Research for impact : scholar/practitioner global development research partnerships in Canada

A reinvigorated global partnership for sustainable development along with a stronger commitment to partnership and cooperation is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. The presentation explores how research partnerships can promote and produce more effective engagement. Partners emphasized the importance of clear project design based on shared understanding of each other’s work and motivations, and clear agreements around roles and responsibilities of partners and institutions

‘Social Control’ and the Politics of Public Participation in Water Remunicipalization, Cochabamba, Bolivia

During the Water War in 2000, residents of Cochabamba, Bolivia, famously mobilized against water privatization and gained back public control of the city’s water utility. Nearly two decades later, the water movement’s vision of democratic water provision under the participatory management of ‘social control’ remains largely unfulfilled. This paper points to the difficulties in rebuilding a strong public water service in Cochabamba, focusing on the different—and often incompatible—understandings and interpretations of public participation. Addressing the concept’s malleability to a spectrum of ideologies, this paper builds a typology of different kinds of participation according to their intentionality, outcomes, tools, and practices. Applying this framework to the water politics in Bolivia serves to untangle competing perspectives of participation, uncover whose interests are served, and which groups are included or excluded from access to water and decision-making. This analysis reveals how transformative participation has failed to take hold within the municipal service provider in Cochabamba

CCIC and sector challenge : social innovation group project

Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC) is Canada’s national coalition of civil society organizations (CSOs), working globally to achieve sustainable human development. This presentation reviews some challenges the sector faces in terms of public trust and Canadian funding for official development assistance (ODA). It presents results of a survey of public opinion regarding ODA and Canadian assistance to humanitarian aid programs to encourage further government and CSO support of programs. The survey suggests that Canadians are more likely to have confidence in ODA work done by individual aid workers than institutions

Everyday Urbanisms in the Pandemic City: A Feminist Comparative Study of the Gendered Experiences of Covid-19 in Southern Cities

Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China—we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to engage women living in neighbourhoods characterized by underdevelopment and economic insecurity. While existing conditions of precarity trouble the before-and-after terminology of Covid-19, across the five cities the narratives of women’s everyday lives reveal shifts in spatial-temporal orders that have deepened gendered and racial exclusions. We find that limited mobilities and the different and changing dimensions of production and social reproduction have led to increased care work, violence, and strained mental health. Finally, we also find that social reproduction solidarities, constituting old and new circuits of care, have been reinforced during the pandemic.Funding This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [895-2017-1011; 1008-2020-0198]. The Delhi study was also supported by the University of Delhi, Faculty Research Programme Grants -IoE 2020