The Social Impacts of Crisis. findings from community-level research in five developing countries

A year on from research into the impacts of the food, fuel and financial crises in five developing countries, researchers returned to eight of the ten original communities to study how the global downturn had played out over the last year. This report is based on qualitative research undertaken between February and April 2010 in one rural and one urban community in each of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Yemen and Zambia.

The social impacts of crisis here refer to the lived human experience of crisis, rather than its non-economic residual impacts. The focus was on how shocks were affecting the reproduction of everyday life, including the material and non-material dimensions of wellbeing as central elements of ‘resilience’, with close attention to gender, age and other sources of difference. The lived experience was situated within the current global risk context, and, amidst indications of emergent global economic recovery, sought to identify signs of recovery in the local economy. It looked at how social protection interventions and local social solidarity and informal support systems were featuring in resilience to the shocks. Finally, it identified issues on which the effects of the crises seemed likely to endure.