risk factors vs. heuristics in development work and social research

Just had an email conversation about “vulnerability mapping” with a colleague who will be going to work in Islamabad. I guess “vulnerability mapping” works OK with a clearly defined problem such as hunger. But he was wondering whether it is possible to map vulnerability in a much broader sense. But isn’t that a bit of a pipedream?

This all reminds me of what we are trying to do at proMENTE
at the moment with some research on trafficking in children. We are supposed to be trying to identify “risk factors” for trafficking. But in this case, what counts as risk depends not on the characteristics of viruses and organisms but on conscious and changing decisions and plans of traffickers (and to a lesser extent their victims). And this is just one of the problems. The notions of “vulnerability” and “risk” are presumably derived from medical models and I don’t feel they are very appropriate to development or aid work in general.

“Vulnerability mapping” sounds like going from “raw data” to “the facts” and then back to the field, with derived imperatives about what to do: a map of what to do and for whom and where. But that is going to be impossible, isn’t it? Isn’t the problem (definitions, prioritization, culture, medicine, politics, psychology…) essentially much too complicated for such a global solution? Isn’t what we need a way of supporting and modifying the practical aid delivery decisions which are actually being made anyway?

Isn’t what we really need a way of organizing heuristic (“rule of thumb”) practical information, i.e. the do’s and don’ts of aid delivery in a certain context?

I guess this is what systemic approaches to development and research are all about. Guess I should try to find out more.

Iva’s first birthday party

There was lots of cake and nobody cried. Filip got the most presents. You can see more of the pictures at our gallery here or at our flickr site (www.pix.pogol.net).

Snowboarding

Well, not really. But we went up to Bijelasnica with Pip and Iva to see the Sarajevo Snowboard Kup which our friends Ismar and Nina and Shorty had organised. We watched some people jump and some people fall …

Pictures from active job search training

I posted some pictures from the training we did at the Employment Institute in Mostar on active job search. That is the program which has now started in Tuzla and Mostar and is going pretty well so far.

new fire

When we bought our second-hand volvo V40 a few months ago it seemed a bit sluggish to me, but not having driven a diesel before I thought it was just something I would have to get used to. But then it started to get more and more lazy and I realised it was something to do with the gas pedal. So last night I went round to Ahmed’s and he just took out a long-dead damper for the gas pedal and now it is like having a new car! It is a much more lively car than when we got it.

Much the same thing happened with my toshiba laptop, whose harddisk died a few days ago along with half its memory. It is now resurrected with faster hard disk and faster memory and a clean system. Only now do I realise how much time per day I had been spending waiting for the thing to fire up and do stuff.

back again

this site used to be subtitled “the website for steve and anamaria and filip and iva…”. now I notice that I haven’t written much here in the last few months. it occurred to me that I might be more inclined to write stuff if I felt like it was really my site. especially seeing as how Iva and Filip have a combined age of four and a half, and Ana doesn’t really have web access. so let’s see if I now ramble here more often … Anyway, I took the opportunity to update the blog system to wordpress 2.0 mainly because of this new template which looks so nice (doesn’t it?)