Category Archives: Evaluation

‘Southern agency’ paper published by MIT Press

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A paper I co-authored with Robert Morrell and Vanessa Watson, based on the interviews I conducted at the Energy Research Centre at the University of Cape Town for the research project Global Arenas of Knowledge, was published by MIT Press’ Global Environmental Politics in August 2018.

Titled ‘Southern Agency: Navigating Local and Global Imperatives in Climate Research’ it identifies the ways in which Southern researchers’ focus on immediacy, impact and local relevance for their work may reduce their academic visibility (as measured by global citation indices for example) but that this results not just from North-South inequality or lack of resources, but conscious, activist decision-making around what forms of output and impact they prioritise as a Southern institution.

Abstract:

Researchers in the Global South are geopolitically distant from the places and people influencing global climate change debates. Their contribution in terms of academic publication is not large. Yet, by examining a South African research center, we show that these researchers negotiate their marginalization, optimize their local advantage, and navigate between national and global imperatives. Climate change requires global action and is a site of activism for Southern countries, which also face urgent developmental challenges requiring applied research. Climate change mitigation has to be addressed with attention to inequality. Our Southern soft-funded research center valued applied research and immediate policy impact over conventional peer-reviewed journal outputs. Impact assessment that relies on research metrics, such as citation counts, may miss some of the accomplishments of Southern institutions such as this one. These Southern re- searchers actively make choices and pursue agendas and are not just the victims of inadequate resourcing and Northern domination.

‘Southern Agency: Navigating Local and Global Imperatives in Climate Research’, Global Environmental Politics, MIT Press, August 2018

Open City

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On Saturday 24 August I gave a short presentation at the Open City mini-conference, responding to the prompt ‘ideas for making Cape Town a more Open City’.

Titled ‘Open Accountability’, my presentation looked at some of the work the Social Justice Coalition and its affiliates are doing to make data around municipal budgets and service delivery more available to the public, and to hold municipalities and private contractors accountable for their delivery of basic services.

Here are some references to material I showed in my presentation:

The Social Justice Coalition

Ndifuna Ukwazi

Imali Yethu

SJC report on the Khayelitsha Mshengu Toilet Social Audit

Analysis of Cape Town’s 2013/2014 Draft Budget for the Imali Yethu project by Ndifuna Ukwazi and the Social Justice Coalition.

Lungisa by Cell-Life

Also see these articles:

Shaun Russell on data-driven activism and the Khayelitsha social audit, ‘The Power of Data as evidence‘, 16 August 2013, on the Ndifuna Ukwazi website.

On the International Budget Partnership site, The Social Justice Coalition Uses Social Audit to Clean Up Sanitation Issues in Cape Town.

Service Charge Revenue

Service Charge Revenue depicted in the Imali Yethu analysis of the City of Cape Town’s Draft Budget for 2013/2014

 

Good intentions are not enough

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I was referred to the site Good Intentions by my friend Brian Gough who works for Task Furniture in Education in Cologne. Good Intentions houses critical articles and debates about the effectiveness of aid projects, aiming ‘to provide donors with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed funding decisions’. From her experiences in Thailand working on post-Tsunami aid programmes, founder Saundra Schimmelpfennig observed that:

It quickly became apparent that many poor aid practices were a result of charities trying to attract or keep donors. The donors themselves were unaware of the many misconceptions they held about aid. These misconceptions combined with the lack of easily accessible information made it almost impossible for donors to give in ways that matched their good intentions.

http://goodintents.org/about

I’m interested in that first statement, describing charities ‘trying to keep or attract donors’ – chimes in with my own analysis of the relationship of design for development projects to first world audiences, sometimes to the detriment of users.