Environment

An ‘Outcome Mapping’ approach was applied retrospectively to five diverse, highly collaborative research projects aimed at poverty reduction. Designed to help plan for, clarify, and document intended and actual changes in behaviour, actions, and relationships of groups and organisations that directly influence a project’s intended beneficiaries, Outcome Mapping enabled us to identify and describe the strategies and actions that played important roles in the innovations achieved.

This article reports on an ex-ante impact study in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia. The study, guided by a livelihoods approach, developed a spatial-mapping methodology based on secondary data for 18 variables which served as indicators of the five livelihood classes of assets (natural, physical, financial, social, and human). The overall livelihood-asset index showed a significant and strong negative correlation (R = –0.65, P = 0.00) with the national poverty line, with poverty peaking in districts where the assets base was lowest, and vice versa.

This article develops the ‘safety–emotion–power’ nexus and highlights the role of emotion in research by politicising the unequal power relationships between researchers and NGO staff members in defining danger and negotiating safety in their fieldwork. Drawing on the author’s research experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, it argues that research touching on emotion-laden topics can inflict stress and pain on NGO staff members and their families.

The author participated in the IUCN World Conservation Congress (5-14 October 2008), both the Forum events and pre-selected Learning Sessions, including forest carbon inventory, and multilateral negotiations. The sessions highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary approaches and of treating indigenous knowledge as seriously as rigorous hard science. The gravity of climate change was fully recognised.