R4D Palestine

Using Art for Social Change

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

The Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme is putting the arts at the centre of their research and communications work.

id21 education highlights 5. Conflict.

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:46:00 GMT

Miscellaneous id21 2008 IDS, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, 2 pp. This issue contains the following short articles: Rebuilding education in Afghanistan; How donors fail to educate children in conflict-torn states; Education in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and Learning from south Sudan's ongoing tragedy.

Routines in facility-based maternity care: evidence from the Arab World.

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:57:00 GMT

Miscellaneous K Khalil, H Sholkamy, N Hassanein, M Cherine, A Elnoury, L Mohsen, M Breebaart, T Kabakian-Khasholian, R Shayboub, R Khayat, OMR Campbell, H Osman, R Mourtada, R Hafez, D Sinno, N Mikki, L Wick, L Wick. H Bashour, A Abdulsalam and S Sheikha 2005 BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 112 (9) 1270-1276 [doi:10.1111/j.1471-0528.2005.00710.x] Objectives: To document facility-based practices for normal labour and delivery in Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank (part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory) and Syria and to categorise common findings according to evidence-based obstetrics. Design: Three studies (Lebanon, West Bank and Syria) interviewed a key informant (providers) in maternity facilities. The study in Egypt directly observed individual labouring women. Setting: Maternity wards. Sample: Nationally representative sample of hospitals drawn in Lebanon and Syria. In the West Bank, a convenience sample of hospitals was used. In Egypt, the largest teaching hospital's maternity ward was observed. Methods: Shared practices were categorised by adapting the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2004 classification of practices for normal birth into the following: practices known to be beneficial, practices likely to be beneficial, practices unlikely to be beneficial and practices likely to be ineffective or harmful. Main outcome measures: Routine hospital practices for normal labour and delivery. Results: There was infrequent use of beneficial practices that should be encouraged and an unexpectedly high level of harmful practices that should be eliminated. Some beneficial practices were applied inappropriately and practices of unproven benefit were also documented. Some documented childbirth practices are potentially harmful to mothers and their babies. Conclusion: Facility practices for normal labour were largely not in accordance with the WHO evidence-based classification of practices for normal birth. The findings are worrying given the increasing proportion of facility-based births in the region and the improved but relatively high maternal and neonatal mortality ratios in these countries. Obstacles to following evidence-based protocols for normal labour require examination.

Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium. Annual Report 2007-2008

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:18:00 GMT

Miscellaneous 2008 70 pp. and 54 pp. A summary of the achievements of the RPC during the year 2007-8 is presented. Progress towards the outputs and impact of the key themes, and progress on research, communications and capacity development are described. As well as the full report, the narrative report which forms part of the annual report is appended.

Pathways of Women's Empowerment

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Current

Pathways of Womens Empowerment is an international research and communications programme established in 2006 which links academics with activists and practitioners to find out what works to enhance womens empowerment. The aim is to make these pathways of change visible and to build on them to inspire a radical shift in policy and practice. By involving policy actors and practitioners directly in the research and learning, they hope the work will be in itself a catalyst for change.

The programme investigates what enables women, individually and collectively, to empower themselves, how they can sustain these changes, and how development agencies' policies support or hinder this process in order to make such changes visible and to build on them to inspire a radical shift in policy and practice. The key areas of focus are:

Locating empowerment in women's everyday lives, applying a range of methodological and analytical strategies to gain a better understanding of how positive change happens in women's lives.
Tracing policy processes that seek to promote women's empowerment in order to understand the enabling conditions, strategies and tactics for achieving policy change.
Understanding strategies for change, seeking to reveal the factors for success and asking what works and what is specific to particular contexts, and what more generic lessons can be drawn.

Research strategy implemented for systematic identification of pathways of women's empowerment in four thematic areas.

Four centres of regional excellence in applied research strengthened CEGENSA, NEIM, SRC/AUC and BRAC University with capacity to implement and support policy research on womens empowerment within their regions.

Associated global institutions UNIFEM, DFID and other donors, IDS strengthened in their capacity to make use of innovative and critical research.

Communications strategy achieved, having influenced key stakeholders to take RPC research findings into account in policy practice.

Consortium governance and management system achieved horizontal working practices and power sharing.

The Mid Term Review of 2009 found that most of the outputs have either been achieved or are in the pipeline and nearing completion. Some of the real successes highlighted include:

Knowledge outputs of extremely high academic quality, the consistency of the quality is remarkable for a consortium comprising such diverse locations, the outputs are diverse in form, content and style.
A significant number of policy-advocacy and public education oriented communications materials have also been produced and used in the form of pod casts, photo exhibitions, films and videos.
Capacity of the research partners enhanced. There is some variation, in relation to the increased capacity of individual and teams compared to improved institutional capacity.
Communications is not an "end of pipe" activity but a central part of the programme.
Some stunning examples of creative communications work across all hubs: Stories for Change (Bangladesh), a pilot TV drama on mythical stories of Nigerian women, the Changing Times, Changing Lives photography course and exhibition (Bangladesh), work with Ghanaian Foundation for Female Photojournalists.
The programme created a transparent, democratic, egalitarian and effective system of managing the multiple partnerships and relationships within its structure.

RoboWar Dreams: Global South Urbanisation and the US Military's 'Revolution in Military Affairs'.

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:37:00 GMT

Miscellaneous S. Graham 2007 Working Paper No. 20 (series 2), 2007, London, UK; Crisis States Research Centre, 27 pp. This article seeks to open up to critical scrutiny the attempts currently being made to reengineer post-Cold War US military power to directly confront global south urbanisation. Through analysing the discourses produced by US military commentators about 'urban warfare,' and the purported military and technological solutions that might allow US forces to dominate and control global south cities in the future, the paper demonstrates that such environments are being widely essentialised as spaces that necessarily work to undermine the United States' military's high-technology systems for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The paper shows how, amid the on-going urban insurgency in Iraq, widescale efforts are being made to 'urbanise' these military systems so that US military forces can attempt to assert high-tech dominance over the fine-grained geographies of global south cities in the future. This includes an examination of how US and Israeli forces, by 2007, had already begun to implement ideas of robotised or automated urban warfare to counter the complex insurgencies in Iraq and Palestine/Israel, respectively.

Working Paper No.41. Access to Justice: The Palestinian Legal System and the Fragmentation of Coercive Power.

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Working Paper Tobias Kelly 2004 Kelly, T., Access to Justice: The Palestinian Legal System and the Fragmentation of Coercive Power, Working Paper No.41 (series 1), 2004, London, UK; Crisis States Research Centre, 24 pp. In recent years there has been an increased interest amongst development practitioners in the potential role of law in situations of violent conflict. The Middle East has increasingly become the focus of this concern. In particular, it has been claimed that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has failed to provide adequate access to the law for many Palestinians, and has instead ruled through patronage and violence. In this context the PNA has been the site of repeated calls for legal reform. Legal reform is often treated as a technical question of legal procedure or as an issue of the cultural appropriateness of legal regimes. This paper takes a third approach, which stresses the political and normative aspect of legal processes. It argues that, in order to understand the obstacles to positive legal development in situations of political transition, it is necessary to discover the ways in which legal practices are understood, used and abandoned in particular contexts. In a context where law has no absolute moral value, but is attractive for the substantive claims that can be made through it, people are willing to use whatever resources are available to them in order to enforce the tangible benefits of legal claims. This opens up the law for political manipulation, and encourages what might be called 'legal patrimonialism', whereby legal entitlements are distributed according to political resources, rather than legal procedures. The paper concludes by arguing that in the context of the West Bank the promotion of effective legal processes should not be seen as a short cut to a stable political regime. Accountable legal processes require centralised, strong and stable coercive support, based in a measure of organisational cohesion and territorial sovereignty.

Drought paper for WANA Ministerial Meeting

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Completed Six multilateral agencies are sponsoring a meeting to be held in Morocco on June 25 - 26 2001, on ,Opportunities for Sustainable Investment in Rainfed Areas of West Asia and North Africa,, to which the Ministers of Planning/Finance, Agriculture and Environment of each of 14 countries in the region will be invited. The objectives of the meeting are: To provide a forum for interactions between policy makers and donor agencies to identify opportunities for collaboration that seek to increase the flow of resources to optimise the productivity from dryland areas, to reduce rural poverty and vulnerability to drought, and to arrest desertification To sensitise the Ministers of Planning or Finance, Agriculture, and the Environment, in addition to the donor community, to the potential opportunities for investing in the dryland ecosystems of the region, and to the economic and social costs of further neglecting these fragile landscapes To reach a better understanding of the policy environment, including the institutional and regulatory framework. To increase the allocation of domestic resource directed at the infrastructure base of drylands, and to meet the growing demands of the local population living there. To share experiences and transfer knowledge between countries and across institutions. A preparatory meeting of senior civil servants has already been held in Cairo on May 13 -14. Six thematic papers will be presented on: policy issues, technological and institutional experiences in the region (3 papers), carbon sequestration and drought management An NRI researcher was contacted on behalf of the Global Mechanism for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (the GM), one of the sponsoring agencies, to prepare and present the paper on drought management at the Cairo and Morocco conferences. Only token funding for this task was available from the GM. To increase awareness of important issues in drought management
a) among the WANA countries
b) among multilateral donors and in particular the Global Mechanism for the UNCCD
The issues concerned derive in good measure from previous DFID-funded work (ZW0027), and include in particular:
the interconnections between government-level drought management and farmers' and herders' livelihood strategies in the drylands
the importance of mainstreaming drought concerns in sectoral-level agricultural policies,
the interlocking of drought management, programmes to combat desertification, and overall good development practice in rainfed areas.
The unique roles of the Global Mechanism as a facilitator for donor funding of activities relating to the UNCCD (which it understands in a broad sense) makes it a particularly useful channel for disseminating findings on drought management and its broader ramifications. Final draft of paper to be presented 25-26.06.01

Transboundary water resources management: Using the law to develop effective national water policy for transboundary watercourse States

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Completed A TWS faces serious challenges in assessing the quantity and quality of shared waters it is entitled to receive from, or obliged to provide to, other TWS. The governing rule of international water law - ,equitable and reasonable utilisation, - requires that all ,relevant factors, be considered in determining the legal entitlement and obligations of a TWS. The problem is how this rule should be applied at the national level, in order to provide guidance for a TWS in devising a coherent national water strategy. This is especially important where TWS do not have an agreed framework for allocation regarding the use of their shared waters. This project seeks to operationalise ,equitable and reasonable utilisation, through a practice-oriented and interdisciplinary approach in the context of 3 different scenarios: upstream (China), downstream (Mozambique) and shared groundwater (Palestine) cases. The LAM will provide a mechanism by which all relevant factors can be identified and evaluated within a framework consistent with a TWS's legal rights and obligations. This will provide a TWS with a tool, which can be used to determine its ,equitable and reasonable use,of shared waters at the national level. This task requires combined legal, economic and hydrological input, in both the design and application of the LAM. The core activities of the project will include devising a methodology that identifies the data needed to quantify the ,relevant, factors, developing guidelines for the collection, processing and assessment of that data, and testing this approach in 3 case studies. The overall objective of the project is to develop a generic LAM, capable of being used by any TWS. The Dundee Water Law and Policy (WLPP) programme has had numerous requests from national governments, the private sector, international organisations, donor agencies and NGOs to assist States with the development of their international and national water law strategy. The recurrent and most difficult issues relate to the identification of the rights and obligations of a TWS regarding its transboundary waters, especially at the national level. These issues are identified in the DFID White Paper and ,Water Crisis, Strategy Paper. Similar issues arose out of the 1999 DFID KaR project R7327. Over the past 3 years, the Dundee WLPP has responded to requests by the World Bank, DFID, SIDA, GTZ, DANIDA, NATO, UNEP, UNECE, among others, for water law and policy expertise in Belarus, Cambodia, China, Ghana, Latvia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Russia, Tanzania, Thailand (for Mekong River Commission), Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia.. Interested private sector companies include Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux, Severn Trent International, and Rio Tinto. To develop a generic interdisciplinary operational protocol - a legal assessment model (LAM) - to assist a transboundary watercourse state (TWS) to determine its rights and obligations regarding the use of its shared international freshwater. Generic Logical Assistance Model (LAM).

Final report with results of 3 case studies.

Enhanced local capacity/expertise.

Proposed follow-on activities for further application of the LAM at the national level.