Citizens’ aspirations for the future are politically important; they are linked to welfare and whether citizens engage in forward-looking political and economic behavior. How do natural disasters affect aspirations, and can governments’ social protection policies successfully mitigate any damaging effects? If natural disasters threaten aspirations, there is strong policy interest in understanding these threats and what government can do to protect aspirations. This article uses Pakistan’s 2010 floods to identify the effects of a natural disaster on citizens’ aspirations. Aspirations were significantly reduced—especially among the poorest and most vulnerable. However, by exploiting exogenous variation in access to targeted government social protection, the authors show that social protection following natural disasters can significantly reduce their negative aspirational effects. This offers a new understanding of government social protection. It not only raises social welfare in the short term by restoring livelihoods and replacing damaged assets; it also has an enduring effect by raising citizens’ aspirations for the future. The authors show not only that the aspirations of citizens matter for citizens’ behaviors, but also that government policies can effectively protect and increase those aspirations. This implies that the value and efficacy of government disaster relief programs are underestimated when aspirations are not taken into account.

In Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change leading experts analyze and question ongoing adaptation interventions. Contributions span different disciplinary perspectives, from law to engineering, and cover different regions from Africa to the Pacific. Chapters assess the need for adaptation, highlighting climate change impacts such as sea level rise, increases in temperature, changing hydrological variability, and threats to food security. The book then discusses the state of global legislation and means of tracking progress. It reviews ways to build resilience in a range of contexts— from the Arctic, to small island states, to urban areas, across food and energy systems. Critical tools for adaptation planning are highlighted - from social capital and ethics, to decision support systems, to innovative finance and risk transfer mechanisms. Controversies related to geoengineering and migration are also discussed. This book is an indispensable resource for scientists, practitioners, and policy makers working in climate change adaptation, sustainable development, ecosystem management, and urban planning. - Provides a summary of tools and methods used in adaptation including recent innovations - Includes chapters from a diverse range of authors from academic institutions, humanitarian organizations, and the United Nations - Evaluates adaptation options, highlighting gaps in knowledge where further research or new tools are needed

We find strong empirical evidence that raising aspirations is one route to empowering women. Higher aspirations on the part of husbands predicts more egalitarian gender attitudes for both the husband and his wife. However, higher aspirations on the part of wives may be an even more important predictor of women's empowerment. In particular, higher aspirations on the part of wives predict both more egalitarian gender attitudes (for both the husband and his wife) as well as greater involvement of women in household decision-making, as agreed by both the wife and her husband.

Targeting is a commonly used, but much debated, policy tool within global social assistance practice. Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas examines the well-known dilemmas in light of the growing body of experience, new implementation capacities, and the potential to bring new data and data science to bear. The book begins by considering why or whether or how narrowly or broadly to target different parts of social assistance and updates the global empirics around the outcomes and costs of targeting. It illustrates the choices that must be made in moving from an abstract vision to implementable definitions and procedures, and in deciding how the choices should be informed by values, empirics, and context. The importance of delivery systems and processes to distributional outcomes are emphasized, and many facets with room for improvement are discussed. The book also explores the choices between targeting methods and how differences in purposes and contexts shape those. The know-how with respect to the data and inference used by the different household-specific targeting methods is summarized and comprehensively updated, including a focus on “big data†? and machine learning. A primer on measurement issues is included. Key findings include the following: · Targeting selected categories, families, or individuals plays a valuable role within the framework of universal social protection. · Measuring the accuracy and cost of targeting can be done in many ways, and judicious choices require a range of metrics. · Weighing the relatively low costs of targeting against the potential gains is important. · Implementing inclusive delivery systems is critical for reducing errors of exclusion and inclusion. · Selecting and customizing the appropriate targeting method depends on purpose and context; there is no method preferred in all circumstances. · Leveraging advances in technology—ICT, big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning—can improve targeting accuracy, but they are not a panacea; better data matters more than sophistication in inference. · Targeting social protection should be a dynamic process.

The term 'natural disaster' is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase 'natural disaster' suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth. At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed. The updated new edition confronts a further ten years of ever more expensive and deadly disasters and discusses disaster not as an aberration, but as a signal failure of mainstream 'development'. Two analytical models are provided as tools for understanding vulnerability. One links remote and distant 'root causes' to 'unsafe conditions' in a 'progression of vulnerability'. The other uses the concepts of 'access' and 'livelihood' to understand why some households are more vulnerable than others. Examining key natural events and incorporating strategies to create a safer world, this revised edition is an important resource for those involved in the fields of environment and development studies.

Developing policies to foster inclusive rural transformation processes requires better evidence on how climate change is affecting the livelihoods and economic behaviours of vulnerable rural people, including women, youths and people living in poverty. In particular, there is little comparative, multi-country and multi-region evidence to understand how exposure to weather shocks and climate change affects the drivers of rural transformation and adaptive actions across different segments of rural societies and in different agro-ecological contexts. This evidence is essential because, while climate risk and adaptive actions are context specific and require local solutions, global evidence is important for identifying shared vulnerabilities and priority actions for scaling up effective responses. This report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of climate change on rural women, youths and people living in poverty. It analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households (representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries. These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labour allocations and adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age characteristics.