Publications

From “medical miracles” to normal(ised) medicine : AIDS treatment, activism and citizenship in the UK and South Africa

IDS working papers;252

This paper compares and contrasts the cultures of activism and illness and treatment experiences of UK and South African AIDS activists. By the 1990s AIDS public health discourse in the UK, and elsewhere in the West, was reconfiguring AIDS as a manageable chronic illness that could be treated...

Unpacking rights and wrongs : do human rights make a difference? : the case of water rights in India and South Africa

IDS working papers;260

This paper focuses on why poor and marginalised people still lack access to economic, social and cultural rights (also known as positive rights), despite a fairly mainstream support to positive rights in mainstream development debates. In part this is due to the problematic division between...

Rights passages from “near death” to “new life” : AIDS activism and treatment testimonies in South Africa

IDS working papers;251

The paper investigates how the moral politics of AIDS activism in South Africa are contributing towards new forms of biological/health citizenship (Petryna 2002) that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness...

Contentious politics, contentious knowledges : mobilising against GM crops in India, South Africa and Brazil

IDS working papers;256

Debates about science and technology are central to the future of development. No recent controversy has highlighted this as much as the debates about genetically-modified (GM) crops. Looking at the experiences of anti-GM activism in India, South Africa and Brazil, this paper explores how...

Gendered health systems biased against maternal survival : preliminary findings from Koppal, Karnataka, India

IDS working papers;253

In this paper we outline the context of pregnant women’s lives and the plural health systems they encounter in Koppal, the most deprived district in the state of Karnataka, south India. We combine preliminary survey findings with qualitative work to illustrate the dynamics involved in...

Subsidy or self-respect? : community led total sanitation ; an update on recent developments

IDS working papers;257

Community Led Total Sanitation, or CLTS, is an approach which facilitates a process of empowering local communities to stop open defecation and to build and use latrines without the support of any external hardware subsidy. Since the approach was first pioneered in Bangladesh in 1999 CLTS has...

The case for international labour standards : a “Northern” perspective

IDS working papers;250

The last few decades have seen heated debates over the issue of international labour standards. As governments sign up to international trade agreements, some of their constituencies call for the inclusion of labour agreements that would oblige them to abide by certain standards protecting...

Governance hybrids : pro-poor, rights-based approaches in rural Peru

IDS working papers;240

How do we understand the hybrid forms of governance that occasionally emerge when rights-based approaches (RBA) are introduced into contexts of extreme poverty? Poverty is multidimensional, and any attempt to respond to poverty must offer internally consistent responses to each of the...

State courts and the regulation of land disputes in Ghana : the litigants’ perspective

IDS working papers;241

The majority of land in Ghana is still held under a diversity of customary tenures, embedded in family, community and chiefly institutions; but land disputes may be adjudicated in a variety of institutions: informal arbitrations and family tribunals, chiefs’ courts, quasi-legal state...

Making property rights accessible : social movements and legal innovation in the Philippines

IDS working papers;244

Today, many rural poor Filipinos are using state law to try to claim land rights. In spite of the availability of a much heftier set of specialised legal resources than ever before, however, claiming legal land rights remains extremely difficult. Pro-market scholars cite difficult legal...

id21 Market Research Report: India

Building on a pilot market research activity in Kenya in March 2004, this trip was one of a series of field visits to meet development practitioners, policy-makers and researchers in their working environment, to find out how research materials are used and accessed in those countries.

Famine Intensity and Magnitude Scales: A Proposal for an Instrumental Definition of Famine

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Ambiguities in current usage of the term 'famine' have had tragic implications for response and accountability in a number of recent food crises. This paper proposes a new approach to defining famine based on the use of intensity and magnitude scales, where 'intensity' refers to the severity of...

Stephen Devereux