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The Centre for the Future State is one of four DFID funded research consortiums which will be closing this year. In response DFID are hosting a two day conference at the National School of Government, Sunningdale, to synthesise the research findings of all four programmes and demonstrate how each programme has improved knowledge and understandfing of issues important to governance.
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What DFID says...
Effective aid depends on whether and how governments, leaders, and citizens work together in developing countries to fight poverty and build peace and prosperity – it depends on governance. A new DFID synthesis report, The Politics of Poverty: Elites, Citizens and States, shows how research from four major DFID-funded research programmes that are closing this year is changing academic and policy thinking on governance.
Governance has a profound effect on the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable: the inability of government institutions to prevent conflict, provide basic security, or basic services can have life-or-death consequences; lack of opportunity can prevent generations of families from lifting themselves out of poverty; and the inability to grow economically and collect taxes can keep countries trapped in a cycle of aid-dependency. Governance also matters for donors: understanding the political and economic actors and institutions that promote or oppose change has often made the difference between success and failure of development interventions.
The Citizenship, Accountability and Participation Programme (http://www.drc-citizenship.org/) and the Centre for the Future State (http://www2.ids.ac.uk/futurestate/); the Crisis States Research Centre (http://www.crisisstates.com/) and the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (http://www.crise.ox.ac.uk/), funded by DFID over the past ten years have made some major findings about governance, including:
- Security is a precondition for development; this is a matter of survival and must be prioritised in countries recovering from conflict. There can be trade offs between maintaining the stability of states and achieving development outcomes. Understanding and managing these tensions will be crucial to achieving the MDGs.
- Conflict is three times more likely in countries where there are high levels of inequality between different ethnic and religious groups. So it will be important that in countries where there is a high risk of conflict, aid is invested in ways that takes into account the role of inequality in making conflict more likely.
- Citizen engagement in development is more important than previously thought. It helps to get better outcomes in terms of service provision, and contributes to building more effective and accountable states. Even in the least democratic societies, and in conflict-affected countries, local associations and groups find spaces to promote development.
- Effective taxation policiesare crucial to building effective and responsive states and provide a critical path out of aid dependence.
- The way economic growth really happens in developing countries may not fit the current blueprints recommended by donors.
Finally, these programmes have shown the value of networks involving research institutions in developed and developing countries, building the capacity of Southern researchers and engaging with policymakers and practitioners.
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People can follow updates on the findings on twitter by using the hashtag #politicsofpoverty - the link is: http://twitter.com/search?q=%23PoliticsofPoverty OR the R4D twitter channel http://twitter.com/R4Dlatestfrom
DFID's R4D website has a webpage active - click for more...
DFID website - http://www.dfid.gov.uk/politicsofpoverty
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