Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) ESRC Research Group

Books

Wellbeing in Developing Countries: From Theory to Research edited by Ian Gough and J. Allister McGregor Wellbeing comprises more than money, commodities and economic growth. Analyses based on limited views of wellbeing are likely to produce sub-optimal and unsustainable policies. This book integrates three challenges to existing approaches: human development; the analysis of resource distribution and use; and research on subjective wellbeing, happiness and quality of life. It shows how these can combine to form a new approach to development, based on human wellbeing. International experts from a wide range of disciplines contribute towards establishing a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing. Published by Cambridge University Press See Contents and Authors
Chapter in Book: Handbook of the Economics of Happiness Edited by Luigino Bruni, Associate Professor of Economics and Pier Luigi Porta, Professor of Economics, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy Chapter 8 Well-being and Consumption: Towards a Theoretical Approach Based on Human Need Satisfaction by Monica Guillen Royo (WeD) Published by Edward Elgar Publishing
Chapter in Book: Female Well-being: Towards a Global Theory of Social Change edited by Janet Mancini Billson and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban Chapter 12 Women in Thailand:Changing the Paradigm of Female Well-being by Farung Mee-Udon (WeD) and Ranee Itarat Chapter 4 Bangladesh: a Journey in Stages Sultana Nasrin (WeD Bangladesh) and Alema Karim Published by Zed Books See pdf
Chapter in Book: Rethinking Wellbeing, edited by L.Manderson. 'Capabilities, needs and wellbeing: relating the universal and the local', by David A Clark and Ian Gough. Perth, Australia: API Network. pp.45-68 (2005)
Chapter in Book: Resilience and wellbeing in developing countries by Laura Camfield and Allister McGregor in Handbook for Working with Children and Youth Pathways to Resilience Across Cultures and Contexts by Michael Ungar Published by Sage
Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts Ian Gough, Geof Wood, Armando Barrientos, Philippa Bevan, Peter Davis, Graham Room 'Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.' See Cambridge Press
Global Capital, Human Needs and Social Policies Ian Gough Published by Palgrave Macmillan Can the needs of capital ever be reconciled with the needs of people? To what extent can social policies bridge the gap between social rights and human welfare, and economic competitiveness in a global world? Building on his previous writings on political economy and human need, Ian Gough throws new light on these perennial questions in a series of penetrating and original essays. The conclusion is upbeat: social policy still has the potential to narrow (though never close) the gap between the drive of capital and the universal needs of people.

Publications

The new publication from the ESRC 'Britain Today' was available from bookstalls from March 2007 and featured an article on Wellbeing in Developing Countries by Allister McGregor (WeD Director)

ESRC 'The Edge' March 2005 Volume 18 Featured research by WeD in an article by Romesh Vaitilingam
A fresh look at creating better lives
Reducing poverty in developing countries is vital - but meeting people's material needs should be part of a broader ambition of improving the quality of their lives. ESRC research is at the forefront of this agenda.

Journal Publications

April 2007 Twelve years’ experience with the Patient Generated Index (PGI) of quality of life: a graded structured review. Quality of Life Research, 16 (4), p705-715. Martin, F, Camfield, L, Rodham, K, Kliempt, P, Ruta, D.

March 2007 in the Journal of Economic Methododology (14:1, 107–131) Needs and resources in the investigation of well-being in developing countries: illustrative evidence from Bangladesh and Peru
J. Allister McGregor, Andrew McKay and Jackeline Velazco
Abstract The paper offers an analysis of how to operationalize the development
goal of promoting well-being, and provides an exemplar. It focuses on one
element of a comprehensive methodology to operationalize empirical research
into the social and cultural construction of well-being in developing countries.
This research uses a definition of well-being that combines objective and
subjective dimensions and locates these in the social and cultural relationships of
particular societies. We focus here on the Resources and Needs Questionnaire
(RANQ), a research instrument specifically developed for this work. This
explores the relationships between the resources that households command and
the levels of needs satisfaction which household members experience. Preliminary
analysis of data for Bangladesh and Peru identifies a number of significant
relationships between the distribution of resources that households command and
the levels of needs satisfaction they achieve. These outcome results then represent
a foundation for further analysis using complementary qualitative and processoriented
data.
Keywords: well-being, poverty, resources, needs,

Professor Geof Wood and Ian Gough paper ‘A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach To Global Social Policy’ was published in World Development October 2006 (34-10, pp1696-1712).
Summary:
Beginning from the framework of welfare state regimes in rich capitalist countries, this article radically redefines it and applies the new model to regions and countries which experience problematic states as well as imperfect markets. A broader, comparative typology of regimes (welfare state, informal security, insecurity) is proposed, which captures the essential relationships between social and cultural conditions, institutional performance, welfare outcomes and path dependence. Using this model, different regions of the world (East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa) are compared. For many poorer, partially capitalized societies, people’s security relies informally upon various clientelist relationships. Formalizing rights to security via strategies for de-clientelization becomes a stepping stone to protecting people against the insecurity of markets.

David Collard's paper Research on Well-Being: Some Advice from Jeremy Bentham was published in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Vol. 36, 3, 330-354 Jeremy Bentham provided a comprehensive list of the sources of pleasure and pain, rather in the manner of modern researchers into human well-being. He explicitly used the term well-being and made both qualitative and quantitative proposals for its measurement. Bentham insisted that the measurement of well-being should be firmly based on the concerns and subjective valuations of those directly concerned, in the context of a liberal society. Those who wished to superimpose other judgements were dismissed as "ipsedixitists." He also addressed, though of course could not solve, some of the measurement problems more recently tackled by "neo-Benthamites." The paper concludes that many of Bentham’s observations about the measurement of well-being are still relevant to issues in current research.

Ian Gough and Allister McGregor edited a special issue of Global Social Policy on “Human Well-being: Communicating between the Universal and the Local”. The issue included Ian on “Human Well-being and Social Structures: Relating the Universal and the Local”, Allister on “Researching Well-being: Communicating between the Needs of Policy Makers and the Needs of People” also by Teófilo Altamirano, James Copestake, Adolfo Figueroa, and Katie Wright-Revolledo an article on “Universal and Local Understanding of Poverty in Peru”.
See Global Social Policy (December 2004), Vol 4(3), SAGE publications.

Alula Pankhurst and Pip Bevan's paper on "Hunger and poverty in Ethiopia: local perceptions of famine and famine response" was published in Humanitarian Exchange.
See www.odihpn.org

From WeD-Bangladesh, Iqbal Khan and Zulfiqar Ali contributed to the Country Report titled "Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh: tales of Ascent, Descent, Marginality and Persistence", edited by Binayak Sen, Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies, Bangladesh and David Hulme, Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), University of Manchester.
See www.chronicpoverty.org

Munshi Israil Hossain submitted an article titled "Internal Labour Migration: Recuperating or intimidating the livelihoods of those who stay away and who stay put in rural Bangladesh?" in 'Social Science Review' , Dhaka University.

Policy Forum

Africa After 2005 - from Promises to Policy

Contain the presentation The importance of understanding the 'local' by Pip Bevan and Alula Pankhurst (WeD Ethiopia). See forum publication

WeD Workshop Papers

WeD hosted an international workshop on 'Researching Well-being in Developing Countries' at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst near Bremen, Germany on 2-4th July 2004. More details of the workshop. A book of the workshop papers will be published in the summer of 2006 by Cambridge University Press.