Advancing Ethnography for Development (AED)
How do we know that development projects actually work, from the perspectives of the people they are meant to serve? For projects that involve changing what people do and think (such as sanitation or rule of law, to name just two), tracking project impacts is difficult. Good ethnographic methods can help projects succeed, but development projects move fast and often have limited resources. We are partnering with development practitioners to design and test better methods for rapid ethnographic assessments that can help development projects succeed.
Project Details
Partnering with development practitioners at Chemonics International, we have been test-bedding methods for ground-truthing development project assumptions about cultural knowledge in low resource settings at multiple sites.
Current collaborating development projects include Mozambique (climate change adaptation), Haiti (rule of law), and Palestine (gender and human rights). We are testing a range of systematic methods to capture change in cultural knowledge and explain variation, including cultural consensus analysis, social network analysis and other forms of rapid text-based interview-analysis.
Partners: Chemonics International | USAID | DDG International (Haiti) | ASU-ID
Research Team
- Alexandra Brewis Slade, ASU
- Roseanne Schuster, ASU
- Amber Wutich, ASU
- Peggy Ochandarena, Chemonics International
- Gilberto Muai, Mozambique
- Christelle Safi, Haiti
Funding
USAID