A leading development researcher looks back over two tough years
When Heaven Crawley last spoke to Funding Insight, in May 2019, official development assistance-related research in the UK was enjoying a moment in the sun. The UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund was three years into its mission to increase research done to benefit low- and middle-income countries. Six months before the interview, Crawley had been awarded nearly £20 million from the GCRF to set up and lead the South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (Mideq) at Coventry University.
Development research was then hit by the double whammy of a global pandemic and deep cuts to funding—annual government spending on aid was reduced from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent of GDP.
We caught up with Crawley to hear how she had coped with these issues.
How did the pandemic affect your research?
There have certainly been a lot of challenges associated with the pandemic. In my field, there are migrants in the global south who’ve been unable to travel or trapped in certain locations and out of work. We’ve witnessed increased xenophobia and racism against migrants, economic downturns and more. The impacts of Covid are clearly very negative. But in terms of our research, I would say Covid has been oddly positive. One objective of the Mideq hub was to decentralise learning about migration away from the global north, where it’s driven by political, policy and economic interests, and towards the global south, where so much migration takes place. Restrictions meant global-south peers had the freedom and autonomy to do the research without any direct involvement from the north. I think there has been a shift in power in knowledge production as a result.
Is this only research power, though?
Yes, the problem is that funding power still sits in the global north. And while UKRI can talk about equitable partnerships, its practice has been frequently less than equitable. I’m talking about the cuts. At the drop of a hat, literally a week before the new financial year started, we had to tell our partners they were losing their money. There’s nothing equitable about that. It’s a reproduction of historical inequalities in access to resources.
Some would say the GCRF was compromised from the start, as it was taking money from the aid budget and spending it in UK universities.
My understanding, and I don’t think this has ever been said officially, is that as long as 40 per cent of a GCRF grant goes to the global south, that would be sufficient. This balance for me is not right. The balance of work almost always weighs more heavily on global south partners; UK partners effectively cost more to provide less input.
Does that make your relationship with your partners difficult?
Yes. I was in a meeting last week where a global-south researcher basically said that I represent UKRI for the global-south partners because I am the closest they will get to talking with UKRI. It’s very difficult for me to hear that, but it’s true. I become the perpetrator of what partners have described as “brutal violence” in terms of their livelihoods and other consequences. It feels very personal.
How do you see development research in the UK in the future?
I should start with the very good news story of GCRF: it largely achieved what it set out to achieve, which was to shift the way we think about this research and engage expertise and knowledge from the global south.
But the bigger question we must face is the position of UKRI in the wider landscape of UK government funding, and particularly within a business department rather than an education department. UKRI decision-making is often oriented towards projects that have quantifiable outputs and deliverables, which is not necessarily the case for research on development.
What about the next generation of researchers in this space?
Again, there’s good news resulting from the GCRF. A lot of energy and resources have gone into early career researchers. Right now, there are some very powerful networks of early career researchers who, if certain forces could be combined, could be in a great position to leverage different kinds of resources—not necessarily government resources—and press on.
What are those resources?
There are other resources that are not embedded in the political agenda of one particular country. Some are attached to organisations doing development. Big development organisations increasingly have their own research operations. You’ve also got some of the big foundations: George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, among others. And then there are what you might call intergovernment funding—funding that comes from government but is mediated by other institutions. It’s not easy to find these sources, but we do need to look beyond traditional funders such as UKRI and think about how else we might do this work.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com