Rural poverty reduction in the 21st century A publication of The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, 2019
The views expressed in IPC-IG Publications are solely those of the authors and should not be take... more The views expressed in IPC-IG Publications are solely those of the authors and should not be taken as representing the views of their respective institutions, the United Nations Development Programme, or the Government of Brazil. Rights and Permissions-All rights reserved. The text and data in this publication may be reproduced as long as written permission is obtained from the IPC-IG and the source is cited. Reproductions for commercial purposes are forbidden. Some of the photographs used in this publication are licensed under The Creative Commons license; full attribution and links to the individual licenses are provided for each.
Opening space for equity and justice in resilience: A subjective approach to household resilience assessment, 2021
While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing re... more While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing resilience remains an outstanding problem. To date, measurement has largely relied on the identification of proxy indicators, inevitably shaping what is measured in ways that reflect underlying assumptions, generalisations and approximations, and raising the question of whose values are being embedded into resilience. These concerns reflect recent interest in the role of recognition justice in resilience, and in particular how marginalisation from meaning-making processes creates the conditions for the inequitable distribution of outcomes in practice. Here, we propose a two stage, subjective approach to resilience assessment, starting with rapid household interviews that invite participants to assess the likely impact of multiple shock and stressor storylines. In a second step, participatory qualitative methods are employed to support inductive investigation of resilience focused on the factors that differentiate those reporting relatively high and low resilience. We illustrate this using fieldwork data from 569 households in Bangladesh. This subjective approach enables households to engage in the production of knowledge about their resilience, revealing two core features of situated heterogeneity: the forms of difference, and the underlying causes. Underlying causes arise from interactions and feedbacks between social, political, economic and institutional conditions that are highly context specific, while significant forms of difference include intra-community and scalar heterogeneity; vulnerability to specific or generalised shocks; and the role of undesirable practices in securing resilience. The results underline the need for resilience to be assessed in relation to local understandings of precarity, and through the expression of senses of justice that inform local conceptions of wellbeing. This means moving beyond positivist approaches and placing epistemic diversity at the centre of resilience assessment, enabling the production of a situated understanding of how and why resilience is differentiated, and offering an analytical starting point from which policy and practice can drive towards equitable resilience.
Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentr... more Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include ...
This article focuses on long-distance or cross-regional marriages in a village in Badaun District... more This article focuses on long-distance or cross-regional marriages in a village in Badaun District of Uttar Pradesh where brides have migrated from the states of West Bengal and Bihar. These marriages cross caste, linguistic and state boundaries and the marriage distance exceeds 1,000 kilometres. At destination, it is a combination of factors such as landlessness or marginal landownership, higher age
Rural poverty reduction in the 21st century A publication of The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, 2019
The views expressed in IPC-IG Publications are solely those of the authors and should not be take... more The views expressed in IPC-IG Publications are solely those of the authors and should not be taken as representing the views of their respective institutions, the United Nations Development Programme, or the Government of Brazil. Rights and Permissions-All rights reserved. The text and data in this publication may be reproduced as long as written permission is obtained from the IPC-IG and the source is cited. Reproductions for commercial purposes are forbidden. Some of the photographs used in this publication are licensed under The Creative Commons license; full attribution and links to the individual licenses are provided for each.
Opening space for equity and justice in resilience: A subjective approach to household resilience assessment, 2021
While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing re... more While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing resilience remains an outstanding problem. To date, measurement has largely relied on the identification of proxy indicators, inevitably shaping what is measured in ways that reflect underlying assumptions, generalisations and approximations, and raising the question of whose values are being embedded into resilience. These concerns reflect recent interest in the role of recognition justice in resilience, and in particular how marginalisation from meaning-making processes creates the conditions for the inequitable distribution of outcomes in practice. Here, we propose a two stage, subjective approach to resilience assessment, starting with rapid household interviews that invite participants to assess the likely impact of multiple shock and stressor storylines. In a second step, participatory qualitative methods are employed to support inductive investigation of resilience focused on the factors that differentiate those reporting relatively high and low resilience. We illustrate this using fieldwork data from 569 households in Bangladesh. This subjective approach enables households to engage in the production of knowledge about their resilience, revealing two core features of situated heterogeneity: the forms of difference, and the underlying causes. Underlying causes arise from interactions and feedbacks between social, political, economic and institutional conditions that are highly context specific, while significant forms of difference include intra-community and scalar heterogeneity; vulnerability to specific or generalised shocks; and the role of undesirable practices in securing resilience. The results underline the need for resilience to be assessed in relation to local understandings of precarity, and through the expression of senses of justice that inform local conceptions of wellbeing. This means moving beyond positivist approaches and placing epistemic diversity at the centre of resilience assessment, enabling the production of a situated understanding of how and why resilience is differentiated, and offering an analytical starting point from which policy and practice can drive towards equitable resilience.
Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentr... more Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include ...
This article focuses on long-distance or cross-regional marriages in a village in Badaun District... more This article focuses on long-distance or cross-regional marriages in a village in Badaun District of Uttar Pradesh where brides have migrated from the states of West Bengal and Bihar. These marriages cross caste, linguistic and state boundaries and the marriage distance exceeds 1,000 kilometres. At destination, it is a combination of factors such as landlessness or marginal landownership, higher age
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