Reimagining Development through the Crisis Watch Initiative

This article reflects on the experience of the Crisis Watch initiative. This established a network of organisations and individuals who were involved in monitoring and acting on the ongoing effects of the 2008 financial crisis at the grassroots level. It provided a basis for understanding the ongoing human impacts of crisis and for sharing lessons on how to generate evidence quickly for policy consideration. The interplay between the financial crisis and other ongoing crises meant that people often experience a compound crisis. In this context, the attribution of specific impacts to the financial crisis alone is difficult and can lead to inappropriate simplifications for policy. The experience from Crisis Watch urges us to reimagine the relationship between crises and development in terms of a systems approach, which draws on complexity thinking. This focus on relationships between people represents a significantly different starting point for development policy thinking

Cultures of of Aspiration and Poverty? Aspirational Inequalities in Northeast and Southern Thailand

The paper provides micro-level evidence of rising inequality in Thailand, using data from an intensive study of seven communities in Northeast and Southern Thailand. This inequality affects participants’ material and subjective wellbeing, their aspirations, and the extent to which they feel these are realised. The paper argues that adaptation, expressed as reduced aspirations, could explain why the effect of material poverty on people’s satisfaction with their lives is small. The reduction in attainment of aspirations linked to socio-economic status suggests that a small, but constant group of people are being excluded from a shift in the societal consensus over what constitutes a good life

Multiple dimensions of wellbeing in practice

In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) placed the relationship between human wellbeing and ecosystems firmly at the centre of the agenda for academics and policy makers concerned with sustainable development for the following decades (MA, 2005). The decision to use the concept of human wellbeing was relatively novel and ambitious at the time. Four years later, that decision was decisively underlined by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance (Stiglitz et al., 2009), commissioned by the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by Joe Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. This report made a comprehensive case that if we are to achieve sustainable and inclusive development in our societies, then it is necessary to reform our major systems of statistical data collection from being focused on measuring progress in terms of production and consumption, to measuring it in terms of human wellbeing. Since that report there has been an explosion of initiatives to conceptualise and measure human wellbeing, and to put it into practice in academia and policy (Bache and Reardon, 2016; Helliwell et al., 2017)

Introduction: Social Protection for Social Justice

The articles in this IDS Bulletin are drawn from a conference hosted by the Centre for Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, UK, in April 2011. The conference brought together academics and practitioners who understand social protection to be more than a palliative agenda for alleviating poverty and vulnerability, believing instead that social protection should be fundamentally interested in realising economic and social rights for all. This alternative agenda is one grounded in social justice, and it opens space for understanding how issues of rights, governance, distribution and access are critical for breaking the production and reproduction of vulnerability over time. The selection of articles in this IDS Bulletin aims to elaborate the linkages between social protection and social justice, to identify opportunities for operationalising the ‘transformative’ aspects of social protection and to strengthen the case for integrating social protection into broader social policy

Introduction: Time to Reimagine Development?

The major global crises of the past four years – financial, fuel, food, climate – have collectively had a dramatic impact on people's lives and livelihoods. Have they also had a large impact on core ideas underlying mainstream development? Drawing on a number of Reimagining Development case studies and on a much wider literature, this article examines the impacts of the crises on lives and livelihoods and also on core development ideas. First the article sets out why the current time is a good one for reimagining. Then it highlights some of the new ideas that are emerging and some of the older ones that are making a reappearance. Finally, the article reflects on the challenges of reimagining development and processes that are important if new ideas are to make a difference

Social Protection: Responding to a Global Crisis

The current global financial crisis will have adverse effects on poor people in developing countries in both the short? and long?term. While the complexity of this crisis makes its path difficult to predict, recent advances in social protection thinking and practice provide a body of experience for developing countries and development agencies to draw upon in responding to the crisis. Recognising that the crisis will produce pressures on national budgets and could lead to social and political unrest, this article argues that the ways that policymakers think about and design social protection responses will require careful consideration. It proposes a framework for prioritising responses and argues for an approach to designing social protection measures that take account of both immediate needs and the wider developmental role of social protection schemes. Social protection measures can be an important element in reconstructing a social contract that builds effective future governance for development

Evaluating Outside the Box: An Alternative Framework for Analysing Social Protection Programmes

The evidence base on social protection programmes is expanding rapidly, largely pointing towards their positive impacts. Most evaluations rely heavily on quantitative techniques and experimental methods to allow for attribution of impacts. In this paper, we argue that new ways of investigation and analysis are needed to expand and deepen the evidence base in support of improved design and implementation of social protection. Greater emphasis on qualitative research, mixed methods and participatory evaluation is crucial, given current evidence gaps about programme dynamics and impacts. This paper proposes a new evaluation framework that goes beyond conventional approaches, by highlighting relatively neglected aspects related to programme processes, social dynamics and feedback loops in programme evaluations

Towards an economics of well-being

There is growing concern that presently dominant frameworks in economics no longer provide a way of adequately addressing and analysing the problems of today’s globalising and rapidly changing world. This article makes a number of fundamental proposals about how we might reframe economics to move it towards a clearer focus on human well-being. It develops arguments for a change in the basic ontological proposition and for the need to see ‘the economy’ as an instituted process of resource allocation. From this viewpoint, economics is then the study of resource allocation decisions and processes and the forces that guide these: from a human perspective it is about understanding who gets what, under what conditions and why? The paper argues that a pluralist approach to understanding the economy is necessary for political, analytical and technical reasons. Drawing on a range of contributions to heterodox economics, the paper argues that if we are to understand current crises and challenges, then our understanding of resource allocation in society must have a broader scope than is present in mainstream economics; it proposes a rethinking of economic agency and provides a critique of rational behaviour that is founded in shifting the emphasis from a narrow conception of welfare to well-being. Acknowledging human well-being as a multidimensional concept, the relationship between the well-being of the person and the collective is reconsidered and the methodological implications for the issue of aggregation are discussed. The article seeks to serve as a point of departure for formulating new research questions, exploring the relationships between human well-being and economic development and analysing economic behaviour and interactions in such a way as to bring us closer to peoples’ realities on the ground

Is resilience socially constructed? Empirical evidence from Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam

The objective of this paper is to better understand the various individual and household factors that influence resilience, that is, people⬢s ability to respond adequately to shocks and stressors. One of our hypotheses is that resilience does not simply reflect the expected effects of quantifiable factors such as level of assets, or even less quantifiable social processes such as people⬢s experience, but is also determined by more subjective dimensions related to people⬢s perceptions of their ability to cope, adapt or transform in the face of adverse events. Data collected over two years in Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka and Vietnam confirms the importance of wealth in the recovery process of households affected by shocks and stressors. However our results challenge the idea that within communities, assets are a systematic differentiator in people⬢s response to adverse events. The findings regarding social capital are mixed and call for more research: social capital had a strong positive influence on resilience at the community level, yet our analysis failed to demonstrate any tangible positive correlation at the household level. Finally, the data confirm that, like vulnerability, resilience is at least in part socially constructed, endogenous to individual and groups, and hence contingent on knowledge, attitudes to risk, culture and subjectivity

The Three Awkward Companions of the SDGs: Growth, Inclusivity and Sustainability.

The Sustainable Development Goals have aspirations for achievements in respect of three important characteristics of development that have hitherto proven largely to be inimical. These are economic growth, inclusivity and sustainability. The cuckoo in the nest appears to be economic growth since thus far development that has been based on the pursuit of economic growth has been costly both socially and environmentally. The worrying growth of inquality is well documented and the unsustainable environmental impacts of rapid economic growth are evident. The SDGs mutely assert the compatibility of each but it is not clear what framework for development and progress would allow them to be compatible. This paper will use both theory and empirical examples to explore whether the three might be reconciled. It argues that the largest problem may lie in the continued dominance of key axioms in orthodox economics. The possibility of achieving the SDGs aspirations lies in the adoption of new forms of economics that are reoriented to human wellbeing.peerReviewe