The Importance And Value of Aid
by David Hulme
It looks, thankfully, like DFID has survived the brunt of austerity savings made since the financial crash of 2008. While backroom costs have been cut, the government has stuck to its commitment to earmark 0.7% of Gross National Income for Official Development Assistance. Though critics instinctively point to the development budget in suggesting where we need to cut public spending, the truth is there is a rare consensus among the main parties that our spending on overseas aid plays a valuable role.
Celebrity advocacy and post-democracy
We have seen, in the first and second parts to this series, that development NGOs have systematically organised and professionalised their work with celebrity advocates, and that this does not necessarily resonate well with British publics. What we have yet to see is how well, and how effectively celebrity can work with political and corporate elites. To understand it properly however, we have to see how well this form of advocacy fits with current democratic trends. Specifically, celebrity advocacy is tailor-made for post-democratic societies, which tend to favour inegalitarian elites, even as it lobbies against international inequality.
Bringing Social Theory back into issues of Development
Tim Jacoby and Uma Kothari, both from IDPM at the University of Manchester, have edited a special edition of the journal Progress in Development Studies which has just been published. It showcases emerging research from early career colleagues at the Institute.
By Tim Jacoby and Uma Kothari
I dream about those German sausages
By Tanja R. Müller
The above sentence was the message I received the other day from a Facebook-friend, together with a black and white photograph showing some African kids in a classroom with a tall, Germanic looking woman-teacher, and some German sentences on the big blackboard in the background. The picture was taken around 1984, in a small town in what was then East Germany, Staßfurt. My Facebook friend was one of a cohort of almost 900 Mozambican children who completed the long years of secondary schooling and adolescence in East Germany in order to become homem novo, a specific type of ‘new socialist man’, upon their return to Mozambique.
New visions for violence reduction strategies in the Mexico
By Natalia Garcia-Cervantes
Rising levels of violence and crime can erase the benefits of economic growth and dramatically decrease well-being. But if we see high levels of violence as a specifically urban problem, with therefore specifically urban solutions, new ways of approaching the problem can be established. Natalia Garcia explains how her research in Mexico is developing this idea.
The Politics of the diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America
By Paola Pena
The political and social scenarios of Latin America have been shaped by the coming to power of ideological Left-wing governments along with the adoption and rapid expansion of a particular type of social assistance programmes known as Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). It may seem obvious that these two facts are directly related. Leftist candidates obtain their electoral victories by following a common discourse of improving the high levels of poverty and inequality across the region. However, this may not be as straightforward as it seems. Therefore, in my Dissertation, I analyse the politics of the diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. A modified version of the dissertation has been published at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, as a BWPI Working Paper 201 with the title “The Politics of the diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America”.
Consuming celebrity advocacy
One of the most intriguing facts about celebrity is how little we know about how the general public respond to it. And, when you do try and find out, then one of the most intriguing things is how little notice many people appear to take of it. Yes, there are studies of fans and fandom. But fans are not necessarily the best indicators of how broader publics respond to celebrities. Indeed, by definition (the word is short for ‘fanatic’) a fan is an unusually committed supporter.
Podcast your research!
Viva Voce is a new and exciting online platform that was created by our very own IDPM PhD student, Gemma Sou. Viva Voce promotes and supports PhD students, PostDocs and Early careers researchers in the Social Sciences, by providing a platform for setting up short, sharp and engaging podcasts about yourself and your research. Gemma says that,
“We’re increasingly encouraged to get our research ‘out there’ and to have ‘impact’ beyond academia. However, there are few platforms that are dedicated to publicising and disseminating the exciting knowledge that emerges from early career researchers. Other sites like linkedin and academia.edu are basically there for people to upload their CVs, which marginalises early career researchers who have less publications and experience. Plus, these sites are very text heavy and not very accessible or exciting. I wanted something that focused more on the topic and quality of your research (‘what you do’) than how many publications or years of experience you have (‘how much you have done’)”.
Learning from Dhaka’s BusteeBashees
By Sally Cawood
In March 2014, IDPM PhD Student Sally Cawood boarded a plane to Dhaka for her first taste of urban life in the Bangladeshi capital, dubbed one of the most ‘unliveable cities’ in the world. In this blog Sally describes how this two week trip fundamentally altered her views on urban slums (bustees), their residents (busteebashees) and her PhD.
In Dhaka, at least 5 million people live in slums known as bustees, with thousands more joining the world’s most crowded city every day (See Banks et al, 2011; Ahmed, 2012; Cox, 2012; Shikdar, 2012). As opposed to passive vehicles of hyper-urbanisation, I argue in my PhD that bustee residents are highly networked and active agents, a view shared by others (see Roy and Hulme, 2013; Slum/Shack Dwellers International; Asian Coalition for Housing Rights). My research focuses on the drivers, forms and outcomes of grassroots collective action among this neglected group.
Constructing celebrity advocacy
Celebrity is a normal part of development business these days. While we can all point to famous development advocates, I suspect that most of us do not know the extent to which development NGOs in Britain, and indeed the whole NGO sector, has transformed itself as part of an effort to work more effectively, and successfully with celebrity advocates. This blog describes this transformation and some of the tensions it has produced.