In so doing, it draws on the example of the risks associated with alcohol (production, retailing and consumption) in the Western Cape Province of South Africa (SA) to consider two impact objectives: (1) Shifting governmental agendas from treating effects to identifying, acknowledging and addressing the c au s e s of hazardous drinking and its (intended and unintended) consequences, and (2) injecting development aspirations into alcohol control policy and, no less importantly, alcohol control into development policy. This paper therefore ruminates on the theoretical and empirical problem of how best to translate findings of complexity into messages that can be communicated simply and which, ultimately, could have the intended outcome of alleviating the vulnerabilities that drive and exacerbate poverty.
In the case of the research project explored in this paper which concerns behaviours and practices that both stem from and aggravate poverty, this task is all the more important, but no less demanding.
#Bryant keil how to#
The challenge is therefore clear: how to translate social science research in ways that hold the potential to alleviate poverty and generate ‘useful, legible and relevant’ research findings (Wilton and Moreno 2012, 107). For example, the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) asks that the primary area of impact be poverty alleviation. 2011 Williams 2012) from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), research grant criteria, and government Higher Education and research policy, trying to effect impact may necessitate reframing how the research problem itself is viewed. Yet, despite this burgeoning of demand for impact (Pain, Kesby et al. The importance of generating impact from research is undoubtedly clear, especially where research concerns risk behaviours that result in disproportionately high mortality and morbidity rates and that undermine progress towards developmental objectives.
#Bryant keil series#
The second involves the question of how best to convey the complexity of these interrelationships to a series of disparate “end users”. The first concerns how best to theorise and conceptualise the intersections between alcohol, poverty, development and urban space. This paper emerges from two points at different ends of the research process. In addition, it also reflects on the model's utility as a means of communicating findings that might reorient policy discussions on alcohol control in both South Africa and countries of the Global South. In so doing, it aims to mark out an under-explored research agenda that considers alcohol as a pervasive governance dilemma. To realise this, it draws on Blaikie et al’s (1994 2003) political ecological approach to risk, vulnerability and coping and, more specifically, applies their Pressure and Release model to explore liquor as a situated “disaster” in South Africa’s Western Cape province. This reorientation is needed for sustainable, publicly acceptable alcohol policies. To do so, it draws attention to the upstream causes of vulnerability, rather than just the downstream effects of risky drinking. Drawing on the example of South Africa, this paper argues that alcohol consumption might usefully be theorised in political ecological lexicon as a “disaster”.
At the same time, the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the Global South demands new conceptual and pragmatic engagements with their modifiable risk factors. While attention to the socio-ecological and political economic influences on health grows, there remains a paucity of political ecological analyses of health (King, 2010). The Political Ecology of Alcohol as “Disaster” in South Africa’s Western Cape
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