The UN Decade on Healthy Ageing (2021-2030) offers new opportunities to contextualize our understanding on global aging within the existing scholarship as well as social, political and demographic change in our societies, which include new challenges arising from rising inequalities, conflicts, disasters, displacement, instability and precarity.
The anthropology of aging and gerontology more broadly, has only recently been turning its attention to the global south, while the closely related discipline of development studies has started to turn its attention to issues around aging. Ethnographic investigations into the lives of older women and men vividly convey the ways they encounter persistent ageism, neglect and abuse as well as the ways an ageing population has brought about transformative effects on generational relations, work, healthcare, and identity (Browne, Danely, Rosenow, 2021; Lynch and Danely, 2013). Development studies have also investigated into the transition trajectories of the older and identified policy and practices needed to protect the wellbeing of older women and men (Akerkar, 2022).
We argue for an increased collaboration between anthropology and development studies, so that new infrastructures and resources of support such as geriatric health care, pensions, work, health and wellbeing or development and humanitarian policy and practices are informed by local needs, knowledge and practices. Highlighting the diversity of global ageing is needed for supporting countries to rethink their approaches to inclusion, care, and empowerment of older people, particularly after the devastating effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which affected older people disproportionately by mortality and morbidity (Akerkar 2020).
This paper will map out the issues identified by the ‘anthropology of ageing’ and ‘development studies and ageing’ and justify the approach of combining these two distinct fields by situating the subject of global aging in the context of the recent trends, events and global developments.
