The research project studies the impact of transnational organised crime and drug-trafficking (TNOC) on poor urban communities in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, which has seen crime and violence soar since the mid-1990s as the city became transhipment point in the illegal drugs trade. We address the impact of TNOC on vulnerable populations, culture and security by considering the 'transnational-to-community' impact of drug-trafficking. In particular we consider how TNOC contributes to a number of male residents becoming increasingly violent at a micro level as 92% of homicide victims are men: how do relatively benign 'corner kids' turn into violent gang members? In turn we ask, how can these communities work with young men to insulate themselves from the negative impact and violence generation of TNOC? This research uses masculinities as an interpretive lens and draws upon scholars across the disciplines of Peace Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and International Relations. The methodology is rooted in Trinidadian 'Spoken Word' traditions, and art and music, to grasp how male identity, culture, community violence and TNOC intersect. Before high levels of TNOC emerged, the region had relatively low levels of violent crime. However, this changed rapidly with the onset of cocaine trafficking in early 1990s across the Caribbean which dovetailed with the multiple clefts of colonial legacies, exclusion and poverty, worsened by the collapse of traditional agricultural exports, racial divisions and widespread institutional weaknesses. Violent death rates in cities in the region have grown to outstrip many warzones, whilst some of the highest rates of sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) in the world are found in the Caribbean. The answers to understanding violence must be sought at the interface between cocaine-driven TNOC and vulnerable communities, as poor residents have become disproportionately affected by violence. TNOC has weakened the rule of law, posing stiff challenges to already struggling institutions, whilst transforming local communities, hence the rather topical title of this research proposal 'Breaking Bad'. However, we still understand relatively little about the transformative processes between TNOC and community level violence. Furthermore, we understand little about how masculinities become violent in communities traversed by TNOC. It is at the intersection between TNOC, community, and masculinities, that the new violence of Port-of-Spain can be most productively understood. Certainly it is an area where we must strengthen policy and programming. Whilst there is no silver-bullet solution to violence in these cities, masculinities are clearly an important part of the solution and are almost completely overlooked. This research project strives to create pragmatic, evidence based recommendations to lead to concrete impact by promoting innovative, community-led and gender-based solutions for the populations that most suffer from violence, whilst serving to interrupt the negative impact that TNOC has on poor neighbourhoods.

The ecosystem services approach emphasises the many ways nature sustains and enriches people's lives. Valuation of ecosystem services can contribute to ecosystem conservation and human wellbeing. For these efforts to result in poverty alleviation, however, scientists must tackle the relationship between ecosystem services and wellbeing with reference to environmental justice. Ecosystem services tend to benefit some stakeholders more than others. Decision making in ecosystem management is likely to involve some more than others. Can those winner and losers be identified and their responses anticipated? Can the involved social tradeoffs be mapped, just as ecological tradeoffs between competing environmental services, to support ecosystem conservation and poverty alleviation? Recognition of ecological and social tradeoffs is a crucial precondition for just ecosystem management, i.e. ecosystem management that distributes ecosystem services fairly and includes all stakeholders in decision making. The proposed research serves the overarching goal to promote just ecosystem management as a new and innovative concept. The project will contribute to the overarching goal by developing a novel conceptual framework to guide research and practice. Its specific objectives are to (1) incorporate attention to multiple stakeholders and socio-ecological tradeoffs into the ecosystem services approach, (2) analyse the justice dimensions of critical changes in ecosystem services in the management of water, health, forests, biodiversity and coastal ecosystems, and (3) illustrate key justice dimensions in the management of selected coastal and terrestrial ecosystems in China, India and Central Africa. The project is intended to influence future research conducted in multiple academic fields on the feedbacks between ecosystem services and human wellbeing. The conceptual framework will show researchers how to approach long-established topics in their respective fields from new, interdisciplinary perspectives and point out concrete opportunities for linking up with research conducted in other fields. Conservation biologists will recognise new ways to integrate social tradeoffs into their analyses by looking at the distribution of ecosystem services among stakeholders, and by attending to the participation of different stakeholders in decisions over ecosystems. Political economists will benefit from the system-based understanding of 'nature' and the attention to ecological tradeoffs. Ecological economists will gain important insights for the development of new valuation methods which respond to underlying social inequalities and capture ecological tradeoffs. In this way, the research will make a critical contribution to the development of new interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between ecosystems and human wellbeing that acknowledges the significance of ecological, social and socio-ecological tradeoffs equally. Just ecosystem management will directly benefit poor and socially excluded people dependent upon ecosystem services living in developing countries. Equitable distribution will strengthen the contributions of ecosystem services to poverty alleviation, with particular benefits accruing to people dependent on these services. Inclusive decision making in ecosystem management will allow participation by stakeholders typically excluded due to differences in wealth, race, gender, etc. Just ecosystem management will facilitate stakeholders to recognise, deliberate and respond to ecological, social and socio-ecological tradeoffs together. The project will promote just ecosystem management by engaging UK and international policy-making organisations, policy-making organisations in China, India and Central Africa and organisations implementing conservation and development projects in the three sites of Yunnan, Orissa and the Albertine Rift.

In 2019, Brazil experienced more than 72,000 wildland fires, which represents a staggering 84 percent increase from the previous year. The burning of the Brazilian Amazon continues to be the subject of much international attention. Less visible, however, has been an equivalent environmental crisis unfolding in neighbouring countries in South America. In 2019, for example, NASA estimated that Bolivia had a burned area similar in size to Brazil, but in a country eight times smaller. The total burned area was over 5 million hectares, five times greater than the previous year and the largest area burned over the past 20 years. Wildland fires are having devastating socio-economic and environmental implications in rural Bolivia. The Chiquitania region, an area in the Eastern part of the country that hosts one of the largest and better preserved dry forests in South America, has been particularly affected by the recent fires. Here, the exceptional devastation of recent fires, especially on protected areas and indigenous territories, have exacerbated tensions among local communities (indigenous peoples, migrant peasants, ranchers, Mennonites) with different ways of living and using the land and natural resources. This project aims to advance local and international public debate on the complexity and urgency of wildland fire crisis through the creation of research-derived artistic work. We deploy a community theatre approach as a conflict mitigation tool to facilitate critical dialogue within and between different rural communities in Bolivia's Chiquitania region. We draw on a popular community theatre methodology called Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) (Boal 1974) to create a Forum Theatre play with members of different local groups animating their lived experiences of the wildland fire crisis. This play will then travel, to be performed in four fire-affected communities. Forum Theatre is a theatrical form in which spectators (reframed as spect-actors) can physically enter the theatrical 'fiction' to make an intervention that might lead to a different outcome. Our objective is to bring people from different social groups into (potentially tense) dialogue and to create an uneasy sense of incompleteness that seeks resolution through real action off stage. This project will document for the first time the application of TO methods to a wildland fire crisis. It will focus on complex situations of oppression stemming from inter-community conflicts involving multiple dimensions: cultural and ethnic stigmatisation, incompatible livelihood strategies, political competition, relationships to the natural environment. We will develop an innovative approach to understand the linkages between multiple dimensions of oppression and how these are reflected in a major socio-environmental crisis such as the one provoked by wildland fires. The research team will follow alongside the travels of the play to record audience interventions and to interview key actors in local communities to glean a fuller understanding of issues and experiences. The creation and performance of the play will be recorded and, drawing on the individual and collective journeys of the project participants, a documentary film and a photography exhibition will be created. Visual arts will become, in this context, powerful means to engage with national and international audiences in order to enhance public awareness and debate on the complexity of wildland fire emergency. A photo and video exhibit will tour several major Bolivian cities, international festivals and academic conferences and will also be available through the project website. These will thus encourage continued reflection on wildland fire crisis beyond the scope and duration of the project.

Earthquakes are a major threat to lives, livelihoods, and economic development in China. Of the 2-2.5 million deaths in earthquakes worldwide since 1900, at least 650,000 have occurred in China. Chinese earthquakes have caused three of the ten highest death tolls in earthquakes since 1900 and have led to estimated losses of $678 billion (in 2012 USD). The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake alone caused direct economic losses of more than RMB840 billion, despite affecting largely rural areas of Sichuan province and causing only minor damage to the provincial capital of Chengdu. A future earthquake in China could cause catastrophic losses, and disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts in China are therefore of critical importance. Local communities play a critical role in DRR preparation and planning. In the immediate aftermath of a large earthquake, communities are often cut off from outside resources and assistance, and must rely on their own plans and capacities. This is especially true of communities in remote or mountainous areas like northwestern China. While DRR planning in China has traditionally followed a very centralised approach, there is growing recognition of the importance of community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) efforts. Most notably, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has embarked on a major programme to establish a network of thousands of 'demonstration communities' that have met minimum requirements for local-scale disaster preparedness. The proposed research is specifically aimed at supporting and enhancing the MoCA programme. Our work will ensure that it draws on broad scientific knowledge of the hazard, including secondary earthquake hazards such as landslides. Our work will also explore the factors that make communities more or less willing to engage in CBDRR, so that the MoCA programme can best reflect the broad diversity of communities that are exposed to that hazard. We will first look at the ways in which CBDRR is achieved in China, and how these approaches compare to those in other earthquake-prone countries. At the same time, we will produce a new inventory of landslides in northwestern China (an area that includes Gansu, Shaanxi, and Ningxia provinces), and will generate new knowledge on the sizes and effects of past landslides as a guide to landslide hazard in future earthquakes. Finally, we will work with two specific communities to find out their priority concerns and their awareness of the hazards that they face, and to come up with ideas for how they might deal with those hazards in a future earthquake. The emphasis of our work will be on sustained engagement with groups of engaged citizens to come up with solutions that will work in their communities. The goal throughout will be to take a community-centred approach to understanding the choices that people make to protect themselves from earthquakes. The project will lead to (1) new knowledge of landslide hazard in the region; (2) better understanding of the factors that help communities to engage with DRR issues; and (3) strategies for local earthquake resilience that complement and extend the National Five-Year Plans for Comprehensive Disaster Reduction. By increasing resilience at the community level to the damaging earthquakes that will surely occur across this region in future, the project will make a direct contribution to sustainable growth and economic welfare. The research and training that we propose will increase local capacity to assess and plan for the effects of future earthquakes. Finally, China has engaged in constructive cooperation in south-south exchanges of knowledge in DRR, e.g. through the CBDM Asia project. We are keen to contribute to these exchanges and wider economic development of the region by sharing the outcomes of this research with partners in other earthquake-prone countries across Asia.

Migration between the countries of the Global South, otherwise known as South-South migration (SSM), accounts for nearly half of all international migration, reaching almost 70% in some places. The potential of SSM to contribute to development and delivery of the SDGs is widely acknowledged but remains unrealised, largely due to existing inequalities at the global, national and local levels which determine who is (and is not) able to migrate, where to, and under which terms and conditions. These multidimensional inequalities are associated with a lack of rights for migrants and their families; difficult, expensive and sometimes dangerous journeys; and limited opportunities to access services and protection, which can, in turn, exacerbate inequalities. The challenge of ensuring that SSM reduces inequalities and contributes to delivery of the SDGs is intractable due to: - A lack of evidence about the ways in which horizontal and vertical inequalities can undermine major development investments and policies, and about the types of interventions which can overcome inequalities associated with SSM; - A failure of existing development approaches to take account of how SSM (and related policies) is/are influenced by broader economic, political and social processes (and relevant sectoral policies); - A focus on individual ODA-recipient countries rather than on dynamic effects along migration 'corridors' which connect origin and destination countries and the development implications of (two-way) flows of people, finance, trade and knowledge; - The politicisation of migration and a growing tendency to focus on migration management and border controls at the expense of equitable migration and development related outcomes; - The top-down, high-level orientation of much development policy planning which can dehumanise migrants by focusing on economic indicators and outcomes rather than experiences and well-being, broadly defined; and - A gap between policy and legal frameworks to limit inequalities associated with SSM (where these exist), and their equitable delivery / implementation in practice. The Hub is oriented towards addressing this challenge and ensuring that SSM is able to make a more equitable and effective contribution to poverty reduction, development and delivery of the SDGs, particularly SDGs 1, 5, 8 and 10. It does so by bringing together, for the first time, research and delivery partners from 12 ODA-recipient countries which constitute six SSM 'corridors' (Burkina Faso-Cote d'Ivoire, China-Ghana, Egypt-Jordan, Ethiopia-South Africa, Haiti-Brazil, Nepal-Malaysia) who will work in partnership with five UN agencies and the OECD. The Hub will deliver challenge-led programmes of research and evaluation to address inequalities associated with SSM, undertaking extensive new data collection and policy analysis, and testing interventions and solutions in a range of geographical contexts. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) will lead the Hub's communication and dissemination work, working alongside our research partners in the Global South to develop a range of outputs for different local, national and global audiences to maximise the Hub's impact on policy and practice. The Hub builds on existing RCUK investments but also develops equitable new partnerships in order to generate novel and innovative perspectives on the intractable challenge which it seeks to address. In particular, by bringing together researchers from the Global South working across the countries making up the SSM corridors, and connecting these teams with leading migration scholars in the Global North, the Hub provides an opportunity for significant cross-learning within and between the corridors, and on SSM more generally. In so doing it offers considerable added value, strengthening capacity and capability for understanding - and responding to - the challenges associated with SSM and delivery of the SDGs.