Fire risk reduction in informal settlements: interrogating evidence, imagining solutions
Laura Hirst is working on an ESRC CASE PhD studentship with Operation Florian at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, researching the production of vulnerability to fire risk in resource poor urban settlements in the Global South. She is about to commence her fieldwork in different urban settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.
Medair staff conducting household visits as part of a fire risk training at an informal refugee settlement in Taanayel, Beqaa Valley, Lebanon.
Photo credit: Laura Hirst and Steve Jordan.
Workshop organised by the Manchester Migration Lab and Operation Florian, 27 April 2017
Fires cause over 300,000 deaths annually worldwide, causing permanent injuries to millions more, with the vast majority occurring in low and middle income countries. However, these figures are likely to be a vast underestimate; fire risk is classed as extensive – meaning it is everyday, localised, and high frequency – and is less likely to be documented and managed than intensive risks. Fires in informal urban settlements are even less likely to be officially recorded, due to a combination of issues related to poverty and spatial, social, economic and political marginalisation. Similarly, the impact of fire risk on lives and wellbeing beyond physical injuries can be extensive but difficult to quantify; long term health, livelihoods, housing and well-being at different levels may be severely jeopardised, compounding existing disadvantages often experienced by residents of informal settlements. read more…
The Call for a New Deal- Conversing with Dr. Richard-Kozul Wright (Director, UNCTAD)
By Karishma Banga, PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute
We have been living in what Richard Kozul-Wright deems as the ‘Age of Anxiety’, with developing economies suffering from post-traumatic crash disorder, advanced economies finding it difficult to recover from the crisis and growing risks for everybody, everywhere. This comes on top of 30 years of hyper-globalisation, precarious work, rising levels of debt and inequality and- the cherry on the cake- ruthless corporations. Raising fingers at the bleakness of the current scenario, we have proponents pushing forward the mantra of ‘Inclusiveness for All’. While these words sound good to our ears, we continue to witness a slow-down of growth in the global economy. read more…
Alumni profile: Justice Bawole
Since graduating from GDI with a PhD in Development Policy and Management in 2013, Dr Bawole has visited The University of Manchester every year to deliver guest seminars and collaborate with colleagues and former supervisors. We caught up with him on his latest visit to chat about how his degree from The University of Manchester led to two promotions when he returned to Ghana.
Aid Memoir: By maintaining the foreign aid budget and adopting a joined up approach, the next government can show its commitment to becoming Global Britain rather than Little England
Professor David Hulme, Executive director of the Global Development Institute
A day is a long time in politics and the first full day of election campaigning was dominated by suggestions that the Conservatives would row back on the commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid. But, barely 24 hours later, Theresa May scotched these rumours, perhaps encouraged by a passionate plea from Bill Gates that “lives will be lost if the UK reduces its aid”.
But this does not mean that battles about the aid budget are over. This now shifts to defining exactly what official development assistance (ODA or ‘aid’) can be used to achieve. The OECD controls this definition, enabling it to collect authoritative statistics on what each member country spends. Over the years it has had to produce a very precise definition, preventing countries from attempting to count any overseas spending as ODA. This has included commercial loans, subsidies to arms manufacturers, export-credit guarantees for civil engineering companies to win contracts in Africa and Asia: all activities to achieve domestic benefits rather than promoting international development. read more…
Watch: Prof Saskia Sassen on Geographies of Expulsion
On Thursday 4 May, Professor Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, gave a lecture at The University of Manchester on her latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press/Belknap 2014)
You can listen to the podcast and watch the livestream of the lecture below.
read more…
Listen: Richard Kozul-Wright on emerging economies and the end of hyperglobalization
Richard Kozul-Wright (Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division, UNCTAD) gives a fascinating and timely lecture on why we shouldn’t defend the current international order and why a global new deal is urgently needed.
Recent events have provoked considerable hand wringing from supporters of globalization; talk of rising trade protectionism, currency wars, migration controls and economic populism have been taken as evidence that the open global economic order built over the previous seven decades is under serious threat, with some even warning of a return to the kind of economic and political chaos witnessed during the interwar years. read more…
GDI Lecture Series: The Global Arms Trade and International Law with Dr Shavana Musa
On Wednesday, 26 April, Dr Shavana Musa gave a lecture entitled ‘The Global Arms Trade and International Law: Prevention is Better than Cure’. You can watch the live stream below
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.
DI Working Paper: The Demographics of Digital Development
By Professor Richard Heeks, Professor of Development Informatics
Read the Development Informatics Working Paper ‘Examining “Digital Development”: The Shape of Things to Come?‘
Any emergent digital development paradigm will be shaped by three changing demographics of ICT usage: geographical, maturational and experiential.
Geographically, we have already moved from domination of the old Internet world (the US and Europe) to domination of the new Internet world (emerging nations of the global East and South), as summarised in the table below[1]. Use of digital technology in developing countries[2] now represents the majority not minority global experience. read more…
The Drama of Resilience – or the head, heart and soul of places, people and change
By Dr Robbie Watt, who gained his PhD from the Global Development Institute and is now a Lecturer in International Politics at The University of Manchester.
Image: Because every time you say, “Oh, they’re resilient,” that means you can do something else to me. . Image source: https://twitter.com/JulReid/status/405024781772148736
‘Ohh, resilience.’
When I mentioned resilience, the topic of that evening’s GDI lecture to social worker friends in a Manchester pub, their reaction was cynical. ‘We hear about resilience all the time,’ they said disdainfully. Manchester social work, facing austerity and cuts, deploys resilience terminology to justify withdrawal from tragic situations. Don’t worry, they are resilient.
Professor Katrina Brown, Chair in Social Science at the University of Exeter, is by no means ivory tower bound nor isolated from stories such as these. In New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, people objected to being labelled resilient, and Professor Brown was there to notice.
The language of resistance and political struggle can be avowedly anti-resilience. Yet Professor Brown sees resistance as (just?) one part of resilience. Naming grassroots resistance and struggle as (mere?) aspects of resilience invites controversy because resilience has been criticised as a neoliberal and depoliticising concept that speaks to ideas of self-reliance and technocratic governance. Hence there is a tension involved in calling resistance efforts, which often challenge neoliberal policies, as intertwined with resilience.
Nevertheless, resilience is a sufficiently broad concept that Prof Katrina Brown can escape definitions that conform to neoliberal ideas. Indeed Prof Brown’s work, including her recently published monologue Resilience, Development and Global Change, is critical of business-as-usual policy discourses on resilience. Her aim is rather to reclaim resilience as a rich analytical concept that can help us to understand processes of change in dynamic socio-ecological systems, where people and landscapes interact with power and agency.
In her excellent lecture, Prof Brown identified three components of resilience – resistance, rootedness, and resourcefulness – giving colourful examples of each. She then showed us how resilience can be articulated in an empowering fashion through participatory theatre. I turn to each below. read more…
WATCH: Participatory planning in Ruimsig, Johannesburg
Professor Diana Mitlin recently visited Ruimsig, Johannesburg, to learn about participatory planning. This research is part of a new network on ‘Achieving Inclusive Cities through Scaling up Participatory Planning in Africa’ which is being led by Prof Mitlin. The network was awarded £120,000 by the Leverhulme Trust and will bring together community organisations and academic departments in three sub-Saharan African countries and researchers at the Global Development Institute.
You can watch Diana’s interviews with local community activists below. read more…