At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research–action–policy network, collaborated with membership-based workers’ organisations and non‑governmental organisations to conduct a mixed methods, longitudinal study with nearly 2,000 informal workers across 11 cities in the global South and North. The research process underpins three of WIEGO’s core research principles, which include centring informal workers’ lived experience and knowledge, fostering collective ownership over the research process, and producing actionable evidence for advocacy. Drawing from the insights of researcher-activists, this article considers how WIEGO’s institutional readiness, highly nuanced and contextualised analyses, and attention to trust and care enabled a co-productive research process. Moreover, the article seeks to understand how these factors can potentially shape the broader objectives of research as both a capacity-building and mobilising tool and as a medium for translating knowledge for advocacy locally, nationally, and internationally.
Knowledge co-production, Covid-19, research, informal workers.
Statistics in the hands of workers is power.
(Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association, SEWA)
During a crisis, research is crucial arms for struggle. It was good to have this kind of research, validating what workers were going through and then trying to make it visible.
(WIEGO team member, New Delhi)
Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research–action–policy network, is committed to supporting informal workers’ livelihoods through direct engagement and alliances between three of its constituencies: worker organisations, researchers and statisticians, and development practitioners. These relationships seek to strengthen and connect organisations as a means of amplifying their collective voice in key policymaking settings. By working closely with these constituencies over the past 25 years, one of WIEGO’s fundamental objectives has been to challenge myths around the informal economy in academic and policy discourse. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and amidst a context of fear regarding the public health crisis, increasing stigma against informal workers and a drastic loss of livelihoods and earnings, WIEGO collaborated with local membership-based workers’ organisations (MBOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and research-activist teams to conduct a mixed methods, longitudinal study.3 The study examines the degree and pathways of impact on almost 2,000 informal workers working as home-based workers, domestic workers, street vendors, and waste pickers across 11 cities4 in five regions of the world (Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Eastern Europe).
The Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study mapped the multidimensional impacts of the crisis on workers’ livelihoods, including impacts on workers’ earnings and ability to work; impacts of unpaid care work on paid work; differentiated government responses to the pandemic, including city-level restrictions and relief measures; workers’ health concerns; workers’ coping and adaptation strategies; MBO support and advocacy strategies; and workers’ demands for inclusive economic recovery. Round 1 fieldwork was conducted during June and July 2020 and round 2 fieldwork was conducted during June to early August 2021 in nine of the 11 cities. Due to the severity of the Delta variant outbreak, fieldwork in two Indian cities could only be conducted during September and October 2021 (Alfers et al. 2022; Chen et al. 2021).
The pandemic has catalysed discussions around conducting research at a time of global health and economic crisis (Taylor and Knipe 2022). This article considers key factors that enabled a co-productive research process with distinct yet interconnected local and global dynamics oriented towards advocacy objectives and cross-country learning. More specifically, the article unpacks how a knowledge co-production approach, which brings together researchers, activists, and informal workers’ organisations, can produce robust and rigorous data. By opening up the research process to input from multiple perspectives and, equally importantly, from informal workers’ organisations, knowledge co-production helps challenge the notion of which and whose knowledge is valid. Moreover, the rejection of an extractive approach reflects a commitment to the notion that the generation of data is never an end in and of itself. Rather, research can be an important means to strengthen the capacity of informal workers’ organisations to leverage claims‑making opportunities and to engage with the state. In other words, ‘the co-production of knowledge challenges the idea of research on disadvantaged and marginalized groups, demanding the recognition of research processes with organized citizens’ (Mitlin and Bartlett 2018: 364).
Several questions guide the reflections in this article. How do long-standing relationships of trust strengthen an organisation’s readiness to design and implement research with vulnerable groups during crises? How does a research process committed to deep listening and care, as well as to valuing localised knowledge and diverse skillsets help navigate the ethical conundrums and increased complexities of doing research during crises? Engagement with the needs, demands, and voices of the global South points in the direction of understanding how research can be a pathway for making visible contextualised and bottom-up solutions to structural inequalities.
WIEGO draws on interdisciplinary perspectives in its policy work, development of statistics, research, worker education and capacity building, and direct support to informal workers’ organisations (Ogando and Harvey 2020). In particular, the development of statistics and research, ranging from Action Research to research using more traditional methods, serves WIEGO’s key function of increasing the visibility of informal workers in policy discourse and decision-making fora, at both local and global scales. These engagements rely on the generation of actionable evidence, which entails producing knowledge that can help address concrete problems as well as present contextualised solutions. Ultimately, action-oriented queries serve to systematise data that can be mobilised for political action.
In addition, WIEGO sees research as a strategy to strengthen MBOs’ capacities and to amplify workers’ voices and demands through fostering their ownership of data. WIEGO upholds a set of guiding principles in research with and for MBOs, including recognition of workers’ situated experience and knowledge, provision of continuous feedback loops, and commitment to strengthening long-standing relationships with informal workers’ organisations, their NGO allies, and global networks of informal workers. This approach underscores a commitment to more horizontal, democratic, and collaborative relationships throughout research and advocacy processes (see Figure 1). Moreover, this approach reflects the belief that research is never an end in itself but rather, and more importantly, a process and political strategy (Mitlin and Bartlett 2018; Alfers, Xulu and Dobson 2016a, Alfers et al. 2016b; Ogando and Harvey 2020). In this regard, WIEGO and informal workers’ organisations work to identify and leverage policy opportunity windows that can result in more enabling policy environments for informal workers.
Source: Ogando and Harvey (2020). © Edward Elgar, reproduced with permission.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, several scholars reinforced how it served to further lay bare existing structural inequalities and erode assets and collective arrangements for survival amongst the working poor in urban cities across the global South and North (Bahn et al. 2020; Gupte and Mitlin 2021). Being strongly connected to and engaged with the grounded realities of informal workers enabled WIEGO to conduct research at a time of greater complexity around data collection processes, increased vulnerability and isolation, and loss of livelihoods for the urban working poor. WIEGO’s prior experience with knowledge co-production in multi-city, multi-sector, and mixed methods research initiatives in the past, including a study on the 2007–09 global economic crisis (see Horn 2009) and the Informal Economy Monitoring Study (2012–14),5 laid the groundwork for its institutional readiness to undertake research. In this regard, institutional readiness6 relates broadly to WIEGO’s organisational history and anchoring to grass-roots dynamics and intelligence, respect for bottom-up driven demands, and experience in relying on local–global relationships. It is this history that positioned WIEGO to conduct research which could then feed directly into context-based advocacy needs at a time of crisis and urgency.
In addition, a fundamental enabler for conducting research during the pandemic was the presence of WIEGO team members in many of the study cities, and their long-standing relationships and partnerships with informal workers’ organisations. Because of these relationships, WIEGO was informed, from the start of the crisis, of informal workers’ organisations’ assessment of the gravity of the initial impacts of the pandemic on workers’ livelihoods in several cities. Amidst increasing attention on the informal economy by governments and media at the start of the crisis, and in the absence of research or reporting centring informal workers themselves, WIEGO and its partners understood the importance of collecting data that would capture the lived experiences of workers during the crisis to better inform advocacy processes.
In response to this bottom-up driven demand for research, WIEGO quickly formed a Covid-19 Crisis Study Advisory Team and started to gather direct inputs from informal workers’ organisations on the design of the study, the essential themes to cover through the survey tool and interview guides, and processes for identifying and mobilising study respondents. The Study Advisory Team was composed of 12 WIEGO team members, 11 of whom were women and half of whom represented the global South.7
WIEGO focal city teams8 have long worked with MBOs in five of the study cities (Accra, Dakar, Lima, Mexico City, and New Delhi), supporting their organisational development and advocacy objectives. Once abruptly confined to their homes at the start of the crisis, these teams pivoted to become action researchers – working with MBO leaders to connect with members for phone surveys and interviews. In the remaining six of the study cities, the research was carried out by MBO partners and NGO allies, with support from WIEGO’s Study Advisory Team.
Despite the practical and ethical challenges (Taylor and Knipe 2022) related to conducting phone surveys and interviews in a context where the physical proximity so critical for building rapport is lost (Hall, Gaved and Sargent 2021; Townsend et al. 2020), existing relationships of trust with workers facilitated the research process, and in some cases, workers reported that phone surveys served as a welcome source of connection during a time of isolation.
From a research implementation perspective, several challenges emerged relating to conducting surveys and semi-structured interviews over the phone – namely the lack of visual cues and limited interpersonal connection. Nevertheless, research teams worked to establish a sense of empathy and flexibility in carrying out interviews that met workers’ availability. Conscious that conducting research during a pandemic requires adaptation and concerned with burdening workers at a time of livelihood losses and fear, on-ground assessments were made to establish reasonable timelines, which resulted in delays in data collection in some cities.
Institutional readiness was also reflected in our MBO partners’ and local research-activist teams’ deep knowledge of different occupational sectors of informal workers, allowing them to both anticipate and respect the challenges respondents would have in taking part in research that covers sensitive and difficult topics related to impacts of the pandemic. In this sense, institutional readiness cannot be disassociated from long‑standing, interpersonal relationships that ultimately served as both a medium for rapport and bonding and an anchoring to grass‑roots realities even in the absence of face-to-face interactions. As a researcher from Accra, Ghana noted: ‘On the issue of relationships, assuming WIEGO had no established relationship with MBOs, would this study have been possible? My answer would be no. Because WIEGO has [these] relationships, it builds trust and [this] is very key.’
If existing trust enabled the research process, in some cases, the research process served to strengthen it further – local research-activist teams from New Delhi, India and Lima, Peru equally noted how being part of the study strengthened trust between WIEGO and informal workers’ organisations. For a researcher-activist in New Delhi, India the global study provided a means to stay connected to workers and centre their voices in subsequent advocacy with the data: ‘This iterative process strengthened our bonding with the partners, but also our credibility in the sense that we were part of a global study and we wanted to listen to workers.’ A research-activist from Accra, Ghana reflected on empathy and deep listening as fundamental elements contributing to the process of reinforcing trust and care that the global study took shape within: ‘And there was this issue of empathy. Most of them [workers] felt they had no one to talk to. The fact we were there to speak to them made them feel WIEGO was present when everyone had turned their back against workers. Talking was a path for [workers] to vent because there was so much fear. For me, that is something that helped build trust.’9
Listening with care and attention were conscious actions taken by researchers who understood the need for changing the ways one relates to others while conducting research at a time of grave crisis.
Similarly, local partners in Ahmedabad, India highlighted the isolation workers were facing and the importance of bearing witness to their stories: ‘It was very emotional to the members, no one was talking to them during the lockdown.’
By round 2 of the study, workers were expressing that they felt supported as a result of partners maintaining contact with them. As the executive director of local partner Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) in Durban, South Africa reported: ‘The members felt supported because we went back to them during round 2. Many of the informal workers were reported saying, “You have not forgotten us.” ’ By engaging with care, researchers were able to transmit the notion that the research was not only on workers, but with and for them.
Trust was also reinforced by WIEGO’s commitment to collaborating with worker leaders in the analysis and use of the data. While the fast-paced evolution of the pandemic eliminated the possibility of in-person training and feedback in the design phase, and complicated WIEGO’s ability to conduct continuous in-person data validation with worker leaders as a result of new waves of the Covid-19 virus, strategies for constant communication around the research process, analysis of findings, and advocacy possibilities helped establish greater buy-in and ownership with MBO partners. With regard to the latter, it is important to note that the ability to capture contextual and sector nuance in accessible formats, such as city-level fact sheets, helped workers see their stories and lived experience reflected back in the data, encouraging the use of results. Bearing witness to workers’ lived experience encompassed the various dimensions of a deeply engaged research process (Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau 2018), which sought to connect the care expressed in the research process with critical attention to the ways in which data is presented and who it represents.10
Commitment to a non-extractive approach was also embedded in the way that fieldwork was carried out. For WIEGO, conducting fieldwork through online platforms included covering the costs of data usage for workers; stipends for research participation; flexibility to carry out interviews based on workers’ availability; sensitivity to privacy issues, particularly for women in isolation in households; and greater empathy through non-visual cues. In addition, the ability to connect workers to relief, and the fast turnaround in sharing findings with workers and worker leaders, strengthened the perception of WIEGO as a credible source and ally.
The multiple configurations of trust and care, expressed distinctly across the 11 cities, reflected an ethical and epistemological orientation towards the depth of vulnerability and inequalities that the pandemic served to exacerbate. In addition, centring trust and care in the research process builds on an understanding that ‘relational, other-centered ways of knowing the world’ (Lynch, Kalaitzake and Crean 2021: 54) can extend beyond intimate, private settings and into community contexts and political settings to address inequalities and exclusionary discourse, practice, and policy (ibid.).
In several ways, the careful and respectful engagement with workers during the Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study helped frame injustices in an ‘understandable, knowable and actionable’ manner (Tironi and Rodríguez Giralt 2017: 89) and without erasing the very struggles that configure the day-to-day life and resistance of informal workers’ organisations beyond the pandemic (Bahn et al. 2020; Gupte and Zahan 2021). Embedding forms of care in our research practice allows for subjective dignity and connects care with the political (Tironi and Rodríguez Giralt 2017). Hence, placing value on care was a deliberate choice grounded in ethical considerations related to the gravity of the pandemic. The Study Advisory Team and researchers discussed what was at stake for workers to engage in research and how to minimise the consequent negative impacts on their livelihoods and wellbeing. These efforts were a means for articulating and making visible the extent of differentiated impacts on and the agency of informal workers.
The Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study was designed to build from the strengths of WIEGO’s global network structure and to maximise impact in both local and global advocacy processes in support of MBOs.
Throughout all stages of the research process, spaces for participation of different actors were created to bridge and value diverse forms of knowledge, build research confidence and skills with mixed methods, and enable an inclusive exchange and collective sense-making across members of the Study Advisory Team and local research teams.
As previously mentioned, inputs from informal workers’ organisations and local research-activist teams in the design phase were essential for designing tools in a way that would respond to both local and global advocacy needs. In addition, online training workshops around the quantitative and qualitative tools in both rounds of the study served the purpose of valuing and translating local contextual and sector knowledge into the actual tool design.
During the data analysis phase, participation was embedded through deep sense-making whereby local research teams provided key contextual information to substantiate findings, while WIEGO’s Study Advisory Team sought to map broader global trends by themes and sectors.
The confluence of distinct knowledge and skill sets helped hone WIEGO’s approach to mixed methods.
For a local team member from Mexico City, Mexico, the distinct phases of research proved to be a positive learning process: ‘Analysis was difficult in the beginning but after all, I think it was a good exercise to clarify and to order my thoughts.’ For a local team member in New Delhi, India, the process of analysing the data first hand was both empowering and a validation of how their insights of grass-roots dynamics were reflected back in hard data: ‘We looked at the data ourselves and [looked at where] the research and ground realities came together. It’s this confidence of your own ability to deal with research. This process is very enriching and empowering for the team because it anchors you to the ground work. When what you are seeing on the ground [is also in] statistics, it gives you the confidence of knowing you have your feet on the ground.’
From the Study Advisory Team’s perspective, there was the opportunity to get further training for online survey platforms (Survey CTO) and qualitative data software (NVivo). Lastly and equally important was the fact that some MBOs reported improving their own research and digital skills through participation in the study. SEWA in Ahmedabad, India started using Zoom meetings and other online platforms such as Google Forms in their current work after participating in the study.
Relatedly, local research teams highlighted the importance of the study in providing common spaces for North–South and South–South exchanges around findings and advocacy strategies, which for many seemed to underscore the value of Southern voices and knowledge. In addition, these learning exchanges helped both local research teams and the Study Advisory Team sharpen their understanding of power dynamics and strategies for targeting influential stakeholders and allies at multiple levels.
The study was also an opportunity to build confidence around key messaging and new formats for disseminating research findings. From academic papers to accessible worker materials, WIEGO’s Study Advisory Team reported new capacities around testing new formats and styles to translate study findings for different audiences, which is reflected in media uptake of the study findings in over 44 countries.
Nevertheless, the study also faced its own set of trade-offs and challenges. From a participatory research perspective, possibilities for extensive deliberation during key decision-making moments were more limited throughout the study. For example, timing constraints to release findings, advocacy pressures, technological barriers, strains on workers, and complexity of findings created difficult trade-offs around how much and how to engage MBO partners in the analysis of results.
While standardisation and rigour created a strong base for global advocacy, it reduced the flexibility for local customisation that would incorporate themes relevant for local advocacy. At the same time, this trade-off still presented a gain, as there was value in situating local findings in a global context. Another noted challenge was the ability to fully engage workers within and across sectors in multi-day, in-person validation workshops that are common practices of WIEGO’s local teams and partners. Given that the pandemic imposed restrictions, teams had to re-strategise on how to engage with worker leaders through a more consultative approach, which involved sharing findings, opening space for questions, and contextualisation from leaders. This lighter touch approach to engaging with MBO leaders in the analysis phase was nonetheless pivotal for strategising on advocacy plans. In addition, it has led some local teams to think of next steps for engaging with worker leaders to strengthen feedback on the findings for future learning and advocacy with organisations.
The knowledge synthesis that occurs at the local and global levels is mutually reinforcing and serves a twofold purpose: to value diverse knowledge and to secure gains in policy terrains at both levels. The actual work involved in connecting and translating diverse knowledge resembles what some authors understand as ‘emancipatory circuits of knowledge’11 (Butcher et al. 2022: 206). This synergy reinforces the push for shifting and influencing policy discourse and practice in ways in which key stakeholders not only engage with the realities of the urban poor and the multiple arrangements of urban collective life (Bahn et al. 2020) but also learn from bottom-up solutions (Gupte and Mitlin 2021). It is ultimately about recognising and valuing how localised knowledge holds solutions that can enable more effective and sustainable pathways for recovery, as well as mitigate against future shocks and crises.
The global study led to mobilisation around the collective analysis of problems and the proposal of solutions with and for MBOs. On one level, the research process itself helped WIEGO to mobilise as a network whereby local teams and MBOs responded to the crisis in a timely manner, even before the publication of all findings became an authoritative source on the sector-based demands of informal workers. As the director from AeT affirmed: ‘Our organisation has become authoritative on the Covid-19 pandemic. We can give you a list of presentations we have done during the Covid-19 crisis, including to urban professionals [and] academics, among others.’ On another level, it provided space for the elaboration of proposals and agendas with worker leaders based on the contextualisation of findings. While there is still much to unravel and monitor in terms of policy wins and shifts in punitive discourse and practice, Table 1 presents some key highlights of how MBOs in several cities engaged with the data in their advocacy work. These initial gains reveal the importance of closely aligning the research design and stages with the concrete needs of informal workers’ organisations.
| City/country | Use of data | Advocacy objective |
|---|---|---|
| Accra, Ghana | Street vendor leaders from Informal Hawkers and Vendors of Ghana (IHVAG) used city-level reports in preparation for media interviews. | Highlighted the challenges and demands of the sector, particularly relating to punitive and exclusionary measures taken against informal workers in public spaces. |
| Bangkok, Thailand | HomeNet International and the Federation of Informal Workers of Thailand (FIT) present findings to the Minister of Labour in Thailand. | Drew on findings to address informal workers’ demands, leading to the establishment of multisectoral committees that brought together the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Industry, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority, and Bank of Thailand. These meetings focused on addressing relief measures for informal workers and long-standing demands for social protection. |
| Dakar, Senegal | Waste pickers’ leaders from Bokk Diom cooperative presented key findings from the study to local authorities. | Drew on findings to shape advocacy messages for inclusive solid waste management policies. |
| Lima, Peru | A domestic workers’ organisation used findings in discussions with policymakers and to complement findings from other studies on domestic workers. | Drew on findings to shape advocacy messages and call attention to long‑standing demands for social protection. |
| Mexico City, Mexico | The National Union of Domestic Workers – Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras del Hogar, SINACTRAHO – presented findings from the study to Congress. | Drew on findings on food security and loss of earnings to present demands of domestic workers. |
Source: Author’s own analysis of study impacts.
The Covid-19 pandemic has presented a myriad of challenges and ethical considerations for the ways we conduct research. It has caused a recalibration of the modes for generating knowledge even in a co-productive approach. While thinking and knowing through trust and care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Tironi and Rodríguez Giralt 2017) present a call for greater attention to power dynamics and forms of involved12 engagement, it just as equally reveals the extent of our interconnections and interdependency. What it reveals is that co-productive knowledge generation holds transformative potential to build community and capacities when multiple perspectives can influence the design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of research.
WIEGO’s Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study provides some key lessons related to conducting research in times of crisis and exacerbated vulnerabilities. First, the study reinforced the importance of having solid, pre-existing relationships with workers’ organisations in order to ethically conduct research of this nature. Second, participating in the research process helped support worker leaders to extend their outreach to members and translate documented needs into claims-making strategies. Third, by relying on local–global expertise in the sense-making process, findings revealed highly contextualised and differentiated policy needs in cities. Such rich and nuanced findings could then be aggregated for cross-city worker solidarity, strategy formulation, and global advocacy.
The balance of institutional readiness, embedding trust and care, and generating actionable data for local–global advocacy highlights how fundamental it is to value knowledge and expertise from the bottom up. WIEGO’s Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study served to maximise the visibility of the long-standing demands of the urban working poor. Along with workers’ organisations, the end goal is to effectively translate these demands in ways in which key stakeholders take stock of grass-roots’ solutions to equitable urban development. Furthermore, by broadening the ways in which we co-produce and are involved with knowledge, we can support the creation of new configurations of solidarity (Spade 2020) in a context of growing inequalities, political tensions, and compounding crises.
* This IDS Bulletin was produced as part of the Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) Knowledge Translation Programme, led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), which supports the translation of knowledge emerging from the CORE initiative. Supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), CORE brings together 20 projects to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research is being led by local researchers, universities, thinktanks, and civil society organisations across 42 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of IDRC or its Board of Governors, or IDS. For further information, please contact: c19re.org.
† The Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study team would like to acknowledge their local partners in each study city, as well as the informal workers who participated in the study. Despite the significant health concerns and economic hardships, local informal workers’ organisations and the local research teams willingly participated in the study. This research was made possible thanks to generous support from Canada’s IDRC. The author would also like to thank Jenna Harvey and Caroline Skinner for important insights and comments on this article.
1 Ana Carolina Ogando, Research Coordinator, WIEGO, Brazil.
2 It is important to note the author’s positionality as a member of the WIEGO Covid-19 Crisis Study Advisory Team. She has conducted several interviews with local city teams and partners regarding the global crisis study research process.
3 The sample from each city was based on a purposive quota approach designed to reflect the composition of the membership of the informal workers’ organisations participating in the study.
4 The cities included in the five regions are (1) in Asia: Bangkok (Thailand), and Ahmedabad, New Delhi, and Tirupur (India); (2) in Africa: Accra (Ghana), Dakar (Senegal), and Durban (South Africa); (3) in Latin America: Lima (Peru) and Mexico City (Mexico); (4) in North America: New York City (USA); and (5) in Eastern Europe: Pleven (Bulgaria).
5 For more information and reports, see the Informal Economy Monitoring Study webpage.
6 See de Haan and Sanchez-Swaren (2022) for considerations on WIEGO’s Covid-19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study during the pandemic.
7 The Study Advisory Team drew on senior team members who had led previous WIEGO global studies, junior researchers, specialists in quantitative and qualitative methodologies, experts in the field of social protection, research-activist team members directly involved in city-level advocacy work, and WIEGO Communication Team members. Authorship of global findings and academic articles has been shared among senior and junior researchers on the Study Advisory Team, as well as members of city-level research teams.
8 For more information, see WIEGO’s focal cities webpage.
9 Interviews with local research teams and partners were conducted in March–June 2022 as part of an extensive monitoring and evaluation process that follows an outcome harvesting approach. The author conducted and/or participated in several of the interviews. Outcome harvesting is a method that seeks to identify, describe, verify, and analyse change in the behaviour, relationships, actions, activities, policies, or practices of an individual, group, community, organisation, or institution influenced by a project (Wilson-Grau 2018).
10 Action Research, Participatory Action Research, and feminist methodologies, as complementary research traditions, highlight the ways in which a more liberating and transformative research process includes different ways of relating and constructing knowledge (Reid and Frisby 2008). Other researchers have noted the potential of care, trust, and reflexivity as central tenets of ‘deeply engaged scholarship’ that is relevant for both fieldwork and data analysis (Pacheco‑Vega and Parizeau 2018).
11 These circuits reflect processes of co-producing and mobilising knowledge across research and practice, actors, and scales with the intention of challenging structural urban inequalities (Butcher et al. 2022).
12 For Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), involved knowledge signals a dimension of affective connection rather than distant observation.
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© 2023 The Author. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2023.132
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The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 54 No. 2 October 2023 ‘Knowledge in Times of Crisis: Transforming Research‑to-Policy Approaches’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.