Fragile Contexts Research Articles

Community-Based Initiatives and Public Services Delivery in a Fragile Context: The Case of Yemen

The collapse of public services in Yemen due to a protracted crisis raging since 2015 has compelled some local citizen-based coalitions to initiate community-based service delivery. This preliminary study identifies Community-Based Initiatives (CBIs) as non-state actors supplying basic services ordinarily provided by governmental institutions. It offers an overview of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis while focusing on public services provision pre- and mid-conflict and highlights the role of CBIs as a response to its breakdown within a severely fragile context. As this work considers CBI a societal constituent and not simply a temporary phenomenon, it discusses the general trends of Civil Society. This article fills the gap in the literature and compares the Western perspective and application of CBIs in Yemen aiming at developing a more specific and contextual conception. The analysis lays the foundation for much needed future studies on the role of informal organizations in service provision in developing countries of the Global South.

Governance Diaries: An Approach to Researching Marginalized People’s Lived Experiences in Difficult Settings

How do chronically poor and marginalized citizens interact with and make claims to the different public authorities that exist in fragile, conflict and violence-affected contexts? In other words, how does governance from below look like in difficult settings? Given the centrality of the ‘leave no one behind’ agenda, an understanding of how such populations meet their governance needs can help identify the constraints to achieving development for all in these challenging settings. We wanted to research these questions comparatively, to see if there were common features of response in different contexts, with the presence of various kinds of non-state actors, diverse histories of colonialism and authoritarianism, and widely different social norms. In this article we describe the governance diaries approach, an iterative alternative to large-n surveys and multi-sited ethnographies we developed in the process of answering these questions. Governance diaries, working as a qualitative panel data, are a suitable approach for researching complex behavior that changes over time as large-n surveys are insufficiently dynamic to trace the processes behind change (lacking sensitivity) and ethnographic studies often have limited generalizability (lacking comparability). We describe here how this approach works and the challenges and opportunities it offers for research.

Assistance to Constitutional Courts in Fragile Contexts: The Case of Mali, 2017–2022

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Cash transfers and school enrolment in a fragile context: Evidence from Northern Nigeria

Cash transfers and school enrolment in a fragile context: Evidence from Northern Nigeria

“Well-being, that word is very wide”: Understanding how teachers in Uganda define and navigate their occupational well-being

Teachers in Uganda are overstretched and exhausted. Occupational well-being—how teachers feel and function—is associated with satisfaction and retention. Yet, we know little about what teacher well-being looks like in low-resource contexts. We worked with 148 Ugandan teachers to understand how they conceptualize well-being. They described well-being as economic, social, emotional, and physical health. Female teachers were more focused on displaying (over receiving) respect while teachers working with refugee children more frequently described the need for intrinsic motivation and training. We discuss not only the broader implications for understanding TWB in other low-resource and fragile contexts but also how interventions in Uganda need to focus on the interpersonal dynamics that are more proximal to teachers’ lived experiences.

Playful perceptions: the role of and barriers to play for parents of young children in diverse global contexts

ABSTRACT While the importance of play for young children’s healthy brain development is widely recognized, the literature on the role and perceptions of play among parents of young children is largely grounded in industrialized and well-resourced contexts. As such, there remains an important need to understand the role, perception, and value of play among families in more fragile contexts and geographies, including humanitarian settings. In an effort to address this knowledge gap, this study presents findings on the role and perception of play from 825 parents and caregivers of children ages 3–8 years old from a diverse range of low-resource and humanitarian contexts. The findings here demonstrate that play has a central role in families’ lives and parents under the link between play and children’s holistic development, but that there are both individual and structural issues that limit opportunities for play and that present significant challenges to play.

Implications of Performance-based Financing Implementation for Maternal and Child Health Outcomes in Nigeria: A Scoping Review

Background: Performance-based financing (PBF) is seen as an open health system reformtailored to suit the needs of countries, even in a fragile context. It is thought to have the ability to address the strategic challenges of the sustainable development goals. This study explored the implementation of PBF in order to determine whether it improves maternal and child health outcomes in the Nigerian context.
 Methods: This was a scoping literature review of online multiple databases and programme implementation documents. Six databases and an online library were searched using 30 key words, alone and in combination using Boolean terms. Thirty articles and five implementation documents were screened. At the end, 25 published articles and five implementation documents were reviewed. An adapted World Bank PBF conceptual framework was used for the review.
 Results: We found mixed results across most of the service indicators consistent with findings in most lower, middle income countries. In both pilot states, the quality of health services, mainly technical, improved remarkably. There was improved utilisation of maternal and child health services, particularly institutional delivery, modern contraceptives and under-five vaccination. However, client dimension of quality was reportedly poor. The study found no impact of PBF on equity.
 Conclusion: Collaborative partnership to develop policy frameworks for demand-side incentives to ensure equitable access to health services and sustainability of the project is essential. We further recommend that more incentives be paid for client quality dimension.

Religious Tourist Attractions and Ecological Concerns in the Italian Dolomites: The Case of the Trekking of the Thinking Christ

The article examines the mobilisation of a local community after the creation of a religious attraction and a popular mountain trail in a protected and fragile context. Despite much research on the topic, the boundaries between spiritual or religious tourism and pilgrimage are still quite complicated. The research questions focused on the social reasons behind the growing invention and reinvention of religious places outside of liturgical celebrations and religious practices. Through a case study, the question of whether/how a religious attraction can give new meaning to a mountain tourist spot on the border of a UNESCO World Natural Heritage List Site is addressed, while also raising ecological issues.

Challenging democracy, human rights, and governance evaluation capacity development through a transformative lens

AbstractDemocracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) evaluation practice faces diverse challenges, not only because of the complexity of intervention designs and implementation but also due to the complexity of the fragile contexts in which DRG evaluation is generally applied. Evaluating in fragile contexts demands responsiveness to the complexity and provides challenges to define what capacities and competencies a DRG evaluator should have. In 2019, the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE) was funded to design a set of tools to develop individual and institutional DRG evaluation capacities in an online training course and an associated toolkit. These materials aim to advocate for more DRG evaluation for a stronger democracy, advancing human rights, and increased governance. Using a transformative lens, this chapter critically reviews the challenges and constraints faced while developing DRG evaluators’ capacities. This critical analysis of complexity with a transformative lens adds insights into the practice of evaluation in the pursuit of human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice.

ICARO—Innovative Cardboard ARchitecture Object: Sustainable Building Technology for Multipurpose Micro-Architecture

ICARO (Innovative Cardboard ARchitectural Object) is a type of innovative building technology developed by a working group at the University of Catania, within the framework of the EWAS (an Early WArning System for cultural heritage) research project. It represents a tool for used to combat climate change thanks to the high level of sustainability of its component. The modular component based on ICARO technology is a pre-fabricated panel for building vertical envelopes, consisting of a laminated wood frame that contains corrugated cardboard boxes. In order to improve the panel’s structural performance, a pre-stress procedure has been adopted. The panel is cost-effective and boasts a high level of sustainability thanks to the use of lightweight, pre-cast, recycled, and recyclable materials. This technology is suitable for the construction of micro-architecture in fragile contexts. In order to test its performance, a full-scale prototype called the EP (Experience Pavilion) was built within the Megara Hyblea archaeological area in Sicily, which was chosen as a test site. A campaign to be carried out at the EP is currently being planned, which will focus on various issues. This paper describes the design of ICARO technology and the construction of the EP prototype.

Youth Agency in Peacebuilding

AbstractMore than 600 million young people today live in economically and environmentally fragile contexts. Scholarly literature on the interconnections between these young people and religion has often portrayed them as prone to radicalization and drawn to violent extremism. Such framings, however, render invisible their potential as agents for positive change. In this article, we take a step back to consider more basic questions about the socio‐political significance of youth leadership in (inter)religious contexts for the cultivation of peace. In particular, we focus on youth, religion, and religious representations of insider and outsider “others.” In this article, we report on the youth‐focused programme Enemy, Stranger, Neighbor, Friend, aiming to contribute to understanding the complexities that youth working in conflict prevention, informal peace education, and interreligious work face and the contributions they can make.

Twenty Years of Externally Promoted Security Assistance in Iraq: Changing Approaches and Their Limits

ABSTRACT Iraq adds to the poor track record of externally promoted security assistance in conflict-affected and fragile contexts. By taking a long-term perspective, this article examines and problematizes the shift in paradigms from Security Sector Reforms (SSR) as a pillar of the liberal statebuilding intervention in Iraq to Security Force Assistance (SFA) as the remedy that the post-interventionist turn endorsed since the 2010s. In discussing this shift, the article also shows that in successive phases of externally promoted security assistance, different notions of security prevailed. As the intervention unfolded, human security instead of guiding SSR was quickly put to the side, as donors’ security (2003–2008) and later regime’s security (2009–mid 2014) prevailed. The late 2014–2019 prevalence of SFA in Iraq was instead characterized by the disjuncture of security assistance from other governance aspects in the country while it later became part of a tense geopolitical context (2020–2023). Overall, Iraq proves to be a laboratory for testing out concepts relating to security whereby external actors and factors are key to explaining the shift in security assistance, while internal local needs for security are largely ignored.

Maturity Level of Digital Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health Initiatives in Jordan and Palestine.

While there is a rapid increase in digital health initiatives focusing on the processing of personal data for strengthening the delivery of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) services in fragile settings, these are often unaccompanied at both the policy and operational levels with adequate legal and regulatory frameworks. The main aim was to understand the maturity level of digital personal data initiatives for RMNCH services within fragile contexts. This aim was performed by choosing digital health initiatives from each country (two in Jordan and three in Palestine) based on RMNCH. A qualitative study design was adopted. We developed a digital maturity assessment tool assessing two maturity levels: the information and communications technology digital infrastructure, and data governance and interoperability in place for the five selected RMNCH initiatives in Jordan and Palestine. Overall, the digital infrastructure and technological readiness components are more advanced and show higher maturity levels compared with data governance and interoperability components in Jordan and Palestine. In Jordan, the overall Jordan stillbirths and neonatal deaths surveillance initiative maturity indicators are somehow less advanced than those of the Electronic Maternal and Child Health Handbook-Jordan (EMCH-J) application. In Palestine, the Electronic Maternal and Child Health-registry initiative maturity indicators are more advanced than both Avicenna and EMCH-Palestine initiatives. The findings highlighted several challenges and opportunities around the application and implementation of selected digital health initiatives in the provision of RMNCH in Jordan and Palestine. Our findings shed lights on the maturity level of these initiatives within fragile contexts. The maturity level of the five RMNCH initiatives in both countries is inadequate and requires further advancement before they can be scaled up and scaled out. Taking the World Health Organization recommendations into account when developing, implementing, and scaling digital health initiatives in low- and middle-income countries can result in successful and sustainable initiatives, thus meeting health needs and improving the quality of health care received by individuals especially those living in fragile contexts.

Co-Benefits Through Coordination of Climate Action and Peacebuilding: A System Dynamics Model

Climate disasters affect human security and development, moreso in fragile and conflict-affected contexts where population’ capacities to cope with climate change are compromised. Responses to such crises lie at the nexus of humanitarian assistance, development, and peacebuilding. Yet, there are still too few integrated programmatic responses coordinating peacebuilding and climate actions to ensure a progressive human development. This research develops a multi-scalar model to help actors identify thematic areas to inform synergistic efforts and programs at different scales to better coordinate their actions. Findings suggest that climate action and peacebuilding sectors can coordinate actions around climate and conflict risk assessments, the management of land and water resources, ecosystem restoration, nature-based climate adaptation, climate and conflict smart agriculture, natural resources governance, and sustainable market development. These collaborative efforts have the potential to generate co-benefits, such as increased social cohesion and livelihood creation.

Defragilization of fragile states: evaluation through a logit regression analysis

The studies about fragile states in the international relations begins around the 1990s, and the issue remains active. According to the World Bank, in 2016, 1.8 billion people lived in fragile states. The projection shows that, in 2050, almost 10% of the global population will live in fragile contexts. Poverty, famine, child mortality, and violence denote some characteristics of state’ fragility. Many fragile states have been sanctuaries for terrorist groups, threatening global security. There are several indications of causes for fragility in the states, however, there is no universal consensus on this. International organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), find a way to tackle the fragility of states. The problem is: what are the significant variables to justify the defragilization of fragile states, once statistics show that, while one group of states in the world remains fragile or even deteriorated, another group is getting better gradually? The goal of this article is to present the results of research and the outcomes of logit regression analysis, of a group of states, from 2007-2016., which got defragilization. The analysis took into consideration 1,473 relevant observations involving 13 supposed explanatory variables. Some independent variables, such as international aid or investments on education, would appear to be significant, however, they were not. Conversely, the results were consistent with the improvement of state governance and reduction of infant mortality. The study opens an avenue for new researches to defragilization processes.

SLICE - Solar Lightweight Intelligent Component for Envelopes: application for the ICARO pavilion

In the ongoing race to reduce polluting emissions, a significant contribution is made by the introduction of intelligent building management systems. The European directive 2002/91 on energy performance in buildings already invited us to look at a new generation of almost zero energy buildings. Research in the field of multifunctional facades offers the opportunity to provide an immediate response to improving air quality and, at the same time, optimizing the use of resources. In fact, adaptive facades can be traced to one of the most effective strategies to efficiently manage the interactions between external and internal environments to maximize winter heating, summer shading and natural ventilation, sound insulation, daylight transfer, glare-free, and interior comfort for the occupants. Nowadays, adaptive enclosures are not only able to interact with the environment and the user but allow the energy needs of buildings to be reduced by integrating technologies to produce energy from renewable sources. The contribution will present the latest developments of an innovative kinetic device for architecture, carried out by the University of Catania; it is the result of a multidisciplinary research project involving important local industrial companies. The component consists of a composite material substrate with integrated high-efficiency photovoltaic technology. The results shown below made it possible to evaluate the use of the designed component in light and stand-alone architectures, representing a valid solution to reduce the impact on the territory even in fragile contexts.

Research methods for a fragile world: A personal reflection and actionable recommendations

There remains a dearth of knowledge on research approaches and methodologies that are well-suited for contexts of violence and fragility, specifically in management research. Well-intentioned researchers often fall into the same traps over and over again, where objectification, silencing of voices, and violence normalization may prevail ( Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021 ), leading to inadvertently causing harm and perpetuating damaging power dynamics and stereotypes. In this piece, I reflect upon my autobiographical research journey and practical experiences to provide concrete examples and recommendations to other fellow scholars that may enable them to enhance the value of research in fragile environments for all those involved, particularly those most in need. I conclude with a simple guideline for research design, data acquisition, and result dissemination, that may serve as a reference and starting point when embarking on such endeavors.

Preparing university teachers for times of uncertainty: the role of a transnational pedagogical-development training in Palestinian higher education

PurposeThe aim of this study is to explore the extent to which a transnational pedagogical training affected university teachers' approaches to teaching, as well as their efficacy beliefs and cultural perceptions, and to examine how such training could stimulate teachers' pedagogical-development processes beyond the specific context.Design/methodology/approachAn explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was adopted for the study. Quantitative data were collected through an online self-reported questionnaire from two-independent samples, both before (n = 119) and after (n = 110) the training. Qualitative data were collected after the training through episodic narrative interviews with five teachers.FindingsThe quantitative and qualitative findings indicate contradictory aspects of the teaching approach and perceived culture. While the questionnaire responses highlighted the dominance of teacher-centred teaching approaches and an individualistic culture, a thematic analysis of the interview data showed that teachers experienced pedagogical development as (1) increasing student engagement, (2) improving their own teaching practices, (3) a community activity and (4) an institutionalised process.Research limitations/implicationsThe design of the current research may have limited the authors’ potential to deeply investigate the effect of the transnational pedagogical training, as only snapshots of the teachers' perceptions were elicited. Future studies might consider a within-subject longitudinal design to thoroughly follow teachers' trajectories in learning and development over time.Practical implicationsThe research findings suggest that transnational pedagogical training initiatives are to be promoted amidst these uncertain times. Even though the focus of the study was not to explore the teachers' perceptions of teaching development during the pandemic, the current results imply that the mentioned training helped teachers in tailoring their pedagogical practices to suit the unexpected online teaching settings.Originality/valueThe study adds to the relatively new literature on the perceived effect of transnational pedagogical training initiatives. This study’s findings contribute to the body of knowledge related to pedagogical development in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

Including underrepresented language learners in SLA research: A case study and considerations for internet-based methods

This article contributes to recent discussions on internet-based methods as a way to include more diverse samples in research (Casler et al., 2013; Newman et al., 2021). Discussion specifically focuses on designing psycholinguistic research that maximises accessibility and minimises harm for adults learning languages across writing systems in fragile contexts (Fox et al., 2020). Recommendations are offered based on a case study of the author's experiences conducting internet-based research with Arabic-speaking learners of English, some of whom were navigating combinations of displacement, limited host language proficiency and/or limited formal schooling. This leads to the exploration of vulnerability as layers rather than labels (Luna, 2019) as a more instructive route towards ethical and accessible research design. Both practical and ethical considerations are outlined, as well as the value of in-person research when seeking to include adult language learners with diverse migration and educational backgrounds in linguistic research.

The Sea Swallowed our Houses and Rice Fields: The Vulnerability to Climate Change of Coastal People in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa.

Guinea-Bissau remains among the African countries most vulnerable to climate change due to its flat topography and large meandering coastal area invaded by the tides.We present a case study of the island-village of Djobel, showing the dramatic consequences of socio-environmental change. The inhabitants' attempts to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events and sea-level rise and adapt to the new circumstances have been hampered by the seizure of their upland territory by a neighboring village. In the context of a disconnect between state and society, Djobel's inhabitants want the state to guarantee their rights to productive land, water, and safe housing conditions. This case shows the need for legal protection of the rights of poor, marginalized, and underrepresented populations at risk of becoming climate refugees in the fragile context of politically unstable, failed, and often authoritarian states.