Having Faith in Development: Rethinking Development as Diasporic Religious Performativity
International Development. When you hear this what comes to mind? If at all anything does? A question that is often met with brows furrowed in confusion and the attendant “Uh”, “Um” and “So…” whenever people ask me about my area of study.
“I have no idea what that is” they would say, if courageous enough to share their unfamiliarity with what has become my academic preoccupation.
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Development Aid does not deter Irregular Migration
Gabriele Restelli, PhD researcher, Global Development Institute
As Covid’s monopolizing power diminishes, immigration is ready to serve the purpose and fill the gap in headline news. Irregular migrants crossing the English Channel has gathered a lot of attention in recent weeks.
Immigration had been high on the European political agenda since 2014 and 2015, when Europe experienced record numbers of asylum seekers and migrants arriving in its territories, mostly via irregular routes. Nonetheless, the narrative of an “invasion” is rather misleading. read more…
‘Collateral damage’ of UN Peacekeeping Missions: stories from Darfur
Tanja Müller, Professor of Political Sociology, Global Development Institute
It was a cold day in February 2016. I arrived at the main train station in a UK city and took a taxi to an address in a suburb. The taxi driver looked at the postcode and asked if I was sure that was where I wanted to go. When I said yes he shrugged and started the 25-minutes drive. read more…
New research highlights how poverty alleviation efforts are shaping the success of environmental targets linked to SDGs
Social protection programs can facilitate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but can also create trade-offs across divergent social and environmental goals that can undermine their effectiveness, say the authors of new research published in the journal PNAS. This is one of the largest studies on the sustainability implications of social protection, funded by the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at The University of Sheffield. read more…
Covid-19 and the Hrishipara Diarists – July 2020: a big rebound – but only for some
The story so far
These blogs offer a running commentary on how 60 low-income households in central Bangladesh who volunteer as ‘diarists’ in our daily financial diary project have coped with the pandemic. The first blog in this series was written just after a ‘corona lockdown’ was enforced in Bangladesh on 26th March 2020. The second showed how bad things got during April, the first full month under lockdown. The third reviewed the partial recovery that took place in May. The fourth blog covered June, the first month after the lockdown ended. This fifth blog is about July, when Bangladesh was hit by heavy flooding as well as the continuing pandemic.
What does Covid-19 mean for global inequalities?
It is now abundantly clear that Covid-19 is a critical inflection point, not just for the severe public health impacts that have arisen from the virus across the world, but also for its economic, social and political implications.
Covid-19 is impacting global inequalities in multiple and distinct ways. While we are still in the midst of the pandemic, and at this time it is hard to predict when we will have come through the worst (in the UK and globally), it is clear that Covid-19 has accentuated existing patterns of social, economic, spatial, and racial inequalities, and is likely to heighten these interconnected aspects of inequalities in the future. This is going to be especially significant challenge in the less economically advantaged global South, as well as in our own hinterland here in Manchester. read more…
Covid-19 is a global development challenge
For the past few years, researchers at the Global Development Institute have argued that Development Studies needs to move on from its traditional international focus.
Rory Horner, David Hulme and others have been at the forefront of arguing that the idea of global development is a better way of thinking about complex, interconnected social, political and economic issues around the world. read more…
How can we strengthen the data literacy pipeline for the SDGs?
Pete Jones, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Jackie Carter, Co-director University of Manchester Q-Step Centre, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Jaco Renken, Co-director Centre for Digital Development, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester and Magdalena Arbeláez Tobón, Data-Pop Alliance, Columbia
In 2015, the United Nations launched its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2030 Agenda constitutes a broad and ambitious plan which centres on 17 overarching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), comprised of 169 associated development targets and 232 indicators with which to measure progress. read more…
Watch: Covid-19 and the future of global value chains
The Covid-19 pandemic created a major shock to the global economy. The ramifications of this shock are reverberating through global value chains to reach workers and sites of production throughout the world.
These ramifications are both short and long term. In the short term, the crisis was a major shock for developing economies particularly those who rely on exports through GVCs as global lead firms cancelled orders and workers were terminated often with very little protection.
Fred Nixson (1943-2020)
We are very sad to report that our former colleague, Professor Fred Nixson, passed away last Wednesday, 15th July, aged 77.
Fred came to the University in 1971 after three years teaching at Makere University in Kampala. Together with David Colman, Diane Elson, Colin Kirkpatrick and Phil Leeson in Economics, and Teodor Shanin, Hamza Alavi, Marilyn Strathern, Peter Worsley, Richard Werbner and Terry Ranger in Sociology, Social Anthropology and Politics, he was part of a stellar array of academics in the 1970s and 1980s who established Manchester’s reputation as a world-class centre of excellence in teaching and research in development economics and development studies, laying the foundations for the Global Development Institute and our own research and teaching programmes in development economics and policy today. read more…