Reflecting back upon the PPSC team’s activities in 2011

Danny Burns

As 2012 begins, I want to take this opportunity to wish you a happy (and stress free) New Year. In this blog I want to talk offer a few flavours of things that members of the team have been working on; others you will see from recent contributions to the blog; more will follow over the next weeks…

An increasing area of interest for development actors at all levels, from grassroots movements to major donors, is how to better understand the complex, shifting and multi-layered social and political environments in which development and change occur. Many organisations are searching for more relevant tools of context analysis. Jethro Pettit and others have been working on new tools for power and political economy analysis. Popular frameworks like the Powercube (developed by John Gaventa) are being adapted and combined with other approaches. Recent learning partnerships on power have included Oxfam, Novib, Hivos, Christian Aid, the Swedish Cooperative Centre, and Trocaire. Work has also been carried out within the UK voluntary and philanthropic sector with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,  Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Carnegie UK Trust, Trust for London. This work has included three, year-long action learning processes with dozens of participants from these foundations and more than 20 of their partner organisations Training modules on power have adapted into Spanish and French and facilitated by IDS staff in universities and workshops in Spain, West Africa and Latin America.

The team’s work around “unruly politics” has been growing steadily through the “Summer of Unruly Reading” group facilitated by Akshay Khanna. We have been building a collective conceptual analysis within the team, and growing a work programme with Hivos and their partners.  We have also been building connections with people in the Occupy movement. Mariz Tadros continues to be closely engaged with the emerging situation in Egypt and other parts of North Africa.

PPSC has been contracted to engage in a number of new programmes this year. These include:

• a three year programme on gender and sexuality funded by SIDA (Sweden)
• a three year programme with SDC (Switzerland) – on participatory methodologies and developing the resource centre as a hub for materials on participatory methodologies
• a three year programme with SDC working with the IDS Governance team to support the work of their Decentralisation and Local Governance Network
• an extension of Gates Foundation funding for our Community Led Total Sanitation Hub

The PPSC team played a major role in designing and delivering the Bellagio initiative on the future of international development and philanthropy in pursuit of human well being which comprised a series of global dialogues, commissioned papers and a major international summit. PPSC fellows – Danny Burns (Delhi and Kinna, Kenya), Patta Scott-Villiers (Kinna, Kenya), Alex Shankland (Sao Paulo) and Mariz Tadros (Cairo) – facilitated four of the global dialogues. Georgina Powell Stevens co-ordinated the summit participation of around 200 participants. In June of this year Alex Shankland and I, will be facilitating another Bellagio conference on Indigenous health with colleagues from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam).

Rosemary McGee has recently carried out a major review of accountability and transparency initiatives with John Gaventa. Naomi Hossain continues her longitudinal work with Oxfam and others on food price volatility; Joanna Wheeler, Peter Clarke and I are working on a six country action research programme with VSO and the international volunteering network FORUM on the impact of volunteering on poverty; Joanna Wheeler and Tessa Lewin have been working on a range of participatory video initiatives; Marzia Fontana has been working with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of Lao PDR on a project which has brought Lao-based women’s groups and international organisations into dialogue with each other. Rosalind Eyben has been organising The Big Push Forward – an international initiative that links practitioners and researchers to identify and share strategies and approaches for fair assessment and evaluation. Patta Scott Villiers is leading a programme of action research in Karamoja Northern Uganda funded by Irish Aid. Alex Shankland is opening up new areas of work on the role of emerging powers in reshaping development especially through civil society.

Pathways to Women‘s Empowerment in the Middle East hosted a UN Women organized conference on “Pathways for Women in Democratic Transitions: International Experiences and Lessons Learned” in Cairo. The meeting featured Michele Bachelet and others discussing legal reform, women’s movements and gender-responsive accountability systems. Mariz Tadros was a speaker on the panel “Building Strong Women’s Movements in Democratic Transitions”.

The team has recently published a number of IDS Working Papers and Bulletins and will publish a bulletin on Action Research in International Development this spring.

Finally I want to say a huge thank you and good luck to John Gaventa and Kate Hawkins. John has been an inspiration to the PPSC team for more than a decade. He has joined the Coady Institute in Canada as their new Director. Kate Hawkins our sexuality programme convenor who has initiated and developed a great deal of exciting work within the team will be leaving IDS (but will continue to work with us as a free lancer). I would also like to welcome to the team Research Fellow Jerker Edstrom and Jas Vaghadia who will be working on our gender, masculinities and sexuality programmes. Welcome also to Naomi Vernon who is joining our CLTS team.

As I say, just a few flavours of the many different things that are happening. If you want to find out more, follow the links, or contact us directly.

Danny Burns is the Team Leader for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and will be publishing IDS Bulletin 43.3 ”Action Research in Development” in May 2012

Participation team online: blogging highlights from 2011

Stephen Wood

As we move into 2012, I thought it would be interesting to reflect upon some of the blog highlights that were written by colleagues in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) since we launched last year:

• Aid conditionality dominated the headlines again in the latter part of last year when the British Government made an explicit link between aid and Southern countries’ treatment of LGBT human rights. Research Fellow akshay khanna tackled the political fallout of this announcement head-on in a blog post “Aid conditionality and the limits of a politics of sexuality”, when he challenged the usefulness of an LGBT politics that fails to account for the complexity and variety of sexualities outside of dominant western models and how countries such as India and Brazil are leading the way in developing much more nuanced politics of sexuality.
• With much internationally attention being paid to efforts to increase economic growth, Research Fellow Rosalind Eyben’s blog post, “Care work should be at the heart of a people-centred economy”, was a timely reminder that discussion is still desperately needed around the vast amount of unpaid work existing outside the market economy, that underpins and sustains human wellbeing and yet is unaccounted for by most development organisations. Those taking on these care responsibilities, mostly women, are usually those with least voice and ability to influence policy change that might account for this within societies across the globe.
• Finally, as the struggle for democratic representation continues across the Middle East, the reports by Research Fellow Mariz Tadros from Cairo on the unruly politics being conducted by Egyptians protesting in Tahrir Square against military rule have been an eye-opening insight into the hopes, fears and challenges experienced by those fighting for change. Her blog post “From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt” was a particularly thought-provoking contribution.

As always, these recommendations only scratch the surface of the rich discussion and debates we have been conducting on our blog. If you haven’t done so already, I really would encourage you to sign up via email to receive each of our blog posts as they are published and engage our authors in dialogue by commenting upon their work.  As we are building up our audience, if you can recommend us to anyone who might be interested in engaging with our work, we’d be appreciative. We have some really exciting material due in the coming weeks and months that you don’t want to miss.

Stephen Wood is the Team Administrative Co-ordinator for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and is also a member of the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme. He can be found on Twitter at: StephenWood_UK