Pri's blog

My first session at the World Economic Forum East Asia, was on the Role of Think Tanks in Policy Making in East Asia.   The session was Chaired by Simon Tay, the Chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. Two short presentations were made by William H Overholt, President of the Fung Global Institute, and Chandran Nair, Founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT) (don’t you just hate these clever acronyms, especially when you struggle so unsuccessfully to come up with them?!!) Overholt’s was a pretty orthodox, somewhat western-centric view.  He talked about TTs needing to think about the future, and to develop deep analyses of issues – because governments are beleaguered by electoral politics with no space to scout for new ideas or do some corrective thinking. TTs are also faced with challenges – challenges of maintaining independence while receiving government funds, or from ‘clients’ who typically want you to support/refute strateg...

Shared responsibility - inland waters, Trincomalee Here’s a brief, somewhat  academic blog – inspired by listening to Frances Stewart at a webinar organised by ODI, in the context of doing a Gender Synthesis  of the first round of panel data for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium.   Most of my readers  may want to escape from this rather unexpected theoretical musing on my part! My problem is that I am not sure that gender falls into how Frances Stewart conceptualises  Horizontal Inequality , even though in some of her writing she thinks it does (1);  and even though, from an external analytical perspective there are visible structural inequalities between women and men.  So as  Stewart et al point out, gender as a group affiliation matters, because it is tightly bounded and members can’t move from one gender to another and because being a member of the group, results in levels of discrimination (ibid).  What I am not...

Right now, there is a team of us at CEPA working with the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC), a DFID funded research consortium led by the Overseas Development Institute ( ODI), London, on a six year programme looking at three research themes, namely 1.     Legitimacy. What are people’s perceptions, expectations and experiences of the state and of local-level governance? How does the way services are delivered and livelihoods are supported affect people’s views on the legitimacy of the state? 2.     Capacity. How do international actors interact with the state and local-level governance institutions? How successful are international attempts to build state capacity to deliver social protection, basic services and support to livelihoods? 3.     Livelihood trajectories . What do livelihood trajectories in conflict-affected situations tell us about the role of governments, aid agencies, markets and the private secto...