^{Photo credit: Warwickshire County Record Office, PH350 269a}

Dr. Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla, the Head of School for Cross-faculty Studies is part of a team that has successfully secured funding for a Public Engagement project at the University of Warwick. The project is being supported by Warwick’s Public Engagement Fund, designed to assist researchers of all levels to undertake projects or activities that build upon their public engagement experience and impact.

^{Image credit: Dr Marco J Haenssgen}

Supporting idea generation and research design for a project on behavioural spill-overs in Thailand, the Institute of Advanced Study and the Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development have awarded £3,150 and £950 to a research team around Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Assistant Professor Marco J Haenssgen.

^{Image credit: Dr Marco J Haenssgen}

Dr Jess Savage, Senior Teaching Fellow in Global Sustainable Development has been awarded £44,676 from the University Global Challenges Research Fund: Accelerator Programme to undertake a research project titled "Protected Areas and People: Exploring perceived wisdoms surrounding natural resource management and sustainability". The aim of the research is to help find sustainable, long term solutions by developing strategic tools for the effective design and implementation of management systems. This will allow the expansion of current knowledge networks throughout Cambodia, and into nearby Myanmar.

GSD Assistant Professor Dr Marco J Haenssgen has won a £19,793 GCRF Catalyst award to support the research project “Dynamism of land use and livelihood strategies among highland ethnic minorities in Northern Thailand: Co-producing narratives of change.”

Together with the Thai anthropologists Dr Mukdawan Sakboon and Dr Prasit Leepreecha from Chiang Mai University, the research team will use the innovative qualitative research method of story completion to document and illustrate livelihood changes in the highlands of Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Over the past 30 years, livelihoods among highland ethnic groups have changed dramatically, with government-orchestrated shifts away from opium production and self-sufficient agriculture towards cash and mono crop cultivation, capitalist systems of production, and tourism business. Not only has this created new definitions of “rich” and “poor” villagers, but it also changed people’s relationship to the natural environment. In the fluid political environment of Thailand, villagers’ livelihoods and their uses of the land they live on have again come under scrutiny, raising fears of expropriation and displacement. This project aims to use the story completion technique together with visual media to produce narratives that give villagers a new channel to engage policy and the broader public with their personal experiences and livelihood changes.

Dr Nicholas Bernards has been awarded an Early Career Small Research Grant by the British International Studies Association (BISA), for a project on 'The Colonial Origins of Policy Failures in Global Development Governance'.

The grant for GBP 2,950 will fund preliminary research at the National Archives on the development of financial systems in colonial Africa, focusing in particular on debates between 1930 and 1960 about access to credit for African borrowers in British African colonies. The project examines the particular geographies and institutional forms that regional and territorial financial systems took on in British Africa. It emphasises the ways in which the uneven development of financial systems in the colonial era have posed distinct limits on contemporary global policy frameworks, particularly efforts to promote 'financial inclusion'.

Dr Bernards will present on this research in progress at the BISA 44th annual conference in London on June 12.