Pri's blog

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...