To understand and mitigate economic inequalities, both locally and globally, we need to acknowledge inequalities within households. Yet, in most empirical studies, such intra-household inequalities are disregarded mainly because we lack appropriate measurement tools and data. Not only is this problematic for inequality measurement, this lack of understanding hampers the design of cost-effective poverty reduction and child development policies. This project has five general objectives. First, I will update the facts about inequalities through direct measurement of intra-household consumption allocations, and relate these to spousal income contributions. Second, I will develop and validate novel measures of parental resource-allocation preferences and use these to study whether children are likely to benefit more if mothers, rather than fathers, receive cash transfers. Third, I will develop and validate novel measures of household decision-making and use these to investigate how targeted transfers shape women’s empowerment. Fourth, I will study whether cash transfers or an educational parenting program is most cost-efficient for child development. Fifth, I will use an integrated framework and the new tools and data, to refine our understanding of the mechanisms behind inequalities among adults and child development. Concretely, the project will contribute to our knowledge in the following specific ways. I will carry out an extensive data collection on intra-household allocations, parental-allocation preferences and women’s empowerment, in ten very diverse countries, one from each decile of the world income distribution. I will engage in a local RCT in Tanzania on cash transfers and parenting, which also involves extensive data collection on household consumption, time use, preferences and decision-making. Finally, I will conduct lab experiments in Chile, India and Tanzania so as to validate the parental-allocation preference and decision- making measures.

HydroConnect focuses on the connectivities afforded by hidden, underground fresh water that surfaces along the coastlines of islands lacking accessible, perennial fresh water. It explores how Austronesian-speaking seafarers transformed such freshwater ‘seeps’ into wells throughout the South China Sea and Indo-Pacific, affording sea-routes around these well networks. Thus, HydroConnect breaks with the tendency in the social sciences and historiography to analytically privilege oceans or navigable rivers as vectors of global connections and history-making. With the innovative concept of hydroconnectivities – human connections afforded by fresh water access – HydroConnect develops a novel theoretical framework linking the terrestrial and the aquatic through comparative historical ethnography of Austronesian speakers’ Indigenous knowledge, which has crossed oceans and flowed down generations, travelling between different groups of people. Deploying a cyclical tidalectic methodology transcending anthropology, archaeology and geology, it breaks new methodological and theoretical ground for conceptualising global history through hydrological connectivities across these chains of island worlds in different oceans. First, it studies how this travelling Indigenous knowledge enabled hydroconnectivities that opened up sea routes and integrated fresh water, well infrastructure, and ecological and social exchanges across immense oceanic spaces in the past. Second, the project maps and theorizes how present-day descendants and successors of Austronesian-speaking seafarers benefit from vernacular hydrological knowledge of underground freshwater seeps. Thus, it advances analogical knowledge for tackling groundwater depletion to enable past-informed and future-oriented water policies for the sustainable management of the Earth’s aquifers.

TRAFIG introduces a novel perspective on protracted displacement situations (PDS) that will improve the protection and resilience of refugees and enhance trust and cooperation between refugees and host communities. It considers the transnational and local connectivity of displaced people and host communities as well as their capability of mobility as socioeconomic and socio-psychological resources that displaced people use and upon which their resilience relies. The project will develop a rapid assessment tool to identify the most vulnerable groups in PDS and to analyse interactions between displaced and host communities. As an evidence-based tool for creating impact, it will support policymakers and practitioners to enhance the self-reliance of displaced people as well as host-refugees relations through tailored programming and policy development. We closely cooperate with key stakeholders throughout the entire life cycle of the project. Our research is based on a novel concept of transnational figurations of displacement that combines the figuration model – a meso-level approach emphasizing the networks of interdependent human beings – with the transnationalism approach and state-of-the-art knowledge on forced displacement. Through comparative empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative, in camps and urban settings at sites in Asia, Africa, and Europe, TRAFIG will answer the following questions: (1) How do displaced people gain access to and make use of humanitarian and migration policies and programmes? (2) Why and how do displaced people live in vulnerable situations and sustain their livelihoods? How can policy support their self-reliance? (3) How do transnational networks shape refugees’ experiences and trajectories? (4) Which processes structure relations between displaced people and host communities? (5) What are the medium and long-term economic impacts of PDS?

What strategies do authoritarian states deploy to control information beyond their borders? While disinformation efforts as foreign influence has received extensive attention, little has been done to systematically dissect information suppression strategies. By analysing the ways in which Russia, China, Ethiopia and Rwanda suppress information, the ARM project will conceptualise, identify and help address information suppression as foreign information manipulation and intervention (FIMI) by authoritarian states domestically, within Europe, and among diaspora communities residing in Europe. China and Russia are selected as two major powers highly active in managing information as a part of their foreign policy. Ethiopia and Rwanda, though less influential on the global stage, are some of the most engaged African states in transnational repression. Having substantial diaspora populations in Europe, their reach should be analysed and the implications of their information suppression should be understood. By conceptualising information suppression as part of FIMI, the ARM project will broaden the established approach to FIMI, which has traditionally only been focused on disinformation. By delineating the concept of information suppression within the strategic toolbox of authoritarian regimes, we will contribute to the scholarly discussions how autocracies manoeuvre to strengthen their power base. With the identification of the tactics, techniques, and procedures of information suppression, we will make a toolkit, including recommendations on how to combat information suppression operations, taking the risks and vulnerabilities of target groups into consideration. Through the lifespan of the project, we will involve the defender community: key actors within policy and civil society who try to detect, understand, and respond to threats stemming from authoritarian regimes’ suppression of information.

In recent years, China’s and Vietnam’s militarized and subsidized fishing fleets have begun to shift their radical marine harvesting techniques, and accompanying trade, from the South China Sea to Africa and Oceania. Scholarly analysis has largely assumed that fishers are instruments of their states’ geopolitical agendas, responding to regulations and incentives. This both obscures the actual motivations and modalities of fishers’ expansion of their fishing grounds and downplays the transoceanic networks connecting different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting this spike in maritime trespass, TransOcean will analyze and theorize how individuals and groups of fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader and smuggler, and how the emergent mobilities of Asian fishers interact and collide with those of Pacific and African fishers. Deploying the innovative concept of relational and shifting multiple mobilities and employing thalassographic analysis, TransOcean develops a novel theoretical and methodological framework of fishers as mobile maritime actors who exploit their multiple occupations, incomes and networks to pursue transoceanic expansion. TransOcean studies, for the first time, diverse groups of interconnected fishers outside of territorially bounded fisheries and area studies, by analyzing mobilities beyond sea-borne migration or diasporic settlement. Though multi-scalar and globally oriented TransOcean remains firmly rooted in fine-grained ethnography, with a focus on Vietnamese and Chinese and African and Pacific fishers in specific on-shore nodal points, connected by the growing Sino-Vietnamese demand for illicit seafood. Thus, TransOcean breaks new methodological and theoretical ground for tackling intractable marine problems of significant scientific and policy value.