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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.