Power and Popular Politics
Using a power lens on all our work, we examine popular forms of contestation in particular of non-elites.
We seek to pioneer new ways of working with community, activist, academic and professional co-researchers from both the global North and South, using qualitative, ethnographic and action research.
The Power and Popular Politics Cluster focuses on:
- Critically engaging with voice, accountability and citizenship in conventional and newer spaces, including the interface between the online/offline
- Exploring through a post-civil society lens organised and non-organised, violent and peaceful social and political action and unruliness
- Redressing intersecting inequalities with groups rendered invisible by systems of governmentality
- Investigating the mechanisms of social change arising from global crises and local responses seen through a moral economy lens.
Key contacts
Team Members
Accountability for Health Equity Programme
Since the publication of the 2004 World Development Report a range of different attempts have been made to make the design, prioritisation and delivery of health services more accountable to different stakeholders. However, complex politics and power dynamics can limit or skew people's abilities to access services or hold them to account, particularly for poor and marginalized people. More details
Coptic Culture Conservation Collective
The Coptic Culture Conservation Collective initiative will create a narrative and visual archive of contemporary Coptic intangible cultural heritage. More details
Poverty, Politics, and Participatory Methodologies in SDC
This Collaboration with the Quality Assurance (QA) Programme of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) is now in its second phase, running until December 2018. The aim of the program is to improve the quality and effectiveness of SDC processes and operations focused on poverty. More details
Unequal Voices: The Politics of Accountability for Equity in Health Systems
The Unequal Voices project - Vozes Desiguais in Portuguese - examines the politics of accountability in health systems in Brazil and Mozambique, exploring how accountability can be used to deliver better health services for citizens everywhere. More details
Innovative Ways in Supporting Decentralised and Democratic Local Governance
The aim of this cooperation with the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation is to strengthen their Democratisation, Decentralisation and Local Governance Network's understanding, learning, and policy engagement in decentralised and democratic local governance. More details
Diálogo
IDS is the external monitoring, evaluation and learning partner for Diálogo, a programme which aims to contribute to improved governance and accountability for Mozambican citizens. More details
Citizen Engagement Programme (CEP)
An empowerment and accountability programme aimed at improving the quality of health and education services in Mozambique. More details
Making All Voices Count
Making All Voices Count: A Grand Challenge for Development (MAVC) is a four-year $45 million fund to support innovation, scaling-up, and research that will deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness. More details
Youth in Fragile Settings
This project aims to build an evidence base that maps the role young people – particularly young women – have played in contributing to processes that sought to or did address fragility as well as examine gaps and challenges with the ultimate aim of increasing the voice and participation of young people around the world. More details
Brazil and International Development Cooperation
Brazil is a founding member of the BRICS group, Latin America's largest economy and the world's sixth-largest economy. The Rising Powers in International Development (RPID) programme is looking at Brazil's growing role in the field of international development cooperation. More details
Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility
Researching the impacts of, and responses to, volatile food prices in poor communities in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Vietnam and Zambia. More details
Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency
The Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency (PVCA) project is an action research project designed by researchers at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and carried out with a number of institutional partners. More details
Food Riots and Food Rights
The objective of this research is to improve the prospects for accountability for food security at a time of volatility. This will be achieved through an exploration of the proposition that recent popular mobilisation around food has activated public accountability for hunger. More details
Participatory Approaches to Quality Assurance
This collaboration between IDS and the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) aims to bring appropriate participatory methods into quality assurance within SDC. It will also bring new levels of rigour to the principles of participation, poverty orientation and empowerment in the work of SDC and its partners. More details
Accountability at Local Level in Fragile Contexts
This collaborative project between IDS and HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation (HSI) was designed to contribute to learning on accountability initiatives in fragile contexts by exploring the dynamics and enabling factors within three ongoing accountability projects. More details
Capacity Collective
Exploring and addressing the challenges facing capacity development to bring about change in a purposeful way More details
The Social Impacts of Crisis
How have people and communities experienced recent global economic shocks? In early 2009, the Social Impacts of Crisis project started work in 12 community 'listening posts' in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Yemen and Zambia to answer this question. More details
Reflective Practice and Organisational Learning and Change
Deepening individual and collective self-awareness of how our knowledge and values shape our relationships with others More details
Capacity Building for the establishment of an MA in Gender and Development at Cairo University, Egypt
To support Cairo University in establishing and offering a full one-year accredited Professional Diploma or MA in Gender Studies. More details
How can healthcare be more equitable and accountable in Mozambique?
16 Nov 2016By Jennifer Constantine
Don’t tell Jamie! Sugar and snacks down to economics not poor choices
04 Apr 2016By Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert
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