POWER AND LIFE QUALITY IN ETHIOPIAUpdate 7 April 2009: Two new papersWeD Ethiopia was one of the four country teams in the ESRC Research Group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) which was based at the University of Bath in the UK between October 2002 and September 2007. The purpose of the research programme was to develop a coherent conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the social and cultural construction of well-being in specific developing societies. The framework was developed through exploratory empirical research in four countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand. While the Group is no longer working together on a common project the ideas and methods which we developed are being taken forward by Group members in a number of different ways.
The research conducted by the Ethiopia WeD group built on survey and protocol research conducted in the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey sites between 1989 and 2000, enabling us to make an extremely rich longitudinal mixed method and multi-level database. To date analysis and interpretation of some of the data has produced a number of academic papers, a book chapter, policy papers and policy briefings, many of which are available on this site. Work continues on analysing the data and writing.
The Research in Ethiopia
'Wellbeing' or life quality has three aspects: objective or universal, relative or local, and subjective or personal. One of the major goals of the research in Ethiopia was to develop ways of assessing and evaluating these sometimes competing dimensions, in order to establish the shapes of local patterns of life quality. A second major goal was to understand and explain these patterns in terms of the histories and dynamics of inter-penetrating global, country, community and household power structures and cultural repertoires, and the actions and interactions of people occupying different culturally-influenced roles in the power structures.As a challenge to conventional approaches to the study of development the overarching research goal of the WeD programme was to develop 'a conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the social and cultural construction of wellbeing' in any empirical context, to produce it through a process of iteration between conceptual framework and empirical evidence mediated by the developing methodological framework, and to demonstrate its value by using it to produce empirical studies of the four countries. One of the aims of the Ethiopia research programme was to develop and disseminate new kinds of qualitative instrument to study life quality in development contexts in order to offer a rigorous, theoretically-grounded and ‘bottom-up’ alternative to the current heavy reliance on household surveys and regression analyses. We adopted an exploratory strategy to produce a structured database allowing investigation and comparison of the experiences of communities, households and people, through which key personal, local and universal wellbeing issues could be identified. The resulting database can be used to address a wide range of questions relating to the collective wellbeing of communities and households and the objective, relative and subjective life quality of individuals.
The Research Team
Over the five years the Ethiopia WeD Research team included social anthropologists, sociologists, economists, a geographer and a psychologist. The fieldwork phase involved over 50 Research Officers for shorter or longer periods. We conducted our initial Resources and Needs Survey in June/July 2004 in collaboration with economists from the Department of Economics at AAU, IFPRI (Washington) and the CSAE at the University of Oxford.Links to Policy and Practice
Development research should be designed, conducted and disseminated in dialogue with policy-makers and practitioners; this belief guided the design of our launching workshop (February 2003) and our networking practices which included regular meetings with donors and an e-network. One module in our first fieldwork endeavour, conducted in 20 rural sites between July and September 2003, investigated local implementation and experiences in fifteen policy areas. We have completed case-based analyses of (1) power structures and agency and (2) the causes of extreme poverty using our rural multi-method data, and have also prepared two policy-related pieces of work on migration and labour markets (World Bank) and rural-urban linkages and migration (Irish Aid). We recently presented a data-based paper on the causes of economic poverty and inequality to an Inter-Africa Group symposium attended by government and NGO officials.
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Updated: 07-Apr-2009
