Caroline Moser

The asset vulnerability framework: Reassessing urban poverty reduction strategies

In an electric can opener, there is provided a handle with a cutter which may be readily attached or removed. On finishing the opening of a can, the handle is automatically displaced to switch open the supply source so that the motor stops. A push button of a switch for driving the motor can be readily and securely assembled with the can opener housing. A can pushing spring is provided so that the rotation torque for starting a can rotating roller is small. Moreover, taking apart and assembling of the electric can opener may be easily and securely done.

Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training

1. Introduction 2. Gender roles, the family and the household 3. Practical and strategic gender needs and the role of the state 4. Third World policy approaches to women in development 5. Towards gender planning 6. The institutionalization of gender planning 7. Operational procedures for implementing gender policies, programmes and projects 8. Training and strategies for gender planning 9. Towards an emancipation approach

Gender mainstreaming since Beijing: a review of success and limitations in international institutions

The Beijing Platform for Action prioritised gender mainstreaming as the mechanism to achieve gender equality. A decade later policy makers and practitioners are debating whether this has succeeded or failed. This article aims to contribute to this debate by reviewing progress made to date through a review of gender mainstreaming policies in international development institutions. Categorising progress into three stages - adoption of terminology putting a policy into place and implementation - the article argues that while most institutions have put gender mainstreaming policies in place implementation remains inconsistent. Most important of all the outcomes and impact of the implementation of gender mainstreaming in terms of gender equality remain largely unknown with implications for the next decade?s strategies. (authors)

Urban Violence and Insecurity: An Introductory Roadmap

IN 1992, WHILE I was living once again in the suburbios (low-income settlements) in Guayaquil, Ecuador, local community members explained to me how serious a problem local violence had become in their daily lives. Violent robbery on buses was so ubiquitous that, over a six-month period, one in five women had been attacked by young men armed with knives, machetes or hand guns. The streets were no longer safe after dark, so girls and young women were dropping out of night school, exacerbating their social isolation. The cost of upgrading housing had expanded to include security grilles on windows, and doors designed to deter burglars. Certainly, there had always been known ladrones (robbers). These had been pointed out to me when I first lived there in 1978 – mainly young men, often also marijaneros (marijuana smokers). But in those days, they never burgled in their own neighbourhood. Although houses with their split cane walls were vulnerable to break-ins, local community social capital was strong enough to hound out wellknown criminals if they got too close for comfort. Of course, there was always violence inside the household, particularly men beating up their wives and partners, especially when they were drunk. But this was accompanied by silent fear that prevented women from addressing the problem either individually or collectively. Over the 15-year period, however, the nature of the violence had changed considerably. So 1992 was my real introduction to urban violence as a development constraint that eroded the assets of the poor and affected their livelihoods and well-being. Like many others writing in this volume, my background is not in criminology, social work or psychology – three of the disciplines traditionally most associated with violence as an issue of individual criminal pathology. Rather, I am an urban anthropologist. In the past decade, as lethal violence and its associated fear and insecurity have been recognized increasingly as a critical problem in urban areas, so the range of researchers, policy makers and practitioners focusing on this issue has expanded. Today, economists, political scientists, transport planners, architects and NGO community workers, among others, all grapple with the ubiquitous presence of urban violence in their work in cities. Despite the growing attention to urban violence, we are faced with an important contradiction. On the one hand, we are still on a slow learning curve. This is reflected in the fact that this is the first volume of Environment and Urbanization devoted solely to this issue – although there have been notable self-standing articles in earlier issues. On the other hand, as we seek to comprehend the complex, multi-layered nature of violence, the phenomenon itself is not static. Along with newer preoccupations, such as globalization, post 9/11 fears and insecurities, international migration and “failing” states, not to mention long-term difficulties of exclusion, poverty and inequality, the face of urban violence itself is also rapidly, dramatically changing. This issue of Environment and Urbanization seeks to understand better the phenomenon of urban violence and insecurity, to document the causes, costs and consequences, and to highlight community-based innovative solutions to the problem. This introduction, therefore, has the challenge of simultaneously reconciling these two aspects – it needs to provide a basic roadmap of urban violence as a background to the papers in this volume – while also highlighting some of the concerns raised in the articles themselves. These include new insights into long-known violence-related problems, as well as newer “cutting-edge” issues.

The Construction of an Asset Index Measuring Asset Accumulation in Ecuador

Development economists have increasingly advocated using assets to complement income and consumption-based measures of welfare and wealth in developing countries, and thus to extend our understanding of the multi-dimensional character of poverty and the complexity of the processes underlying poverty reduction. The objective of this technical paper is to contribute to the debate about the measurement of assets, and the development of asset indices. It describes the particular methodology developed to construct an asset index based on a longitudinal panel data set from Guayaquil, Ecuador. It then outlines its application in terms of the different components of the asset index, before concluding by identifying several continuing methodological problems.

The Urban Poor in Latin America

With three quarters of its population living in cities, Latin America is now essentially an urban region. Higher urbanization is usually associated with a number of positives, such as higher income, greater access to services, and lower poverty incidence, and, Latin America is no exception. Today, urban poverty incidence, at 28 percent, is half that of in rural areas; extreme poverty, at 12 percent, is a third. Despite this relatively low poverty incidence, the absolute number of poor people is high, and most studies agree that about half of Latin Americas poor live in urban areas. The Banks own estimates suggest that 60 percent of the poor (113 million people) and half the extreme poor (46 million individuals) live in urban areas. The report reviews what is specifically urban about poor people living in cities, which reveals a number of facts, critical to understanding the challenges facing the urban poor, and the means to address these challenges. Three preconceived ideas are discussed, that tend to cloud judgment about urban poverty. All three spring from the common misperception that urban statistics are representative of the urban poor. However, the relatively low incidence of poverty in cities, combined with Latin Americas high inequality, imply urban statistics are almost never representative of the urban poor. Concerning the differences between urban and rural poor, the need for differentiated strategies to tackle urban as opposed to rural poverty is implied, and, the first and most important differential is the greater integration of the urban poor into the market economy. Second, while urban areas are not systematically unequal than rural areas - it depends on the country, and, within countries, on the city - they are much more heterogeneous socio-economically, or with respect to economic activities and processes. Third, heterogeneity notwithstanding, Latin American cities tend to be highly segregated. As a result, social exclusion coexists with (relative) physical proximity to wealth, services and opportunities. This gives rise to negative externalities, or neighborhood effects that result in a lower ability to access jobs, lower earnings, and lower educational achievements. Fourth, social networks are less stable in urban areas, with relationships based more on the quality of reciprocal links between individuals and friends, than on familial obligations. Fifth, urban living also means much greater exposure to organized crime, drugs and gang violence. This is true for the population as a whole, but it has particularly dismal implications for the poor living in the slums of Latin Americas large cities, where drug-traffic is now pervasive. Finally, another important characteristic of urban poverty has to do with overwhelmed, rather than absent services. The underlying hypothesis of this report is that, indeed, the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific.

Has Gender Mainstreaming Failed? A Comment on International Development Agency Experience in the South

2005 marks a decade since governments across the world signed the Beijing Platform for Action (PfA) that endorsed a policy to promote gender equality and empower women. Gender mainstreaming was identified as the most important mechanism to reach the ambitious goals laid out in the PfA. Following the lead set in Beijing, in 1997 the UN adopted gender mainstreaming as the approach to be used in all policies and programmes in the UN system. Throughout the next decade governments and civil society organisations across the world have sought to implement the PfA – and in so doing to develop successful gender mainstreaming policies, strategies and methodologies. Ten years later, practitioners around the world are asking if gender mainstreaming has succeeded; indeed some sceptics are already talking of its ‘failure’. This brief comment seeks to contribute to this complex debate by reviewing the gender mainstreaming experiences of a specific group of institutions, rather than one government or organisation. These are the so-called ‘northern’ international development agencies, both bilaterals, such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and multilaterals, such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), that have supported the so-called ‘southern’ governments and civil society in the implementation of gender mainstreaming – with analytical, institutional or financial assistance. In particular, the article mentions recent experience working for the UK Government’s Department for International Development. So although these are northern institutions their focus is international and on the developing world of the south. The constituencies that influence their practice and contests their decision are both northern activist and lobbying organisations (such as Oxfam, Christian Aid, and ACORD in the UK), as well as southern activist groups in civil society. Progress in gender mainstreaming can usefully be discussed in terms of four related stages; first, embracing the terminology of gender equality and gender mainstreaming; second, getting a gender mainstreaming policy into place; third,

Participatory urban appraisal and its application for research on violence

This paper emphasizes the importance of conducting participatory research on violence and describes the range of participatory urban appraisal tools that can be used to do so. This includes tools that can document the perceptions of poorer groups regarding the kinds of violence (economic, social or political), the extent, causes (and the links with poverty and exclusion) and consequences of violence, as well as the strategies for coping with or reducing, it. The use of these tools is illustrated with examples drawn from the findings of research on violence in 18 low-income communities in different cities in Colombia and Guatemala. The paper also outlines a conceptual framework on violence, poverty/exclusion, inequality and social capital that can help in the research design and in analyzing the findings.

Urban social policy and poverty reduction

The paper describes the differences in the ways that social and economic policy perceive poverty and its underlying causes, and thus differences in how they define it, measure it and institute mechanisms to reduce it. It also highlights the many dimensions of poverty that economic policy ignores and considers the constraints that limit the effectiveness of current poverty reduction strategies.

Violence in a Post-Conflict Context: Urban Poor Perceptions from Guatemala

The study documents how people living in poor urban communities in Guatemala perceive violence. Specifically, it identifies the categories of violence affecting poor communities, the costs of different types of violence, the effects on violence on social capital, the interventions employed by people to deal with violence, and the causes and effects of social exclusion. The study develops a violence-capital-exclusion nexus which is an analytical framework linking different types of violence both to societys capital and to the exclusion of its poor population. To incorporate the rarely heard voices of the poor, the study uses participatory urban appraisal methodology, which emphasizes local knowledge and enables local people to analyze the problems they face and identify their own solutions. Local-level recommendations for reducing violence can be summed up in terms of six priorities: Rebuild trust in the police and judicial system. Attack the problem of alcoholism. Reduce societys tolerance for intrafamily violence. Prevent the spread of drug consumption. Transform maras (violent youth gangs) from perverse to productive social organizations. Develop mechanisms to build sustainable community-based membership organizations.