Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in Fragile Contexts

Fragility, resulting both from violent conflict and/or severely adverse environmental conditions linked to climate change, fundamentally alters the linkages between agriculture and nutrition outcomes. This paper argues that these alterations occur not only because of the political economy and other logistic constraints placed on agriculture and nutrition in contexts of fragility, but also because the state may or may not have the capacity or political will to undertake the different degrees of flexible and innovative functioning required to administer and implement interventions in such contexts. A rethinking of where and when the state does and does not have the willingness or organisational capacity to exercise effective control and implement programmes is needed in order to determine the full extent of whether and how agriculture can be leveraged for nutrition.Department for International Development (DFID)UK AI

Creating Safe and Inclusive Cities that Leave No One Behind

Half of humanity now lives in urban areas, and a growing number of cities are leading the way in generating global GDP. However, cities have increasingly become key loci of violence over the last 50 years, which particularly affects the most marginalised. Creating safe cities which adhere to the principles of the New Urban Agenda will require fostering urban safety through inclusive policies and practices that secure, but do not securitise, urban spaces. This involves using innovative measures to accurately understand people’s vulnerabilities, supporting evidence-gathering from small and medium-sized towns alongside larger cities, and analysing safe and resilient urban spaces alongside more fragile ones.UK Department for International Developmen

‘These Streets Are Ours’: Mumbai’s Urban Form and Security in the Vernacular

This article contributes to the growing literature on the spatial dynamics of urban violence in the developing world. It highlights the dialectic between urban form, violence and security provision as vernacular in nature, shaped by hyperlocal processes and actors. And yet, this dialectic is dominated by state and military-centred terminology, and continually underpinned by the state’s imposition of order to constitute the city as a site for legitimate control. This materialises as the often arbitrary recognition of one area as ‘at the margins’, and not another, as the recognition of one group of people as ‘slum dwellers’ or illegal residents, and not others, or as the recognition of some individuals as criminal, and not others. Using detailed case study material from a group of inner-city neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India, the article suggests that urban form in its physical, political and historical characterisations not only influences how vigilante protection operates, but also interacts in a non-benign manner with the mechanics by which the state endeavours to control violence. As such, it shapes who is vulnerable to violence, how vulnerable they are, and why. This speaks directly to the nature of security provision witnessed across the cities of the developing world

Rethinking Approaches to Peace-Building and Political Settlements in an Increasingly Urbanised World

Violence in cities significantly compromises development and can have detrimental consequences for peace-building and political settlements in both conflict and non-conflict settings. A majority of the world’s most fragile and conflict-affected countries are rapidly urbanising, while much of the global burden of armed violence can be directly or indirectly linked to cities. As such, urban environments interact with the mechanics of security provision in significant and complex ways. Implementing effective violence mitigation strategies therefore requires stakeholders to acknowledge varying types of urban violence, understand how these interact with the mechanics of security provision, and thereby bring a spatially relevant, city-specific thinking to the wider understandings of the arrangements by which political power is organised and exercised.UK Department for International Developmen

Tackling Gun Violence in India

Gun-related violence has far-reaching adverse impacts on all levels of society. In addition to murder and injury, gun violence can exacerbate cycles of highly localised urban poverty, inequality and vulnerability. India has the second largest number of homicides in the world but the issue is little discussed. In contrast to well-known gun violence in the Americas and Africa, and is absent from public security and development agendas. With criminal violence generating at least ten times more deaths and injuries in India than terrorism and conflict, there is an urgent need to re-orient policies towards preventative frameworks and to focus efforts on rapidly growing mid-size cities suffering from under-resourced police forces and rising youth unemployment

Cities, Violence and Order: the Challenges and Complex Taxonomy of Security Provision in Cities of Tomorrow

How will security in cities be understood in the future? For whom will it be provided? What are the ways by which urban security provision will be governed? And, what impact will violence and order in cities have on the processes of state-building in fragile contexts in the future? These questions are uppermost in the minds of policymakers and academics. A growing body of evidence underlines the heterogeneity of security processes and outcomes, both within and between cities. Notwithstanding these recent advances, contemporary paradigms of urban development do not substantively account for the ways in which the social, political, economic and physical aspects of urban form interact and shape the mechanics of security provision in cities. There is a perceptible gap in development policy, compromising the manner in which international donors, multilateral agencies, national and sub-national policymakers respond to urban challenges today. Part of this gap is due to the separation between development theory or urban planning, and issues of fragility due to conflict and violence. These have usually been different epistemic and operational domains, to the detriment of either a comprehensive approach to analysing fragility and violence or effective approaches to security provision.UK Department for International Developmen

The Dialectics of Urban Form and Violence

Over a 50-year span, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) research has not focused on cities or urbanisation to the extent it might have. We find that there is good reason for cities to now be described as the ‘new frontier’ for international development. In particular, violence is increasingly a defining characteristic of urban living in both conflict and non-conflict settings. This has important consequences for the relatively under-researched links between urban violence, the processes of state building, and wider development goals. Benefiting from key IDS contributions to the debates on the security–development nexus, citizenship and the hybrid nature of the governance landscape, we argue that the moment is opportune for the Institute to deepen its research and policy expertise on urban violence ‘in the vernacular’

Tackling Urban Violence in Mumbai and Cape Town through Citizen Engagement and Community Action

Urban violence is an urgent and growing problem in many cities across the world. It comes in a multitude of forms such as gender-based violence, gangs and drug-related violence, police violence, religious riots, vigilante groups, and others. This briefing focuses on gender-based violence in Cape Town, South Africa, and juvenile crime in Mumbai, India, to explore how those living with this violence may be enabled to address it themselves. Those living in poverty find a variety of responses to violence and this briefing shares evidence of how citizens can contribute both independently and through collective action to building safer communities.UK Department for International Developmen

Can Targeted Transition Services for Young Offenders Foster Pro-Social Attitudes and Behaviours in Urban Settings? Evidence from the Evaluation of the Kherwadi Social Welfare Association’s Yuva Parivartan Programme

In Maharashtra, state-sponsored programmes that support school dropouts and young offenders in finding employment and integrating into society are severely limited by a lack of resources and capacity. While several government-sponsored schemes do exist, in reality, however, support for school dropouts is largely provided on an ad hoc basis, and predominantly by non-governmental organisations. In this context, we conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of Kherwadi Social Welfare Association’s Yuva Parivartan programme. This is one of the largest non-governmental interventions directed towards school dropouts and juvenile offenders. The overarching evaluation question adopted was ‘Can targeted preventive action and access to employment for school dropouts act as a preventive measure against delinquency and crime?’ The following five programme-specific Sub-Questions (SQ) were used for evaluation purposes: SQ1: Is the Yuva Parivartan (YP) programme effective at imparting on youth a set of prosocial values that are consistent with job-seeking and crime-avoidance behaviours? SQ2: Are the benefits of the YP programme reaching the population who self-report committing a crime? SQ3: Does the YP programme lead to pro-social behavioural changes? SQ4: Is there a relationship between attitudes towards aggressive and/or violent behaviour, entitlement, anti-social intent and employment outcomes? SQ5: Does the YP programme manage to instil a feeling of confidence among the trainees about their future prospects of finding a job?UK Department for International Developmen