Naomi Hossain

Participatory research studies utilizing qualitative data drawn from large, diverse samples appear increasingly common in the social sciences, particularly in international development. This reflects demand for participatory approaches to researching human well-being at scale, comparative research on globalization and development, and breadth and scale in evidence-based policy making. “Big Qual” studies in international development increasingly combine qualitative with participatory methods and incorporate action research, oral histories, case studies, and visual methods. Apart from their scale (more sites and research participants than conventional “face-to-face” research) and diversity of contexts, these studies broadly share a focus on application, and an epistemological and ideological commitment to hearing and amplifying the voices of research participants and contributing to positive change in their lives. Some ethical challenges of Big Qual research—for example, reuse, storag...

The devastating Bhola cyclone in November 1970 is credited with having triggered the political events that led to the division of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. A callous response to the disaster by the Pakistani regime resulted in a landslide electoral victory for Bengali nationalists, followed by a bitter and bloody civil war. Yet, despite its political momentousness, the Bhola cyclone has been the subject of little political analysis. This paper examines the events, arguing that its extraordinary political significance put disaster management on the nationalist agenda; the famine of 1974 confirmed its centrality, producing a social contract to protect the population against disasters and subsistence crises on which the country's acclaimed resilience to the effects of climate change rests. The Bhola cyclone also drew international attention to this neglected, little-known region, and in general can be seen as foundational for the subsequent developmental achi...

The events of the past year should make us take a hard look at our models of international development. Are they fit for purpose as we enter the second decade of the twenty first century? What are the consequences of the status quo in terms of lives and livelihoods? ...

Summary Recent events have crystallised a view that the speed with which economic shocks are transmitted around the world has accelerated, that these shocks are increasingly multiple in source and impact, and that the risk of future shocks of this global, complex ...

At first blush, Bangladesh appears an unlikely setting for groundbreaking achievements in girls' education. More than 45 per cent of residents in this predominantly Muslim country live in poverty and less than half of adult women are literate (World Bank 2003). As recently as ...

10 Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goal Localization: A Case Study of Ha Tinh Rural Development Project in Vietnam Tran Dinh Hoa and Nguyen Thanh Tung Introduction Ha Tinh Rural Development Project (HRDP) is considered a successful project in ...

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread in 2020, the government of Bangladesh ordered a lockdown and promised a program of relief. Citizens complied at first, but soon returned to economic and social life; relief proved slow and uncertain, and citizens could not rely on government assistance. The government tacitly and then officially permitted the lockdown to end, despite a rising Covid-19 caseload. This article draws on theories about state capacity to make and enforce policy to understand why Bangladesh proved unable to sustain a lockdown deemed necessary to contain the pandemic in this densely populated, low income country. Drawing on original qualitative mobile phone-based research in six selected communities , this article examines how the state exercised its capacities for coercion, control over lower factions within political society, and sought to preserve and enhance its legitimacy. It concludes that despite a) the growth in the capacity of the Bangladeshi state in the past decade and b) strong political incentives to manage the pandemic without harm to economic wellbeing, the pressures to sustain legitimacy with the masses forced the state and its frontline actors to tolerate lockdown rule-breaking, conceding that the immediate livelihood needs of the poor masses overrode national public health concerns. Chronically unable to enforce its authority over local political elites, the state failed to ensure a fair and timely distribution of relief. The weakness of the Bangladeshi state contrasts with the strength of widely shared 'moral economy' views within society, which provided powerful ethical and political justification for cit-izens' failures to comply with the lockdown, and for officials' forbearance in its enforcement. The Covid-19 pandemic highlights both the importance of state capacity in managing novel shocks from within the global system, and the challenges in settings where weak states are embedded in strong societies.

Bangladesh is widely deemed to have made rapid progress on gender equality and women's empowerment. How to understand the apparent advances of women in a poor, populous, Muslim-majority country in the belt of classic patriarchy? This paper locates the origins of these changes in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh's struggle for independence in 1971, when a series of visible ruptures to the patriarchal bargain dramatized the ongoing crisis of social reproduction. This drew elite attention to the conditions of landless rural women, creating space for their programmatic inclusion in the political settlement, within a newly biopolitical project of national development. The paper argues that it is possible to make sense of the gains women have made as well as old and new obstacles to gender justice-including women's continuing responsibility for care-in this critical juncture in the political history of gender relations in Bangladesh.

This article sets out the thinking behind the research methodology used in the Life in a Time of
Food Price Volatility project. It sets out the key questions and aims, describes the approach, and explains
why we chose the research design we did. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology,
and concludes with reflections on the (increasingly important) question of how to research social change in a
globalising era.