Session 1: Development Policy and the Aid Relationship 9.00-10.30
- Giving to Development: Who Gives to Overseas Causes?
John Micklewright and Sylke V. Schnepf
- Well-being and Development Policy: Implications for Aid and Financing Public Goods
Oliver Morrissey
- Global Policy Making and the Millennium Development Goals: Muddling through or Cock-up and Conspiracy
David Hulme

Session 2: Wellbeing and development in practice (1) 14.00-15.30
- Happiness studies and outcome consciousness in international development: exploring the well-being outcomes of education.
Neil Thin
- Caste and wellbeing in India - Santosh Mehrotra
- Assessing Quality of Life: Reflections from exploratory research in Syria and Tajikistan
Dr. Nazneen Kanji

Session 3: Wellbeing and development in practice (2) 16.00-17.30
- Autonomy, critical autonomy and social learning: the place of intervention and interveners in promoting well-being
Hazel Johnson
- Autonomy and Development Projects: Why do we care?
Mirtha Muniz Castillo
-Gender mainstreaming in Ethiopia: translation of policy into practice and implications on the ground
Julie Newton
-Migration, Livelihoods and Wellbeing across Four Communities in Ethiopia
Feleke Tadele

Giving to Development: Who Gives to Overseas Causes?

John Micklewright* and Sylke V. Schnepf Email: j.micklewright@soton.ac.uk

Donations to charities working for overseas causes are an important source of funding for development assistance from rich industrialised countries. In the UK, charities of this type that are among the top 500 fundraisers received nearly £1bn in donations in 2004-5. Two-thirds of UK adults believe that international charities make a ‘major contribution’ to the reduction of poverty in developing countries. But very little is known about charitable donations to development causes. The literature on charitable giving focuses on total donations and does not identify separately the
pattern or the determinants of giving by cause. If further charitable donations are to contribute to the funding of the Millennium Development Goals, more knowledge is required of whether and how giving to development differs from giving to other causes. We investigate giving to development using UK household survey microdata that do record donations to different types of charity – in contrast to sources used in almost all the existing literature on charitable donations. We document the frequency (whether any donation is made) and the generosity (the amounts given) of giving to development, contrasting this with giving to other causes. We analyse the clustering of giving by cause: do people who give to overseas causes also give to other causes and hence does overseas giving complement or substitute domestic giving in this sense? We then present simple statistical models of the correlates of giving to development and giving to other causes, focusing on socio-economic background including education and income. The modelling strategy allows for the decision to donate to be determined in different ways from the amounts that are given by people who give.

Full paper

Well-being and Development Policy: Implications for Aid and Financing Public Goods

Oliver Morrissey
School of Economics, University of Nottingham
Email: oliver.morrissey@nottingham.ac.uk

Aid in its various facets is central to the implementation of development policy. Traditionally, aid effectiveness has been evaluated against impacts on economic performance. Recently emphasis has shifted towards impact on poverty reduction: ‘enhancing the well-being of the poor’ can now be acknowledged as an objective of aid. This paper explores implications for aid policy. Aid can improve well-being directly (through donor-managed projects), indirectly through growth (if this is in some sense pro-poor), and indirectly through aid finance for the provision of public goods (especially public expenditure on social sectors).
In this context of aid, well-being can be interpreted as increased access of the poor to public goods (especially health, education and sanitation) in addition to increasing the consumption of the poor (reducing income poverty). These may be narrow concepts of well-being, but they are appropriate to the remit of aid policy. Given a general belief that aid cannot be accurately targeted on the poor, the objective of enhancing well-being has in practice been addressed by financing social sector spending in the poorest countries or allocating aid to countries where it is most likely to benefit the poor (typically in terms of evidence that growth is in some sense pro-poor). This paper reviews experience in these two areas. First, we review existing empirical evidence for the effect of aid on human development (as a measure of well-being) and poverty indicators. There is some evidence that aid does contribute to human development, but in the poorest countries a major concern is regarding the effectiveness of public spending in increasing access of the poor to public goods. Second, we consider the issue of ‘poverty reducing aid allocation’ and related concerns of how donors have influenced poverty reduction policy. We derive implications for aid policy, and conclude by considering whose well-being is actually served through aid.

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Global Policy Making and the Millennium Development Goals: Muddling through or Cock-up and Conspiracy

David Hulme, School of Environment and Development
University of Manchester Emails to be fwd by Denise.Redston@manchester.ac.uk

This paper traces the evolution and history of the world’s biggest promise – the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s).

It then analyses the processes that converted a ramshackle bunch of US resolutions into a set of globally agreed goals that have and are being used to mobilise $US 50 billion extra per annum for global poverty reduction.

The conclusion draws lessons form this process of a theoretical and practical (what can activists learn?) nature. It also speculates on whether the long term legacy of the MDG’s will be disillusionment with the idea of international development on a global scale.

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Happiness studies and outcome consciousness in international development: exploring the well-being outcomes of education

Neil Thin, University of Edinburgh
Email:n.thin@ed.ac.uk

Analysis and assessments of well-being are essentially about ensuring that development practitioners, policy-makers and evaluators explore outcomes (health, enjoyment, and the quality of life) rather than getting stuck solely on processes (technology, infrastructure, GDP, and delivery of services). The ‘human development’ movement and the Millennium Development Goals have been associated with significant movements towards outcome-orientation. Nonetheless, efforts under these rubrics have remained largely in the middle ground between the means and the ultimate ends of development. Most emphasis has been on outputs and processes like income, schooling, and capabilities rather than on well-being. The inattention to well-being is not entirely due to mere forgetfulness: some key exponents such as Amartya Sen have even explicitly rejected ‘happiness’ as a policy rubric on moral grounds in the anti-utilitarian tradition.

This paper will explore evidence and analyse potentials for the deployment of happiness (i.e. subjective well-being) as a policy rubric in one specific ‘human development’ domain: education. This work will be linked with the ongoing DFID-funded ‘RECOUP’ research programme on educational outcomes and poverty reduction. Although happiness is not an explicit focus of that research programme, I will use the themes and provisional findings of that programme to draw out explicit links and contrasts between a ‘poverty reduction’ orientation and a ‘well-being’ orientation. I will also explore the potential for enhancing such research – and eventually for improving educational policy – through a more explicit focus on well-being. Noting that all parents want their children’s education to give them the capacity for happiness but that education policies and assessments rarely even mention happiness, I will review literature on education and happiness in relation to other kinds of educational outcome such as income, employment, creativity, fertility, health, and social development.

I will argue that aspects of well-being need to feature in development discourse in three main ways:
• as policy objectives (even if some objections to utilitarianism are accepted it is perverse not to recognize happiness as a core policy objective, among others)
• as instrumental means for achieving development (people work better and get along with other people better if they are well and happy)
• in the evaluation and outcome monitoring of development policies, programmes, and processes (we need to know how wealth and health and knowledge are enjoyed, not just how they are generated and distributed).
I will also briefly explore ways in which the Western academic boom in happiness studies, and the associated incipient attention to happiness among European and North American governments, businesses and civil society leaders, might be extended further into international development studies and policy. The dramatic rise and diversification of happiness studies since the 1970s has only recently been followed by some rather slow, cautious, and piecemeal responses by development policy analysts and development agencies. In rhetorical form, there is increasingly frequent and high-profile endorsement of the possibility that happiness (and well-being more generally) could be an important policy objective and that happiness studies might supply important information for monitoring and evaluation of policy processes and outcomes. In practice, however, there has been as yet very little systematic exploration of the opportunities and pitfalls afforded by happiness studies for would-be reformers or evaluators of policy. Nor is there as yet, in the happiness studies community, a serious movement towards adapting and expanding happiness studies in ways that would make their findings more policy-relevant. Furthermore, both happiness studies and happiness policy analysis remain largely focused on the quantitative analysis of survey results, and could be greatly improved through the addition of ethnographic and qualitative research and cultural-philosophical analysis. This paper will therefore address the ‘happiness studies’ community as well as ‘development studies’.
Neil Thin, January 2007

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Caste and Well-being in India

Santosh Mehrotra Email: santosh.mehrotra@undp.org

Well-being in India is inextricably tied up with one's caste status, with lower castes usually having worse health, nutritional and educational outcomes. Improvements in well-being have also been tied up with the mobilization of lower castes. This paper compares the outcomes of caste
mobilizations in two states of sub-continental India, one from the north (Uttar Pradesh) and another from the south (Tamil Nadu). For 15 years, Uttar Pradesh has had a movement to mobilize the 'dalits' and the other backward castes of the state. However, UP's lower castes had before the
mobilization began, and still have, the worst social indicators in the state and in the country. Earlier in the last century Tamil Nadu also experienced a mobilization of the dalits and backwards, but managed to transform the social indicators in health, nutrition, fertility and education after independence. Thus, while UP's mobilizers of the dalits have focused exclusively on capturing power, the gains to the lowest castes have been entirely of a symbolic nature. This paper, after analysing the data from two National Family Health Surveys (1992, 1999), addresses the reasons why UP's indicators of well-being, including the health and education status of the lower castes, are much worse than in Tamil Nadu - despite the lower caste mobilization over the last decade and a half.

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Assessing Quality of Life: Reflections from exploratory research in Syria and Tajikistan

Nazneen Kanji
Nazneen.Kanji@akdn.org

The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) is developing a programme to assess changes in the Quality of Life (QoL) in five countries where member organisations are engaged in area-based programmes. As part of the process to develop the methodology and indicators for Quality of Life assessments, exploratory studies, using qualitative methods, have been carried out in Syria and Tajikistan. This paper will reflect on the conceptual and methodological implications of the findings. It will, firstly, explore people’s own socially and culturally embedded perceptions of what constitutes a good quality of life, and the domains and resources that they consider important. It will disaggregate findings according to wealth, gender and generation. Secondly, it will propose an appropriate methodology to assess ‘quality of life’, arguing for combined qualitative and quantitative (or contextual and non-contextual) methods, particularly if the objective is to promote the use of findings for development policy and programming.

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Autonomy, critical autonomy and social learning: the place of intervention and interveners in promoting well-being

Hazel Johnson

Email: h.e.johnson@open.ac.uk

The conceptualisation of well-being and the methodological framework outlined by WeD researchers focuses primarily on the poor and disadvantaged. This paper focuses on a different set of actors: those who intervene to promote well-being. It takes as its starting point the ‘Theory of Human Needs’ framework of Doyal and Gough (1991) to examine whether and how interveners in development are able to exert autonomy and critical autonomy in ways that support improvements in well-being (directly or indirectly). It is argued that autonomy and critical autonomy are as important for those who intervene as for those who might benefit from intervention. Such autonomy is a fundamental part of transformative social learning in which former or dominant knowledges are challenged by experiential knowledges of ‘unwell-being’. These processes may occur directly through social engagement between interveners and poor communities, between interveners themselves, and as part of formal learning and capacity-building. The understanding and agency of interveners is a crucial link between the poor and disadvantaged and higher level policy - or between local/place-specific means and policies and global/universal goals (Gough, 2004). The paper reflects on social learning processes investigated in three earlier research projects: an examination of inter-organisational relationships in intervention on behalf of HIV/AIDS widows in Zimbabwe; an investigation into practitioner to practitioner learning in North-South local authority partnerships in UK and Uganda; and research into capacity-building through formal learning programmes in the UK and Southern Africa.

Autonomy and development projects: Why do we care?
Mirtha Rosaura MUÑIZ CASTILLO
mirtha.munizcastillo@governance.unimaas.nl

If human development is about the expansion of human capabilities (Sen, 1999) and about leading fulfilled and worthy lives, then individuals must have certain capacity to choose these lives according to their own values and goals. Moreover, this capacity must be effective. Options from which to choose have to be achievable: structural contexts must be taken into account (Nussbaum, 2000). This capacity, instrumental to enhance human development and well-being, is defined as autonomy.
This paper presents a conceptual framework of autonomy that emphasises effective over internal capacities by giving relevance t the inter-relations of individuals and groups in specific contexts that define entitlements. Then, it assesses autonomy in a specific micro-level context: a development project. Individuals’ experiences of autonomy evolve in their interaction with project staff, non-government organisations, donors, etc. and how the project came into being and was implemented.
The study draws on four development projects financed by Luxembourg in Nicaragua and El Salvador, related to infrastructure building. Data include project documents, public national reports, external statistics, key stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions and a questionnaire survey. The analysis is primarily qualitative.
The analysis suggests that studying multi-level contexts is necessary to understand experiences of autonomy, and that individuals value to be able to help themselves (Ellerman, 2001). Assumptions about what is best for people (top-down project design), which channels work best (formal vs. informal counterpart), what is participation (working hard or sharing in decision-making) or what is community (whether there is one community) can affect individual autonomy and the capacity of groups to pursue common goals.
Projects can provide people the opportunities to exercise autonomy so that they are better prepared to make initiatives and fac challenges (in light of power imbalances). Identifying autonomy as an explicit development objective can help people to be able to promote significant change and defend nd increase well-being in their lives.
Keywords
Autonomy, human development, projects, structural contexts, capabilities
Short biography:
Mirtha R. Muñiz Castillo graduated as economist at Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru. She holds a MBA from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and a MSc in Social Protection Financing from Maastricht Universty, the Netherlands.
She has been a PhD researcher at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance since April 2004. She has experience in economic and social policy analysis, financial sector and academic research, on Latin American countries.
Her PhD research examines the effects of development projects on individual autonomy of project participants, in light of a conceptual framework rooted in capabilities and human needs approaches. Her fieldwork was carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador in 2005.

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Gender mainstreaming in Ethiopia: translation of policy into practice and implications on the ground

Julie Newton
j.newton@bath.ac.uk

In spite of the growing recognition that ‘gender’ matters amongst development practitioners and institutions which have translated into efforts to ‘mainstream gender’, there has been an overall persistence and sometimes aggravation of gendered inequalities. This paper explores these contradictions in the context of Ethiopia. It is widely acknowledged that women in Ethiopia are disproportionately disadvantaged on a number of grounds. Drawing on data from four rural sites from the Wellbeing and Developing Countries ESRC Research group, this paper makes the case for a more complex analysis of gender inequalities and explores how these are embedded in the social and cultural construction of wellbeing. It begins with an investigation of the policies and interventions in place to address gender inequalities at the national level. It then explores how patterns of power at the community, household and individual level are inherently gendered in ways that have particularly negative effects on women. Specific emphasis is given to how these are legitimised through social and cultural norms. It also examines how gender inequalities are being contested at different levels. The paper then concludes with a discussion of the effectiveness of the policies and structures in place at the national level to address gendered inequalities and wellbeing.

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Migration, Livelihoods and Wellbeing across Four Communities in Ethiopia
Feleke Tadele f.tadele@bath.ac.uk

The paper argues that migration is a social process, in which many households move between rural and urban livelihood options as appropriate to their members’ needs through casual, periodic or permanent migration experiences. It capitalizes on recent perspectives on the migration-development nexus and particularly builds on the discourse of the migration –livelihood framework. It argues that although the Sustainable Livelihood Framework helps to explore the agency of migrants in a particular livelihood context, it does not take into consideration migrants’ spatial complexities and interconnections. It either focuses on rural or urban livelihoods. Building on recent studies on urban-rural linkages, the paper highlights the importance of the WeD Framework in understanding ‘wellbeing’ to provide a perspective on how the ‘same’ migration experience may have different meanings for individual migrants, migrant families or even communities of migrants in different transactions. It further argues that the WeD Framework helps to explore how meanings and values are changing with migration experiences and how these, in turn, shape the identities and wellbeing of individual migrants.

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