to promote racist beliefs, by encouraging the idea that the housing crisis is caused by too many people (primarily migrants) competing for too little housing.


Development education, with its aim of building global solidarity and internationalism, has an important role to play in challenging this narrative. In order to persuade people that the racist narrative to explain the housing crisis is not accurate, it is essential we reach and convince those who are targetted by online far right propoganda. 


For development education practitioners, the issue of housing, and in particular the impact of global finance on housing, provides a unique opportunity to build a sense of global solidarity amongst learners, and to put forward an alternative narrative around the causes of housing inequality in Ireland – one rooted in global justice, not racism.


Following a period of widespread public housing development in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, housing became central to the neoliberal project of the 1980s and 1990s. Government policy created new generations of home owners and with that growing mortgage markets, which would play an essential role in both the growth and collapse of the financial bubble in 2008. After the financial crisis, policy makers in the Global North attempted to alleviate recession by pouring capital into the global economy; between 2010 and 2018, government banks in the Global North released $11 trillion into the global financial system.


But rather than being invested in the Global North, much of this money found its way to countries in the Global South, seeking profit and, as it did so, has begun to cause many of the housing inequalities already visible in the Global North. Rather than responding to the absence of decent housing through public investment in public or cooperative housing, in many instances housing needs are being met in the Global South by governments subsidising private development of housing, and by low- and middle-income households accessing mortgages to purchase private housing for the first time – often creating totally unaffordable debt burdens for those households.


In Brazil, for example, the government developed the programme Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life), which resulted in the building of 10s of millions of units of housing. However, critics argue that it was a subsidy for construction firms, and while it facilitated home ownership for many low- and middle-income families for the first time, it did so while burdening them with large, unaffordable mortgages. 

 

Across the global south, schemes providing microcredit and microfinance now mean that ‘affordable housing’ is built on personal debt, not through public investment, which provided much of the public housing in 20th century Europe. In other words, one of the greatest challenges to equality in the Global North – access to secure, decent housing – is beginning to emerge as a major challenge across the Global South. This provides obvious challenges but also, for development education practitioners, a unique opportunity to build meaningful local-global links and solidarity through transformative education.

 

Éilis led a webinar on Housing inequality, finance and the global south: making local-global links real in Development Education in Ireland, for IDEA in September 2021.



The views expressed in this article are that of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of IDEA. 



Further Resources:

Hearne, R. (2017) ‘A home or a wealth generator? Inequality, financialisation and the Irish housing crisis.’ Dublin: TASC

Fernandez, R. And Aalbers, M. (2020) ‘Housing Financialization in the Global South’

Citizens for Financial Justice (2019) ‘Spotlight on financialisation: Housing’


October 8, 2025
We are looking for a consultant to design an interactive data visualisation tool for our Theory of Impact for Global Citizenship Education in Ireland. The consultant will lead the design or tailoring of off-the-shelf survey software and analytics software to our needs, in collaboration with IDEA staff. Please submit a tender including a description of stages in the development process, number of days, expected fee, and experience of relevant personnel for the work to be carried out to anya@ideaonline.ie . The deadline for application is Wednesday, 29 October, 5.00pm. Read the full terms of reference here.
October 6, 2025
After three remarkable years with IDEA, we are sad to share that Anya Sparynska is moving abroad to begin a new adventure. During her time with us, Anya made an indelible mark - first by shaping a pioneering programme role, and later by guiding us in a capacity development role that strengthened our impact across Ireland’s development education sector. From designing and implementing innovative initiatives to building partnerships and capacity across our member organisations, Anya has left IDEA stronger, more connected, and more ambitious for the future. “I am sad to leave at such a pivotal time in IDEA: we are faced with unspeakable horror, as the need for justice and accountability grows ever more urgent. I have seen, however, our members and staff respond with creativity, humanity and dedication to these challenging times and find inspiration in it, even at this darkest hour. A desire to be close to my family and the pressure of the housing crisis have driven me to Brussels, but I know I will be back as Ireland - it’s passionate, brave and kind people - now feels like home. I will be sure to follow IDEA and our members’ work closely in the coming year and hope to stay in touch! “Working at IDEA has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Seeing ideas and passion turn into real impact and change has been incredibly fulfilling - I’ll carry those lessons, and the very special friendships made along the way with me always.”
September 26, 2025
Date: Tuesday, 04 November, from 3.30–4.30pm Location: Online via Zoom IDEA is thrilled to invite members to the online launch of our new “Theory of Impact for Global Citizenship Education” on Tuesday, 04 November, from 3.30–4.30pm, Online via Zoom. During this session, we will present the model, share insights into the process behind its development, and explore how it will be used to strengthen impact across the sector. We will also introduce a new tool in progress, an interactive data visualisation map designed to showcase our collective impact as a network. For many years, IDEA and its members have been grappling with the concept of impact in Development Education/Global Citizenship Education (GCE). As GCE practitioners, tracking impact helps us to identify how, where and with whom our work is creating positive change, as well as investigating areas in which our impact could be stronger. Furthermore, we can also benefit from examining the collective impact of GCE carried out by the wide-ranging work of IDEA members, and from exploring how these impacts contribute to the major social changes to which the GCE community aspires. Driven therefore by the need to understand how projects and programmes are collectively “making a difference” in IDEA we looked at models that could help us visualise and capture GCE “impact networks”. We formulated our vision of impact and then a theory of how we expect this desired impact to be achieved to allow us to map our activities and collect data to corroborate that theory. This Theory of Impact model is how we hope to illustrate this complex GCE impact network. Building on work done by IDEA over many years including building sectoral capacity in using Results Frameworks for GCE, our Quality & Impact working group, engagement with Irish Aid on their Performance Measurement Framework (PMF), and the successful roll-out of a Code of Good Practice for DE/GCE, this Theory of Impact represent the next stage of our effort to ‘develop a consistent approach to measuring impact among the sector’. We are therefore thrilled to invite you to the presentation of our ‘Theory of Impact for GCE’. At this online presentation, we will tell you about the process that led to the creation of this model, how it will be used and what we hope it could bring to the sector. We will also touch on a new tool being developed based on the model, which should allow the creation of an interactive data visualisation map of our collective impact as a network. Join us as we launch into this exciting new phase of our Impact Measurement work. Join us as we begin this exciting new phase of our Impact Measurement work. Register below!