1. What is the Structures research
2. The conceptual rationale for Structures research
3. How it contributes to WeD research
4. Description
5. How it was developed
6. How it was implemented
7. Potential analysis
8. Links to other research tools
9. Further reading

1. What is the Structures research

This area of research relates the wellbeing outcomes and processes observed to national systems and features (and to a certain extent regional and other sub-national features). It locates the research sites within national and global structures of power, exchange and information. It also highlights how actors within the research sites mediate between the households and outside organizations, including government, business and civil society. The structures work draws particularly on the framework for analysing insecurity and regimes developed to analyse developing countries by Gough, Wood, Bevan and others (2004). The data for this component is mainly secondary and includes both quantitative and qualitative data. It is gathered in reference to: the community profiles ; ‘the process research’ ; and the identification of key community actors in the RANQ. This allows our understanding of structures to be connected across the different levels.

2. Conceptual rationale for Structures – the welfare regime approach

A range of macro theories of how global and national structures influence individual wellbeing outcomes have informed the structures research. These include:

• Theories of divergent evolution of welfare and (in)security regimes (Gough, Wood, Barrientos, Bevan, Davis and Room, 2004).
• Theories of social exclusion/inclusion developed to explain persistent inequality and poverty in countries with a history of racialised-class stratification (Figueroa, Altamirano, and Sulmont, 2001)

The approach we adopt draws heavily on the insecurity and welfare regimes framework developed to analyse developing countries by Gough, Wood, Bevan and others (2004). In conceptual terms this contributes to the developing critique of the ‘Washington consensus’ and the idea that there exists one linear path of economic development. Instead it posits distinct paths of development in different countries and regions, which constitute persistent and distinct welfare regimes. There is a close link here with the model of Sigma society and social exclusion developed by Figueroa, Altamirano and colleagues in the Peruvian WeD research team. See WeD Working Paper No5 and WeD Working Paper No24

3. How it contributes to WeD research

The overall goal is to provide a national and regional context for our detailed studies of communities, households and individuals. The structures research forms an integral part of the WeD research by contextualising the generation of wellbeing and illbeing at the local level. More specifically:

i. It explores the mutually reinforcing relation between structures and processes, a key assumption of the structuration framework which informs WeD. It also explores when this reproduction dynamic breaks down to allow new relationships to emerge.
ii. It relates both processes and structures at the local community level through intermediate levels to the national and supra-national level. It thus contributes to the dialogue between the local and the universal and the local and the global.
iii. In studying processes it links outcomes to actions.

In addition, it investigates the way that supra-community structures shape the agency and outcomes of the people, households and communities we are studying. But also how the activities of actors, especially key actors, in the communities mediate between the households and communities and the wider structures (this draws from our qualitative work).

4. Description

The structures work comprises of two interrelated phases:

i. Macro data collection: compile national and sub-national statistics on needs and resources in the four countries using published statistics from government, other official agencies and some external agencies (e.g. UN and World Bank).

ii. Research into structures using the model of welfare/insecurity regimes which has been adapted to a wellbeing perspective

The regime’s model has been reoriented towards a wellbeing perspective. This has informed the collection of secondary national and sub-national quantitative data from a variety of sources including primary qualitative data from the WeD research (e.g. community profiles and process research) on the following components.

• From welfare outcomes to wellbeing outcomes: Moving beyond the collection of data on poverty, insecurity and components of need satisfaction towards a focus on the three dimensions of WeD’s definition of wellbeing. These are: ‘resources retained, acquired, or lost’, ‘needs met or denied’, and people’s experiences and evaluations of these processes (i.e. the quality of life achieved. This captures the objective, subjective and relational dimensions of wellbeing.

• From a welfare/rectification mix to a wellbeing mix: Moving beyond the collection of data on ‘welfare’ provided by actors within the state, market, community and household towards an in-depth analysis of the institutional arena or landscape in which people seek to secure livelihoods and wellbeing. This is where resources are instantiated and negotiated, and values and meanings are attributed to resources. This data will facilitate the analysis of relationships and understanding of the diverse strategies people use to pursue wellbeing. Specific emphasis is given to the role of social and cultural resources which tend be neglected in mainstream structural approaches to poverty and livelihoods.

• Reproduction consequences: stratification outcomes and political mobilisations: Data is collected on inequality, stratification and social exclusion and is supplemented by more qualitative information on the organisation and political mobilisation of different interest groups-elite, non elite and external. A wellbeing perspective recognises that these are two different processes emerging from the interaction within the wellbeing mix as a consequence of improved or reduced wellbeing outcomes. It also facilitates an elaboration of the different ways a society can be stratified that go beyond ‘inequality’ to result in ‘illbeing’ by recognising additional forces that exclude, exploit, dominate and destroy (Bevan et al, 2006).

• From basic institutional structures to wellbeing conditioning factors: Data collected on the broader factors that enable and constrain what people can or cannot do. This includes how the country is positioned in the world economy, the nature of the state and how this affects the political organisations and mobilisations described above. These can also be described as the generators and rectifiers of insecurity and illfare. Specific attention is given to the overarching impact of ‘culture’ which influences and is embedded within dynamics across the wellbeing mix and overall pursuit of wellbeing outcomes.

5. How it was developed

To accomplish the first phase of this research, data collection was focused on collecting identical indicators across all countries. The decision on what data to collect was framed around three things:

• The research goals and questions of WeD
• What data is available and at what cost (in terms of time and money)
• The advice of the national teams on what is important and what measures best capture the target variable

The data collection focused on national and sub-national data. We decided against collecting data below these levels as it was not always consistently available through our sites and/or was not available for the years required.

The second phase of the research constituted the main component of the structures work. The welfare regime model was used to inform what type of data should be collected (see point 4). Throughout, consideration was given to the feasibility of specific items with careful consultation with the country teams. This secondary data was supplemented by qualitative data from other WeD research, particularly the community profiles and the process research to connect the national level structures with community level realities.

6. How it was implemented

As described above, the nature of the data collected required that most of the research for the structures work was desk based and ongoing throughout the project.

A senior and a junior researcher in each of the four countries with expertise in the area were given responsibility for managing the process of data collection in their respective country with careful collaboration with two researchers based at Bath. The country teams were also responsible for investigating the reliability and availability of the data.

Where national and sub-national data was available internationally (i.e. online), the Bath based researchers collected the required data. When unavailable, the country teams were responsible for collecting the required data and sending it to Bath. Data was stored electronically in Microsoft excel where possible. Other non-numerical secondary data was also stored in hard copy and electronically in PDF (where possible). Throughout this continuous data collection exercise, connections were made with our other primary research strands (e.g. RANQ, community profiles, process research, quality of life and income and expenditure).

7. How can it be analysed?

The structures data permits analysis a) within a site, b) across sites of the same country, e.g. by rural and urban areas, and c) across the four countries. Below are some research questions that the structures work can enable us to address:

• How do structures at the national and sub-national level manifest themselves within the communities? What impact do they have on the distribution of need satisfiers and meeting basic needs?
• How well do local conceptions of wellbeing map onto universal models of wellbeing?
• How far do wider insecurity and welfare regimes explain inequalities in wellbeing? What institutions are involved in the reproduction of poverty?
• What structures explains discrepancies between objective and subjective wellbeing?
• What forms of intervention at the macro level are altering the wellbeing mix which directly improve/decrease wellbeing outcomes?
• What structural reforms are in place (or not) that reform and reshape the institutional conditions within each of the four countries (e.g. market reforms, governance)?
• What interventions are necessary to enable groups to mobilise and influence governance structures to improve the wellbeing mix’s ability to improve wellbeing outcomes?

8. Links to other research tools

The structures data allows us to contextualise the community level empirical research in the four countries (recorded in RANQ, Income and Expenditure surveys, Community Profiles and the QoL research) at the national and sub-national level. It supports elements of RANQ by situating access and use of resources in the wider picture. This is further elaborated in the findings emerging from the Income and Expenditure work. It also helps to identify how particular actors (highlighted in RANQ) within the communities are connected to wider structures. It has critical bearing on the process research by demonstrating how processes are influenced by structures which in turn shape the perceptions of needs, resource distribution and influence the outcome of different processes. It also assists in providing explanations for people’s aspirations and goals revealed in the QoL research.

9. Further reading

Altamirano, A., Copestake, J., Figueroa, A. and Wright, K. (2003) “Poverty studies in Peru: towards a more inclusive study of exclusion”, WeD Working Paper 5, University of Bath. www.welldev.org.uk/research/workingpaperpdf/wed05.pdf

Bevan, P., Pankhurst, A. & Holland, J. (2006) “Power and poverty in Ethiopia: four case studies”, Paper prepared for the World Bank Poverty Reduction Group, http://www.eeaecon.org/Papers%20presented%20final/Wed%20Team%20Session/Phillipa%20Bevan%20-%20Power,%20Poverty%20and%20Wealth.htm

Copestake, J. (2006) “Poverty and Exclusion, Resources and Relationships: Theorising the Links Between Economic and Social Development”, WeD Working Paper 24, University of Bath. http://www.welldev.org.uk/research/workingpaperpdf/wed24.pdf

Gough, I. and McGregor J A. In press, (2007) Wellbeing in Developing Countries: New Approaches and Research Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gough, I. McGregor, J.A. and Camfield, L. (2006) “ Wellbeing in Developing Countries: Conceptual Foundations of the WeD Programme”, WeD Working Paper 19., University of Bath. www.welldev.org.uk/research/workingpaperpdf/wed19.pdf

Gough, I., Wood, G., Barrientos, A., Bevan, P., Davis, P. and Room, G.(eds.) (2004). Insecurity and welfare regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
McGregor, J. A. (2006) “Researching Wellbeing: from Concepts to Methodology”, WeD Working Paper 20., University of Bath. www.welldev.org.uk/research/workingpaperpdf/wed20.pdf

Newton, J. (forthcoming) Structures, regimes and wellbeing (forthcoming WeD working paper)

Wood, G. and Gough, I. (2006) “A comparative welfare regime approach to global social policy”, World Development 34 (10), 1696-1712

Wood, G. and Newton, J. (2005) “From welfare to wellbeing regimes: engaging new agendas”, Paper presented at the World Bank Social Development Division conference on ‘New Frontiers of Social Policy: Development in a globalizing world’, Arusha Tanzania, Dec 12-15, 2005 http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/fromwelfaretowellbeing.pdf