Water, language and inclusion
Professor Diana Mitlin, Managing Director, Global Development Institute
After some years away from the water literature I’ve been struck by extent to which a language of neoliberalism has permeated the sector.
There are significant costs to this use of language. Language which obfuscates has contributed to a shift away from addressing the water needs of citizens who are disadvantaged and on the lowest incomes. Particular concepts are equipping the sector to behave like a market, even when that is neither the stated objectives nor the desired culture.
Three specific terms demonstrate how this shift in language opens up some research questions and closes down others.
read more…
Putting the needs of young people at the centre of national policy
Nicola Banks, Lecturer in Urban Development, Global Development Institute
As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, we’ll be holding a film screening followed by a learning exchange and discussion with youth groups in Manchester to see what can be learnt across these geographies about youth vulnerability and disenfranchisement. Wht is this important? Tanzania has one of the youngest populations in the world. With half of the population aged 25 and under, the median age is 17 years old. One-fifth of the population is between the ages of 15 and 24 and therefore classified as ‘young’ by the United Nations definition. This constitutes around 10 million Tanzanians, with this number expected to double in the next two decades.
Understanding and addressing the problems facing young people is therefore critical, and this will be increasingly central to broader developmental outcomes in Tanzania. What happens if these aren’t put front and centre of policy and programmes? In their Next Generation Tanzania report, the British Council sparks our imagination with the phrase “[embrace the democratic] dividend or disaster”, emphasising the centrality of the issue to Tanzania’s development and potential. read more…
Civil Society: Who are the voices that are rebuilding South Sudan?
Rajab Mohandis, alumnus of the Global Development Institute
Civil society organisations (CSOs) play a constructive role in public affairs in South Sudan. They contribute to the search for peace and stability, public policy formulation and implementation, protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, information dissemination and delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to needy populations in the country. Besides this massive public presence however, the concept of civil society appears to be confusing in the public domain. This article attempts to provide some level of clarity on the identity of CSOs, focusing on South Sudan. read more…
Open Access Week at Global Development Institute
Open Access week for 2018 runs from 22-28th of October. To celebrate you can find a selection of our Open Access publications from the last academic year below.
Open Access is a core value at the Global Development Institute, as Diana Mitlin, Managing Director of Global Development Institute, explains:
“The majority of research at GDI is made available either Green or Gold Open Access, and our GDI Working Paper Series is always free to download. Open Access is key in supporting the core values that GDI holds as an Institute: inclusivity, responsibility, equity and sustainability. read more…
Poverty and social injustice: why are people advocating a ‘relational’ approach? (and what does that mean anyway?)
Dr Chris Lyon, Research Associate, Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
‘Global inequalities’ is one of The University of Manchester’s research beacons. How can academic research into inequalities improve our understanding; how can it help to inform policy and activism; and how can it be critical and morally engaged, while also being rigorous and high quality? That last question has particularly been on my mind recently in light of a rising tide of sceptical critiques of academic work on social justice. read more…
Organisational Change: Science, Art or Alchemy?
On the 7 and 8 September 2018, two second year PhD students from the Development Policy and Management Programme, Kunkanit Sutamchai and Xi Xi, presented papers at the “12th Colloquium on Organisational Change and Development”. This annual colloquium is organised by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) and is chaired by Dr Chris Rees of GDI. This year the conference was held in Wroclaw, Poland and was co-chaired by Professor Grzegorz Belz from Wroclaw University of Economics.
The colloquium brought together international scholars and practitioners with a view to exploring a broad range of perspectives and insights. The theme of this year’s event was “Organisational Change and Development: Science, Art or Alchemy?” During his keynote address, Dr Rees discussed the extent to which organisational change should be seen mainly as “an art” (encapsulating approaches to organisational change, which are more interpretivist, emotionally grounded and dialogic in nature); mainly as “a science” (involving more diagnostically and deterministically focused approaches to organisational change); or even as “alchemy” (with few pre-determined principles and often involving almost magical transformations, which are difficult to predict, explain and manage).
GDI Lecture Series: The Southernisation of Development with Emma Mawdsley
Dr Emma Mawdsley gave a lecture entitled ‘The Southernisation of Development? Who has ‘socialised’ who in the new millennium?’. You can listen to the podcast, or watch the lecture below.
Emma had a bad cold during the talk so the recording was ended slightly before the end of a lecture due to a coughing fit!
Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.
Podcast: How to rig an election (and get away with it) – Nic Cheeseman
On 8th October we were delighted to host Professor Nic Cheeseman to delivers a talk about his new book How to rig an election. In the talk he argues that contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote.
For more on Nic Cheeseman:
You can subscribe to the podcast on:
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- and most other leading podcast services.
Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole
Reflections on an embedded approach to research with impact
Dr Joanne Jordan, Honorary Research Fellow, Global Development Institute
Academics in the UK are now working in a context in which doing research that has societal ‘impact’ is an increasingly important requirement for funders, institutions and scientific bodies. But, before the ‘impact agenda’ emerged, like many climate change and development focused academics, my main motivation for becoming a researcher was a passion to contribute towards social change.
So, how can we create engagement and impact with our research? Drawing on my experiences of developing ‘The Lived Experience of Climate Change’ project based on my research looking at urban climate resilience and how land tenure affects adaptation to climate change in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I highlight some key lessons for effective public and stakeholder engagement and impact. read more…
Hrishipara daily financial diaries: Receiving Gifts in Low-Income Households
Since May 2015 we have been conducting a ‘financial diary’ research project in central Bangladesh in which we record, each day, all the transactions made that day by our ‘diarists’ (as we call our volunteer respondents). You can read more about the project on its website here. In this blog we explore the role of gifts in the households of our diarists.
Gifts received from outside the household
We have recorded just over a thousand transactions in which a diarist household has received a money gift from someone outside the household. This is a tiny fraction of the more than half a million transactions we have recorded, but the total value of these gifts is not negligible. You can get an idea of their scale relative to the economies of the receiving households in Chart 1, which shows the gifts our 72 diarists have ever received[1] as a proportion of their total income[2].
The total value of the gifts shown in the chart is 1.7 million Bangladeshi taka, or about $53,000 at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates (which allow for the fact that a dollar buys more in Bangladesh than it does in the US). A thousand transactions over more than three years, amounting to more than $50,000 in value, provide enough data for us to start exploring the place of these gifts in the households of our diarists.
Taking all 72 diarists as a group, just over 5% of their income is composed of gifts, but as the chart shows the percentage varies sharply among the diarists, with some getting no gifts at all. In this blog we’ll look at who does the giving, and at how and when these gifts arrive. We’ll also look at what kinds of households are associated with high and low levels of receiving gifts and, perhaps most interestingly, at the impact they make on some of the recipients. read more…