Relevance to Development Policy and Practice

DFID's goal of 'making globalisation work for the world's poor'

The CSP is concerned with the fact that globalisation gives added urgency to the task of strengthening government systems in developing countries and this in turn is an essential investment in the prevention of violent conflict and respect for human rights.

Good government, increased voice, institutional development, conflict management, security sector reform and effective aid delivery.

The CSP will inform UK and multilateral development co-operation agencies about:

• how constellations of power at local, national and global levels drive processes of institutional change, collapse and reconstruction;
• the positive and negative effects of international interventions promoting democratic reform, market competition, human rights and conflict resolution;
• the differential causes of violent conflict and the incentives and practices that lead both state and non-state armed groups to sustain or move away from violent confrontation or arbitrary and unjust exercise of their power;
• the ways communities have responded to crisis, and the incentives and moral frameworks that have led either toward violent or non-violent outcomes;
• patterns of formal and informal institutional arrangements in poor communities that deal with economic survival and local order in situations of crisis and breakdown.

Cross-cutting issues central to our concerns

• the alleviation of poverty, which is so often caused or exacerbated by 'fragile states' and weaknesses in international systems;
• the promotion of human rights, especially freedom from violence and fear;
• the protection of the environment, particularly from the devastation wrought by armed conflict and complex emergencies; and
• the advancement of gender equality through freedom from violence and abuse and through political and social change.

Policy relevance will be ensured both directly and indirectly

Development practitioners realise that different historical circumstances call for different solutions. However, they are often unable to access all the information they need to find these solutions, and are bound by policy agendas that limit their room for manoeuvre. We will work to overcome some of these difficulties by:

• Ensuring that the insights, which long-term research into the specificities of particular and comparable situations can generate, can inform the short-term needs for policy reform and project implementation in conflict-affected countries.
• Evaluating successful and unsuccessful reform programmes to identify those most likely to produce positive results under particular circumstances, as well as those most likely to be subverted, hijacked or opposed through violence.
• Giving policy-makers access to analyses based on official documents, statistical data, interviews with elites, ethnographies and participatory methodologies eliciting the voices of poor people and of the business and NGO sectors.
• Drawing policy implications from the analysis both of interventions and what people do in the absence of interventions and how this can be supported.