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LIVING THROUGH CRISES
and Asia. The capacities of developing countries to manage these new risks have failed to evolve in tandem with the new globalized risk pattern. Nation states have generally lacked the resources and institutional frameworks for formal social protection mechanisms, and they have in many cases struggled to honor precrisis social protection commitments as revenues declined, leaving both the precrisis poor and the newly poor with little or no support (McCord 2010). This situation explains the urgency of understanding how globalized crises affect people and how they cope and has profound implications for design of social protection. This book came out of two separate initiatives carried out by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the World Bank that aimed to monitor the effects of the crises as they unfolded. The Bank’s work was motivated by a need for timely information about the impacts of the crisis, something that the household and labor force surveys available at the time were unable to supply. In East Asia, for example, the most recent poverty data available at the onset of the crisis were two years old, and only one or two countries had labor force data available for 2009 (Turk, Mason, and Petesch 2010). To understand the poverty and social consequences of the crisis more fully, the Bank began a series of rapid qualitative assessments as a supplement to quantitative data. The IDS work was rooted in its tradition of participatory research and drew directly on the pioneering work of Robert Chambers, who contributed to the initial research design. The country studies described in this book were organized in somewhat different ways, but they all relied on qualitative data because statistics and surveys of crisis impacts were not available, had gaps, or would come only after major delays. Under such circumstances, qualitative crisis monitoring held the promise of providing, almost in real time, policy-relevant insights into how people were affected and what they did to cope with shocks. Local research teams carried out the field work, often visiting the same localities repeatedly as the crisis was unfolding. Their job was to establish “listening posts” that would allow communities to describe what the global food, fuel, and financial crises of 2008–11 meant to them, how they were affected, and what they did to cope with the adverse consequences. To gather the information, field teams used an array of qualitative methods. The research in the various countries was conducted by different people using methods tailored to the country context. No global research protocol was used (although each country used a consistent protocol), and therefore results can be hard to aggregate across countries. In all countries, however, the research focused on essentially the same questions: Who was affected