 Hello everybody, I hope everyone can hear me and sorry about a slight delay. We'll get kicked off straight away and welcome to this session. My name is Jonathan Goodhand, I'm a Professor in Conflict and Development Studies in the Department of Development Studies at SELAS and I'm currently convening the MSc in Research for International Development. So what I'm going to be doing today is I'm going to say a little bit about the course and I'm going to give a short sample lesson to give you a flavour of some of the issues that we look at in the course and then open it up to you for questions. So let me start off by just say who I am and where I come from. In a previous life I used to be a development practitioner and I worked in the field for something like seven or eight years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Central Asian Republics. And I then subsequently did my PhD research and my work has been broadly on the political economy of violent conflict. But why give me this introduction is that I'm particularly interested in the debates that we touch upon in this course which are about how do we understand the links between policy, practice, evidence and theory. And so why is it important to be thinking about questions around method and evidence? And yeah, here we are. So I suppose in many ways it may seem quite obvious to you if you've had a bit of experience in the world of development's policy and practice. But certainly when I started off in the world of development practice almost 30 years ago it wasn't emphasised so much. Questions of data were not thought about sufficiently rigorously. Questions about the methodologies for developing that data were not interrogated sufficiently. And there weren't sufficient questions about the evidence base for predominant policies and practices. So I think over the last certainly the last 20 years in particular there's been a growing interest in questions about evidence in the world of international development. How do we know whether if you are putting where you should make choices as a development donor where should you be putting your money into have the maximum impact? How do you know whether you're having impact in order to address poverty? Should you be focusing on micro-enterprise? Or should you be focusing on a different field of activity? If you're diffid, should you be trying to address the causes of violent conflict? Or should you be trying to mitigate the effects of violence conflict? All these kinds of questions are linked to questions of evidence and they're also linked to questions of how we develop evidence, how we generate evidence and whether we can trust that evidence to make informed decisions. And so this course is really trying to grapple with those questions about how do we know? How do we make decisions? How do we know what is the most effective place to put money? And how do we think about what international development workers and agents often talk about? The underlying theories of change. What are the underlying assumptions about if you intervene in one area? How do you think, what is your chain of analysis, your causal chain of analysis to take you from these inputs into effects and broader impacts? So that's a very way of introduction that whether you are working as the coalface, if you like, as a development practitioner implementing development programs, whether you are acting as a donor to make decisions about funding, or whether you're working in a think tank, for example, Chatham House or overseas development institutes, or you are actually working as a researcher but trying to engage with development processes. Questions of evidence and methodology come up again and again and it's understanding how to engage with evidence, how to engage with method is a transferable skill that would apply whether you're going to be working as a private sector consultancy contractor or whether you're going to be working for an NGO or a think tank and so on. So what I'm going to briefly say now is a little bit about the course itself and what you would be studying in this course and then I'm going to jump into a sample session plan. So first of all, who is it for? One thing to say about courses at SARAS, they have an incredibly diverse student body and it's a range of different people coming from different backgrounds and different individual and personal trajectories. We have a lot of people who come with experience in the world of developments as humanitarian practitioners, as development practitioners, or as peace building practitioners who want to develop a stronger understanding of questions about evidence and research methods so they can be more confident when they engage with these debates in the real world of development practice. We have quite a few students who don't have experience in the world of development but want to make a transition into that kind of career and they see this as a good grounding for doing so. There are others who've worked in perhaps unrelated fields and they want to make a transition into the world of developments and again see this as a good base for doing so. And finally, there are a number of students who see this course as a stepping stone to go on to further research as a PhD candidate or perhaps working in a think tank as a kind of research and policy analyst and this gives them the skills and the grounding to do that. So let's go on to what it is you're going to, you would learn in the course of doing the masters. Well, obviously research methods is a fundamental part of this and you will be given a grounding in both quantitative and qualitative approaches to generating data building on interdisciplinary perspectives and to enable you to make informed choices about what kinds of methods make no sense to answer these kinds of questions in the field of development and to be able to select and to mix methods. How do we bring together more quantitative methods, large end studies with more fine-growing ethnographic qualitative approaches? Of course, we will be focusing on the technical kind of questions about what good research consists of in terms of rigor and so forth but we're also very interested in how these questions about choices are linked to political and disciplinary debates and these are often contested debates, often based on very different starting points for how you see the world, how you interpret the world and also often very kind of strong normative ideas about what the world should be like. So, you know, this is not just about technical questions of method, it's also about highly charged political questions. You will also learn about research design, so how do you set yourself a set of research questions and create an approach, a research design that enables you to best answer those kinds of questions? How do you present your data when you have developed, when you have done your research? How do you present it in a convincing way to policy audiences or to research audiences? So, we also look at some very kind of practical skills which will be certainly useful after you finish the course about presenting research, about preparing policy briefs for policy audiences. How do you convince policymakers about your key messages? How do you attract their attention? How do you ensure that key messages from a very long complex process of research are captured in a compelling and highly credible way for policy audiences? So, also, how do you pitch your research? And also, how do you develop academic presentations? So, these are kind of some of the skills that you will be taught in the research. And this is kind of the broad structure of the course to give you an idea of the kinds of courses you will be doing and how it's broken down. So, essentially, it's a 180 credit course. Of that, 120 credits are taught courses and 60 credits go towards your dissertation. Let's start with the core courses. So, the three core courses that all students will do which we think are essential to give you a grounding in quantitative and qualitative method. And one thing I should say as well, this is a unique course in the sense that it's taught jointly by the Economics Department and the Development Studies Department. So, you have got very high quality lectures around both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The battlefields of method gives you a broad grounding in different research approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, and a lot of the key debates around the choices of methodological choices. Your statistical research methods and your research methods in the National Development give you a hard grounding in the quantitative approaches in statistical analysis, regression analysis, survey-based approaches. Large-end studies. And so, we have a nice mix of the Development Studies and the Economics Department's areas of expertise feeding into the core courses which give you a platform going forward in the course. You then have choices both from the Development Studies and the Economics Department. There are a few examples given here, but it's a far larger, longer list of some in each department, some close to 20 options in each department. So, you have a big range of options to choose from, normally four options of 15 credits. So, some options may be 30 credits, so that would mean you could choose, you could have a... the options are between two to four optional modules. And this gives you the scope of two areas of personal interest, whether it's kind of thematic areas of interest or geographical areas of interest. So, for example, there you can see you can choose specifically to focus on China, and you could choose on the other and make a choice to look at other... focus on other regions of the world as well. And finally, the dissertation is really the... your opportunity to really focus in on a subject that you really are passionate about, really interest you, and you want to explore in greater depth. And so, you have the first term and a half to think about what that may be. You can spend time talking to different lecturers to make decisions about that. By early in term two, then you will make an initial choice about what your dissertation topic will be. And then by the beginning of term three, you will embark upon your dissertation topic. That gives you an idea a little bit about what you will learn and the kind of the structure. So, to finish off, before we jump into the sample lesson, there's a question, obviously, what would you do afterwards? How will this benefit you in practical and very concrete terms? And our students have gone on to a whole range of different sets of experiences and job opportunities since studying the course. So, it is very, very varied, but this gives you some examples of the kind of positions some of our previous students have gone on to, whether it's through working with official aid organizations in the kind of the donor agency area, such as Difford or World Bank. Many end up working with NGOs. And as many of you will know, there's a kind of a burgeoning area of growth in the NGO sector around monitoring evaluation, around research and evidence. Increasingly, organizations like Difford are putting more of their ODA, overseas development assistance, into research programs. I'm leading a major research program that I'll talk about in a minute, which is funded through funding, because Difford are putting the Department of International Development are putting so much emphasis on creating a better evidence base to inform policy and practice. A number of students end up working with think tanks from Chatham House to the Overseas Development Institute, Asia Foundation. Some go on to PhD research, so the course provides the building blocks. The foundations are going on to a more focused research topic in the form of their PhD. Others may end up actually working in the UK government in areas like the Treasury or the National Audit Office, which are not overseas focused, but based on very important skills that are transferable into that kind of context, being able to interpret data, being able to kind of look critically at data, knowing about research methods and research rigor is something that's clearly very important outside of the international development sphere as well. And finally, quite a number of students are working in private sector organizations which focus on international development issues, whether through evaluation, research, policy advice and so on. And finally, the United Nations is another kind of area that students kind of move into. This is, that's to give you a kind of a brief overview of the course and what it aims to do. I'm sure you may have further questions which I'll give some time for at the end to feedback on. Now, I want to just jump in to give you a kind of sample of a part of a lesson that we teach in the battlefields of method. And this actually is less about method than it is about what do you do with your research and how do you develop a policy brief which aims to have an impact out there in the real world on policy makers. And so I'm going to give you a kind of truncated, a very short version of a sample lesson that I gave to the students in the battlefield of method. And the purpose of this is to, it comes towards the end of the course. So it's the second term toward the end of the second term. Half the students have been exposed to a whole range of different kinds of methods in the first term and in the second term, how do you apply these methods in practice? And in this session, it's really about how do you convert the research findings into a policy brief that can have an impact on policy makers. And this is the outline to give you an idea of what the session is about. So first of all, I introduce the research project that we're talking about in the session, which is a project that I'm leading at the moment. So it's a real-life case study. I then talk a little bit about the questions and challenges of evidence in this area, which is around drugs and violent conflict. We then move into looking at, well, how do you influence policy? How do you make an impact on policy? And how do you go about preparing a policy brief? And we finish the session by doing a task, a case study task in which the students divide into groups. They're given a case study, which is a real-life case. It's a report prepared by the International Crisis Group on drugs production in Myanmar. And they produce a policy brief which draws out the key messages for a named policymaker. So they have to decide who is the policymaker they're trying to influence and how. And this leads to an assignment task in which students have to prepare their own policy brief, which is assessed by myself and is partially assessed work. Okay, so very, very quickly, the research project is one that I'm leading, and it's a UK government-funded research project called drugs and disorder, building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war. And what we're trying to do in this research is ask a very big and ambitious question. How do war economies get transformed into being peace economies in regions of recovery, or experiencing armed conflict? And we may need to do three things in this research project. One, we want to generate a new evidence base on a set of issues where the evidence base is very patchy and very, very political science. I think there are really very few other areas where there's such a mismatch between the quality of the evidence being generated on drugs and the gap between this evidence base and the mainstream policies, which are deeply problematic and I'll come to you in a minute. We're also trying through this research to lead to new approaches and policy reforms, and we're aiming to build up a network of research institutions in the countries where we're doing the research. And the research has been conducted in Colombia, Afghanistan and in Myanmar. And we're working with research teams in these three countries. We've chosen these countries for very obvious reasons. Afghanistan and Myanmar produce more than 90% of the global heroin production and Colombia more than 50% of global cocaine production. So these are areas which are really highly shaped by drug economies, by violent conflict. And to address the problems of drugs and state fragility in these contexts will have global impacts. So it's the potential to have a very major effect by shaping policies in these three countries and globally. And methodologically there's no time to discuss this now but our approach is to try and work with mixed methods. So gaining access to these borderland regions where we're doing the research which is where drugs are mainly produced, consumed and trafficked is very difficult, because we're working with research teams working in these three countries. We are working on GIF spatial imagery. We're doing ethnographic and survey work in the field. And also we're trying to present our research in novel ways. So we're working with organizations that produce visual narratives, case studies and comic strips as you can see here to try and humanize the stories around drugs. And so one of the things in our course is about how you mix methods and how you triangulate approaches to ensure you counter biases or you counter or minimize the problems with a dependence on any one particular method. So that's really in a nutshell what the research is about. Now just to kind of stand back from that a second and think about what do we know about the production of evidence, the methodologies around the production of evidence for drugs. I mean, as I said already it's a deeply contested and deeply problematic field where you have a lot of what I would call policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policies. In other words, evidence is driven by a set of concerns of the policymakers rather than drawing upon the evidence itself. And the policy field is shaped really by this bigger agenda of trying to eradicate or to create a drug-free world and this is linked to dealing with illicit cultivation dealing with the demand for drugs dealing with the production of psychotropic substances like methamphetamines and not just drugs which are grown in fields like coca and poppy to deal with the trafficking of drugs and money-lordening which is linked to drugs. What do we know about the kind of the success of these kinds of policies? Well, we know that the worn drugs has manifestly failed and this gives you an example in terms of the demand has grown and the production has grown the health-related risks have grown and the violence around the worn drugs has also grown. So, in lots of just of the kind of a basic level we can see there's some deeply problematic consequences of the worn drugs and it's led to lots of unintended consequences including growing securitisation and coercive responses the growth of the black economy and protection rackets as those involve seek protection because of its an illegal activity. The way that there is what we might call a policy displacement in the sense that more and more money is invested in securitised approaches rather than kind of health-based approaches that there's a geographical displacement that a success in eradication in one area simply moves the problem across the border into another area similarly new substances are developed and there's problems around stigmatisation and marginalisation of drugs users linked to this kind of moralising debate and so we can see very different things going on in the world of drugs from on the one hand much more securitised approaches the war on drugs in the Philippines is a good example to legalisation in Canada and so this kind of consensus around prohibition is fragmenting and there's a growing interest in more developmental approaches how do you make drugs debates more cognisant of the sustainable development goals can drugs and the sustainable development goals be more integrated with each other rather than treating this as a securitised and a criminalised issue can we treat this as a development issue linked to these the pursuit of these the SDGs so that's where in our project we're trying to realign these debates and one of the big kind of goals of this is to try and produce evidence that is going to shift these debates and at the same time in the course the master's course we're continually thinking about how policy and evidence are not technical kind of questions they're linked to particular world views particular sets of political interests and this is particularly the case in the question of drugs so there are very problematic targets in relation to the war on drugs how many hectors of poppy fields have been eradicated how many seizures have been made for drug trafficking and these lead to very problematic forms of intervention there's a tendency to fetishise drugs rather than to think about how they're connected to a social, economic and political context in many ways drugs is a faith based ideology rather than an evidence based set of policies and there's also problems with how we as researchers kind of communicate and develop our evidence based around drugs we tend to sit in disciplinary silos there's not enough inter-disciplinary research on these issues and there's not enough engagement with researchers from Colombia from Afghanistan and I think that's a big challenge that we need to address in the research there's often a failure to translate the findings of research into actionable points for policy makers and we need to also understand the political economy of policy making so policy making as I've already said it's not just about evidence it's also about particular political and institutional predisposition so when we're thinking about how to engage with the world of policy we need to understand the political economy of how policy is developed how issues are framed why they're aimed in certain ways how they get translated into certain kind of actions and how we as researchers can intervene in those processes whether we're talking about understanding the political context about understanding individual actors whether we're thinking about what kinds of knowledge is going to be more or less compelling for particular types of events or humanitarian or drug actors so to finish off and run out of time ready what's the next step we're doing this session with the students is thinking about in light of this is an example of a research project this is these are some of the debates around policy making in the world of drugs and the problems of evidence how do you go about developing a policy brief to shape and influence policy case so one or two quick points I mean the first thing is a policy brief is a short document this is not a long research report it's condensing the long complex research report into a set of key compelling messages that will attract the attention of policy makers and also give clear directions to policy makers about things that they can do in concrete terms as a result of this evidence so you need to be clear about first of all this is a standalone document that can be read without reading the full research report it needs to be clear to the target audience is it focusing on UNODC the UN Office for Drugs and Crime is it focusing on the World Bank is it trying to target say the children fund you know who is the audience try and focus on a single issue to the extent possible it's not going to have much traction if you outline a whole range of different issues and say they're very complex and something needs to be done about them focus down on something that you think A is going to be interesting and attractive to the donor and it's something that they can actually act upon so it's a short a short document two to four pages no more than 1500 words usually and certainly that's how how we sit in this exercise you need to refer to the content of the longer report it needs to be written very clearly and as I said it has to have very specific recommendations and targets so it's a different skill from writing up a long research report and it's something that needs to be designed imaginatively and be visually appealing to include graphs to include text boxes to include photos and maps that breaks up the text and so it doesn't have long paragraphs of text it needs to be able to be something that captures the attention of busy policy makers in a compelling way and then the structure can vary between different policy briefs but a fairly standard approach is to have your key messages up front when this arrives on a policy maker's desk and they look at this they're going to look at the first few sentences and they're going to say okay so what what can I do about this so what are the messages you're trying to communicate here introducing the issue or the problem and then say something about the approach that was taken what the methods were and what the key findings were and what the implications and the recommendations are that flow out of this analysis there is no single correct structure but I think your policy brief will need to have these key components and one of the people who are good at this the most important thing is get your key message in so that they're clear about this they're compelling and they attract the policy maker's attention if they fail to do that the policy maker's not going to bother reading the rest of it you've got to attract them in the beginning so there's quite a skill around doing this this kind of a policy brief which is a different skill from the more intricate and more the long-winded setting up a research report so I think the thing to highlight here as well is that the course is teaching different skills which are which are important whether a researcher or whether you're a policy maker now in the session itself this is your last slide here the students divide into groups and prepare policy briefs first with the example of the case of drugs and the international crisis group in Myanmar and then they develop one based on a research report from Afghanistan so I've gone up too long I'm now happy to answer questions if you'd like to email me jg27 at sarse.ac.uk I'll do my best to answer them