Impact case study database

To improve access to finance opportunities and poverty alleviation strategies in risky political economies, Michelutti and her team worked in collaboration with the former Senior Rural Development Specialist at The World Bank and founder of the social financial-technology enterprise Village Invest (VI), and with the team leader of the Governance, Conflict, Inclusion and Humanitarian Research Commissioning Team (GCIH) at DFID (now FCDO).

Shaping understanding of, and framing new research commissions on, politics, crime and governance at Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)

Michelutti’s collaboration with FCDO (formerly DFID) shaped their understanding of the application of ethnographic methodologies and data sets. This informed their advice on governance and corruption and their training of new advisors. Knowledge exchange began in 2012, when the team leader of GCIH represented FCDO on the Advisory Board of Michelutti’s ESRC grant (iii). From 2013 onwards, the team leader “provided suggestions about how to link the new ethnographic research [which also informed Ethnographic Driven Risk Analysis Framework (EDRAF – discussed below)] with other sources and available quantitative datasets, such as public data on flows of government funds through procurement and contracting” [A]. The team leader of GCIH explains that “Drawing links between big data sets and analysis and ethnographic research to better understand the individual networks at the foot of the contracting chains, and how public funding reinforces political structures and corruption has informed my own work for DFID [now FCDO] in advising on governance and corruption, including in the training of new governance advisors” [A]. These insights featured in internal documents and were publicised by FCDO via Twitter [B] “to set out the points for wider audiences, and also to have an easy reference for new DFID trainees and our partners” [A].

Michelutti’s research findings on criminal political economies [R1/R2] have also informed the framing of new research commissions. The team leader of GCIH explains that [R1] and [R2] “have helped shape the way we [FCDO RED’s GCIH team] think about politics, corruption, governance and serious organised crime, and this will inform the framing of new research commissions on SOC [Serious Organised Crime] in 2020/21 to ensure that we take into account and commission local level research, including social anthropology, as well as macro level analysis of whole sectors and use of large data sets” [A]. In doing so, FCDO are drawing on the comparative method and the “triangulati[on] of ethnography with quantitative data sources” employed in grant [iii] [A]. He called the project’s comparative methodology a “good, practical move” to overcome a criticism levelled at research funded by FCDO, namely that it is “too context dependent” [A]. [R1] and [R2] shaped discussions within FCDO about “how specific development programmes and budgets (e.g. related to India’s Public Distribution System, and Public Procurement) are entangled in the extra-legal political sphere, particularly at local level” [A]. The approach modelled by Michelutti’s research shows how “technical reforms may have diverse and unintended consequences, particularly at local level” and how to study and tackle such corrupted political and economic practices [A].

Changing the methodologies of a social enterprise lending platform and the development of EDRAF (Ethnographic Driven Risk Analysis Tool)

Michelutti’s research has been applied at the local level by lending platform, Village Invest. Village Invest (VI) is a crowd-funded lending platform that supplies small loans through local saving credit associations. Michelutti began working with VI in 2016. As the CEO explains, Michelutti’s research [R1/R3] changed VI’s methodologies and lending practices. It “challenged [VI’s] initial assumptions and methodologies”, leading VI “to rethink our in-house credit rating scoring” and re-design their data collection strategies and leading to the development of EDRAF by Michelutti and her team at UCL [C]. The development of the tool was supported by an ERC Proof of Concept grant [i].

EDRAF is a novel instrument to assess and minimise risks in the social lending/impact investing sector and generate measurable impact in rural South Asia. The tool comprises a research toolkit to assess political, economic and social risks for social financing in rural South Asia, and a mobile software application for Android to collect and map households’ debt and credit histories in joint or extended family systems. The tool is also designed to monitor and track the social impact of the loans (for a description of the tool and how it works see **[D]**). EDRAF collects and analyses granular and first-hand financial and non-financial data of rural households and their savings and credit organizations (such as Self-Help Groups and their Federations in India; financial cooperatives; community savings and credit associations in Africa, etc.) using a household survey. The household survey aims at understanding household economies and the complex cultures of debt and credit in rural markets. The app automatically prepares business plans with each family. This process helps the families involved to understand their financial situation and to learn what is involved in starting a business. The collected data constitutes the basis from which households will be rated. Importantly, however, they also inform the benchmark for measuring subsequent ratings and, crucially, the loans’ social and economic impact. Thus EDRAF provides innovative impact/vulnerability scores, enabling investors to measure the social impact of their loans and evidence whether social investments ‘make a difference’ on the ground.

EDRAF methodology improves previous VI rating practices in multiple ways. EDRAF takes into account that high levels of social stigma can be attached to low credit scoring. As shown in [R1], [R2], and [R3], these are systems where borrowing money is at the heart of the social fabric and it is shameful not to be given credit. As a result, VI now anonymises and protects borrowers/villages’ identities in their online platform and has adopted a more rigorous data security protection approach and ethical guidelines [C]. Secondly, VI’s initial rating strategies identified as ‘bad’ debts mainly those that were owed to moneylenders. Drawing on Michelutti’s findings, the scoring risk criteria were recalibrated in EDRAF “by considering insights that showed how ‘bad’ debts are not always the hardest ones financially and that - contrary to [VI’s] initial assumptions - often the most sensitive debts were those with kin rather than those with moneylenders” [C]. In so doing, the tool takes into account local ‘hierarchies of debt’ and shapes the ways in which potential borrowers’ financial and social vulnerabilities may impair their ability to pay back the loan or to get loans from other sources. Thirdly, VI “learnt that creditworthiness should not be assessed on the basis of immediate households’ budget” and consequently “completely redesigned the questionnaire of our social finance and credit rating tool” [C]. Thus, EDRAF’s methodology differs from previous VI methodologies by taking into consideration the reputation and budget of the whole family; it is a data collection tool capable of collecting information about ‘extended-network-families budgets’ rather than ‘individual budgets’ and as such has the potential to enhance financial inclusion and wider social impact. In short, the inclusion of family finances recalibrates the risk scores for individuals. Finally, the EDRAF toolkit now enables VI (and other potential users) to identify local power relations and/or institutional conflict that could severely undermine any current or future impact of social lending. It allows for a micro-political economy risk assessment that helps the selection (or exclusion) of operational areas where there are the following risks: poor governance, political instability, communal divisions, criminal networks that may hamper field implementation and elite capture.

Providing access to affordable loans, strengthening individual household finances and local economies in Rajasthan, India

EDRAF was trialled in Rajasthan, North India in December 2018 - March 2019 and evaluated in January - February 2020 [supported by i]. By providing access to affordable loans and, crucially, giving borrowers a voice in negotiating their credit worthiness, EDRAF strengthened individual households and local economies [E/F]. The beneficiaries are the women, men and children living and working in a selected cluster of communities in rural Rajasthan. This includes nearly 120 villages and involves 20,000 members of the local village savings and credit community organizations (Self-Help Groups (SHGs)).

By November 2019, after which the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt on this phase of the project’s rollout, 54 households had been granted VI loans under the new methodology. 98 per cent of the borrowers are repaying the loan – which is indicative evidence that the rating process works [R3]; 40 per cent of families said that they are now better off and that their new businesses (financed by VI loans) helped them to get out of debt with local moneylenders and improved their overall standard of living and, crucially, helped them to improve the standard of education of their children [E]. It should be noted that these households would not have received loans for productive business activities from other sources. For example, one villager said “with VI loan I have bought a buffalo, I have built a fencing wall for my house […] most importantly I have made my children study and I have also managed to pay back the loan instalments regularly” [F]. Likewise, another family member said that her family used the loan to pay off a debt with a moneylender and to buy more land and buffaloes: “We have taken one lakh loan. We have bought a buffalo, which cost 50,000 rupees. With the remaining 50,000 rupees I have repaid a debt that I had with a local moneylender and got back one bigha of land that he kept as collateral […] We got a great benefit from the loan. Now we have four buffalos, and one male buffalo calf. From the buffalos we are getting good milk, and by selling it we are able to repay household expenses […] In the past we had to go often to the moneylender, as soon as we had money problem, but now we don’t have to ask them money any longer” [F]. For this family the biggest impact has been to learn about how to manage a family budget. By sticking to the original business plan generated through the use the app, they managed to greatly increase their monthly income. They no longer need the local moneylenders for loans in the period between the crops, and they can rely on the SHG’s loans if in need.

There are about 250,000 SHGs (involving 3,000,000 households) in Rajasthan. As of February 2020 the local Federation (with 50,000 households) had agreed to adopt EDRAF for their operations with a view to extending the use of the tool to other Federations in Rajasthan by early 2021 (delayed by COVID-19 pandemic). The Federation and SHGs leaders who administer the loans also asserted that their involvement with VI has been beneficial by improving their access to bank credit: The Federation President stated that “The Federation greatly benefitted from VI loans as our involvement with VI greatly improved our linkages with the bank by enhancing our credit rating” [F].

In sum, the application of Michelutti’s findings and methodology has enabled the development of new lending practices, providing access to affordable loans for households in India and made a concrete difference to the lives of individuals in 54 households in Rajasthan. Her methodologies have also shaped understanding of and framed new research commissions on politics, crime and governance at FDCO.

Health is social and cultural, as well as biomedical, and largely generated outside clinical environments. However, most interventions around diabetes and obesity do not take this into account. Type 2 diabetes in particular is a condition in which all modifiable risk factors (e.g. physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, smoking) are firmly situated within the social and cultural domain, as Napier shows in [R1]. The Cities Changing Diabetes (CCD) programme brings together multiple stakeholders working across sectors and disciplines to address this complex health issue. After using a mixed methods approach [R4] based on Napier’s method [R3] to ascertain each city’s specific vulnerabilities to Type 2 diabetes, partner organizations identify and implement interventions based on the social and cultural determinants of health. The goal of CCD is to flatten the curve of global diabetes prevalence at 10% in 2045; in time, these new policies will improve health outcomes for the 437,000,000 people with diabetes (2017 project baseline).

Instigating and influencing the design of local city government-led programmes and initiatives in programme partner cities: Through the CCD programme, Napier’s research has led to changes in practice in a diverse range of community groups and public sector organizations and to the introduction of new interventions to prevent diabetes. The Vice President of Global Prevention and Health Promotion at global healthcare company Novo Nordisk explains that “Napier has been instrumental in developing and applying tools and research methods to assess risk and vulnerability within the field of urban diabetes and obesity, with a particular focus on understanding the underlying social determinants and cultural factors that drive this risk.” Through CCD “[t]his work has guided public health officials in many cities around the world to redesign public health interventions to more appropriately address health inequity in their local setting” [A].

Houston joined CCD in 2014 (population with diabetes estimated at 469,000 in 2017). The Deputy Assistant Director of the Houston Health Department, a key stakeholder in CCD Houston, explained that “by collaborating with Dr Napier and UCL we have [...] developed strategic evidence-based public health interventions that will have sustainable impact not just to the Houston community but communities worldwide” [B]. Alongside a lack of trust in traditional healthcare systems, Houston’s Diabetes Vulnerability Assessment (D-VA) revealed vulnerabilities such as unhealthy food traditions, long commutes and low health literacy. In Houston, faith is deeply integrated into daily life and houses of faith (that is, places of worship, faith leaders and congregations) are the primary community for many Houstonians. Therefore a Faith and Diabetes initiative, formed from a coalition of 80 faith-based organizations and partner organisations such as charity the Institute for Spirituality and Health, was established to empower communities of faith to better understand and address diabetes awareness, prevention and management. The Faith and Diabetes Initiative’s first intervention was The Congregational Health Leadership Programme, introduced in 2016. As the Deputy Assistant Director explains, “this train-the-trainer programme prepares congregational members to implement evidence-based primary prevention programs and a 6-week lifestyle change programme for members already diagnosed with diabetes. 132 trainers, serving a community of more than 75,000 residents of Houston, have completed the course to date” [B]. This in turn “inspired congregation leaders to initiate other health-promoting activities, for example improving healthy food options at church events or outlets” [B]. One of the main objectives of the D-VA is to identify new case definitions [R4]: sets of complex and often heterogeneous risk factors that fuel one another locally. Whereas houses of faith had previously worked with communities largely based on their socioeconomic status (presumed to be at particular risk for diabetes), as a result of Napier’s research they included new communities identified to be vulnerable to diabetes based on sociocultural factors. The Deputy Assistant Director reports: “David’s work has allowed us to expand our capacity to serve those who are often forgotten but are most vulnerable to chronic disease morbidity and mortality” [B].

Rome (pop. 4,300,000, 8.3% with diabetes) joined CCD in 2016. The Head of Health and Welfare Area, Censis Foundation, who led local implementation of study protocol on site, explains that it showed a linear correlation between diabetes prevalence, unemployment rates and use of private transport [C1]. Consequently in 2017, the intervention Walking Routes Passport was introduced, in partnership with stakeholders including patient associations and local health authorities, in an effort to connect those who did not traditionally get around the city on foot with one another and to raise awareness of the benefits of walking instead of driving. The passport is a collection of urban routes designed to encourage citizens to take part in free and accessible physical activities. The President of the Health City Institute (HCI), a think tank concerned with health in urban contexts, explains that the CCD research showed this would reduce “physical risk factors” as well as “the level of participation and empathy felt by people living with diabetes” [C2]. In Rome the passport comprises “52 walking routes” covering “330 km for healthy urban walking [which] made the Italian capital the largest walkable city in Europe” [C2]. The passport was extended to Milan in 2019 (34 routes covering 175 km) and the accompanying mobile phone app has been downloaded more than 5,000 times [C3]. Five other Italian cities with 7,000,000 inhabitants have now joined CCD resulting in “tangible benefits for quality of public care and welfare services in the Italian cities” [C1]. For example, Napier helped to create an education and training course to develop the new role of ‘Health City Manager’ [C4]. As the HCI President explains, “The programme is designed to train Health City Managers who can work with local authorities to guide the process of health improvement in urban areas” and the first cohort of 120 administrators, split across Turin, Bologna and Bari, will begin training in 2021. The course “is aimed at generating a higher level of literacy and management competences among decision makers and at innovating public policy through the youngest generations” [C1].

Seoul’s (pop. 9,900,000; 5,000,000 in Korea with diabetes) participation in CCD since 2019 has improved how child and adolescent diabetic patients and their families understand diabetes and has increased support for them. In November 2020, the ‘Jeju-do Diabetes Patient Support Ordinance’ was agreed by the Korean Diabetes Association (KDA) and Korean Hospital. The Chairman of the KDA and Academic Lead for CCD in South Korea explains that this is a “bespoke package for the 323 diabetic patients under 19 on Jeju island to support [their] treatment” which includes “environmental improvement and educational programmes” [D]. On 28 August 2020, the KDA collaborated with the Ministry of Interior and Safety on a YouTube Live event, “to provide an opportunity to explain policies related to diabetes in children and adolescents […] and to support children and adolescents with diabetes” [D]. The event included a Q&A and the stream has received 1,508 views.

In Copenhagen (24,400 inhabitants with diabetes), the CCD programme research resulted in the introduction of specific projects designed to improve the lives of vulnerable citizens. As the former Mayor for Health and Care notes, “We could see the deeper impact on inequality in the prevalence of diabetes, for example the prevalence among citizens not employed. That made it possible for us to target our action” [E]. Consequently, the Center for Diabetes was established in 2016. Three-quarters of people newly diagnosed with diabetes in Copenhagen visit the Center for Diabetes, which offers a health-stimulating environment, daily activities, patient education, physical exercise, and cooking classes. Through a new peer support programme built around the idea of a civic social club, people diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes gather socially to overcome social isolation and share learnings that help them commit to the lifestyle changes necessary to improve their lives with a chronic disease. The former Mayor explains “both the peer supporters and peers […] have benefitted from the program and experienced positive outcomes”. They note: “Long term, these successes contribute to reducing the problem that Copenhagen is facing with social inequality and type-2 diabetes, therefore reducing overall inequalities in health in the city” and calls CCD “the perfect platform for the City to take action on diabetes and obesity” [E].

The implementation of the CCD programme motivated the development of government policies to address diabetes prevalence in Mexico. The Director of the Health and Nutrition Center at the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico, confirms that “Napier developed a vulnerability index that has permitted us to understand health determinants in Mexico that are usually neglected, concerning cultural health determinants that play a pivotal role in diabetes treatment control and adherence” [F]. As the Director explains, “This index has resulted in innovative intervention methods with great potential to improve patients’ ability to control their diabetes to be incorporated into national prevention methods” [F]. As the Head of the Anthropology and Ecology of Disease Emergence Unit at Institut Pasteur describes, “in Mexico City, David worked closely with urban health authorities and other leaders to reduce soft drink consumption three years in a row, implement door-to-door diabetes screening in the poorest neighbourhoods, and set up maternal-child health clinics to prevent obesity and diabetes” [G]. The Director of the Health and Nutrition Center used CCD data to lobby the Mexican government to promote the soda tax (a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages introduced 2014) and warning labels on food packaging to highlight products high in calories, sugar, salt, saturated fats and trans fats (introduced October 2020). They confirm, “The evidence generated by CCD and the vulnerability index have been used to support a comprehensive proposal of strategies for prevention and control of diabetes that the new government has developed in Mexico, and which are currently being considered for implementation” [F].

Shaping policymakers’ understanding of the prevention and treatment of diabetes and of vulnerability to COVID-19: Napier’s research shaped Western Australian policy recommendations on the prevention and treatment of diabetes. On 29 January 2019, Napier gave a briefing to the Education and Health Standing Committee of the Parliament of Western Australia. CCD is widely referred to throughout the resulting report issued by the committee in April 2019, The Food Fix: The role of diet in type 2 diabetes prevention and management. The report cites Napier’s briefing three times alongside CCD publications (2 publications cited 5 times) and states, “The importance of the approach of Cities Changing Diabetes is critical to addressing effective intervention programmes” [H1]. It found that “Type 2 diabetes prevention is dependent on understanding the social, cultural and environmental factors, particular to a city and its communities, that underlie the development of the disease” [H1, p. 73] and recommends that “The State Government and/or local government authorities use the tools offered by Cities Changing Diabetes to help understand vulnerable populations, or consider joining the programme” (Recommendation 15), and that “the State Government consider funding a Western Australia Local Government to participate in the Cities Changing Diabetes programme” (Recommendation 16) [H1, p. 73]. The Western Australian Government Response to the report (October 2019) stated that recommendations 15 and 16 had been directed to the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries [H2, p. 11].

Napier’s research has changed understanding of the cultural and social determinants of health and wellbeing at the WHO and other organizations, shaping their policy messages. The Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing (CCH) programme at WHO Europe analyses how cultural factors affect health and wellbeing. An advisor to CCH confirms that Napier’s work [R1] “informed the conceptualization and establishment of the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s flagship program in the Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing” and notes that “[t]hrough the CCH project, Napier’s work has been incorporated into a number of policy briefs [eg. R2] disseminated through the region’s 53 national Ministries of Health” [I]. Napier’s expertise in vulnerability assessments has informed responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Coordinator of SoNAR-Global, a project developing a global social sciences network for the preparedness and response to epidemics and anti-microbial resistance, explains that in December 2020 SoNAR-Global was “negotiating with UNICEF to integrate David Napier’s vulnerability assessment into their Minimum Standards for Community Engagement and to start scaling it up in multiple locations around the world. And the WHO has expressed active interest in the development of a training of social scientists to employ this approach” [G], while the European Commission is funding new work by Napier and colleagues in 7 European countries on vulnerability to COVID-19 (ii). The Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe, analyses how cultural factors affect health and wellbeing and “translat[es] global knowledge to the domestic U.S. context” and builds directly on Napier’s vulnerability assessment work [I]. Napier’s research on vulnerability assessments [R3] was foundational to the Initiative’s policy brief, Improving Pandemic Response: Global Lessons and Cultural Insights from COVID-19: “Napier has developed a model that sees vulnerabilities as dynamic and the resulted of compounding factors. […] Building on that, we were able to construct policy guidance for governments to conduct assessments of the factors that produce vulnerabilities before a crisis occurs” [I]. The brief was prepared for “President-elect Biden’s COVID task force” [I].

The Sapelli platform has been used in over 20 projects in 11 countries (Including Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, DRCongo, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia and Zambia) to empower and build resilience to climate unpredictability, to document local resources and seek land rights, to document illegal activities and violence, to protect vital resources from damage or removal by industrial companies, and to promote new models of sustainable agro-forestry, community reserves and forest regeneration.

Empowering IPLCs to protect areas of high biodiversity

ExCiteS’ Sapelli app, which has 500+ installs from Google Play, has been used by ExCiteS and by organisations to support IPLCs in protecting areas of high biodiversity. Participating IPLCs have developed their digital skills, gained important new knowledge and networks, been empowered to protect and manage resources and had their rights better respected by outsiders. In Brazil, Pantanal fishers in Barra de São Lourenço mapped their territories and obtained a 5,000km² community reserve from the Federal Court in Corumbá in a historic decision that allowed them to continue to maintain and expand their traditional way of life without harming natural resources [A]. Brazilian Ashaninka reinforced their local teams to monitor illegal logging, poaching and fishing activity in their territory to send those doing so away [B]. Khoisan in Namibia documented cattle invasions on their conservancy and sent reports to local authorities to control the cattle [B]. The authorities failed to take effective action, but the Khoisan developed further uses for Sapelli in the annual game count to increase their participation in managing their conservancy. Ghanaian farmers use ExCiteS tools to integrate local, indigenous forecasting knowledge with mid-range climate forecasting so they could make more adaptive decisions on when to plant and rotate crops to increase productivity, providing them greater resilience to irregular rainfall [B]. Projects have monitored rare orchids in Zambia to support local livelihoods by building up species distribution maps and other information vital to conservation assessments of the different orchid species used in the Chikanda trade [B]. Masai warriors in the Masai Mara monitored 134 endangered medicinal plants as they were concerned about the loss of traditional ecological knowledge and threats to these plants from deforestation brought on by expanding settlements on their rangelands, and supported Kenyan farmers to network information to increase resilience to unpredictable weather and pests [B]. In 2014, ExCiteS was placed on social investment organisation Nominet Trust’s (now Social Tech Trust) NT100 list of organisations using digital technology to change the world for the better.

Taking one example from Cameroon in detail, ExCiteS has collaborated with international conservation charity Zoological Society of London (ZSL) since 2015 to “promote the greater involvement of local communities around the Dja Biosphere Reserve (DBR) in conservation activities” in Cameroon (funded by the Darwin Fund, iii) [C]. ZSL provided training and information on Cameroon forestry laws while Lewis and Simon Hoyte co-designed the data collection software with local communities [C]. Between May 2017 and August 2020, seven local communities in the DBR used Sapelli to report and map illegal activities, creating almost 800 records of such activity. ZSL staff confirm that they use this information “to inform local forestry authorities, law enforcement patrols and Interpol on the types of activities, frequencies and parties involved in poaching and trafficking for the illegal wildlife trade” [C]. It is used “to guide the Ministry of Forestry (MINFOF) enforcement officers on the ground” [C]. Information is precise and received quickly “enabling changes in how we implement certain field activities. For example, the number of ecoguards per patrol team has increased from 6 to 8, while [ the length of] patrol[ s] […] increased from 7 to 10 days. Some MINFOF control posts have been re-located to better tackle traffickers and camping, and patrolling materials for mobile staff have been improved upon” [C]. These actions have had tangible results: “seizures and arrests have increased due to discrete and precise information supplied through the local community networks. Between 12/2017 and 08/2020, 36 arrest incidents (sometimes of multiple perpetrators) and 19 seizures without arrests were recorded” [C]. When funding for the ExCiteS-ZSL collaboration ended in 2018, ZSL decided to continue funding the project from their own budget “to maintain and grow the ExCiteS network around the Dja Reserve” [C]. This success led Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) to introduce the ExCiteS approach around two Reserves (Lobeke and Nki) in Cameroon in late 2020.

In Cambodia, Sapelli is used by the Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN) as part of the ‘It’s Our Forest Too’ initiative, supported by a partnership between PLCN, a peacebuilding organization, a development organization, an IT company, and the University of Copenhagen. A professor at the latter explains that the project partners “used Sapelli to develop an app for smartphones, making it easy for local forest patrols in Cambodia to geo-reference, document, and upload information about forest resources and illegal activities” [D]. The Sapelli/Prey Lang app enabled the partners to scale up work to stop illegal logging, map resources, support advocacy, environmental justice, conflict resolution, biodiversity conservation, and mitigate climate change. The professor confirms that since the app was launched in 02/2015 “around 400 community monitors from more than 100 villages have uploaded more than 20,000 observations on natural resources and illegal logging to a database hosted in the cloud” [D]. Just as in DBR, Cameroon, in Cambodia, the app has enabled a shorter response time between detection of a crime and law enforcement, increasing arrests and confiscation of equipment. Forest patrols have confiscated logging equipment, “including over 200 chainsaws” and “numerous loggers have been arrested”. PLCN has shaped national policy: “Following PLCN petitions, the government of Cambodia gazetted 430,000 hectares as Prey Lang Protected Forest in 2016” [D]. PLCN reports have been used by INTERPOL “to investigate illegal timber exports to the EU” and have led to new global protection “as international trade in all species of Rosewood (Dalbergia ssp) is now suspended unless shipments have a CITES exemption certificate” [D]. PLCN was awarded the United Nations Equator Prize in 2015, the Innovation Prize of the International Society of Tropical Foresters in 2017, and the Energy Globe Award for Cambodia in 2019.

Raising awareness of Flourishing Diversity to influence the strategies of investors, a charity, and Extinction Rebellion Youth to build support networks with IPLCs to protect diversity

From 2016-2017, Lewis was PI on a Newton Fund project (iv) to develop knowledge-sharing networks between academics, NGOs, and the Ashaninka and Guaranì peoples to support reforesting Brazil’s Atlantic Forest by improving the lives of the Guaranì [E]. Promoting peer-to-peer learning and collaborative project design produced eight Guaranì indigenous maps and territorial management plans, and increased food security through recovering and replanting lost varieties, and by offering training in adapted agro-forestry techniques [E]. The project won the Newton Prize for Brazil 2018 (i) and, in dialogue with partners, Lewis further developed the concept of ‘flourishing diversity’ [R3]. In September 2019, UCL’s Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) hosted the first Flourishing Diversity Series (FDS) that brought 30 representatives from 16 different indigenous groups from 12 countries to London to speak to over 1,000 attendees (general public, students, activists, lawyers and academics) over three days (350/day). Participating IPLCs determined the agenda and content, and garnered significant public support. 12 private sector investors contributed over GBP190,000 and a network of high-profile partner organisations participated, such as UK charity Synchronicity Earth (SE) that “acts to address overlooked and underfunded conservation challenges for globally threatened species and ecosystems”. FDS received coverage by 7 major broadcast (BBC, Time, Forbes, Le Monde, Metro) and online outlets reaching 7,630,000 people. In May 2020, Scientific American ran an article by Lewis, ‘Living with the Forest’, which drew on [R1/R2/R3] to introduce readers to the concept of ‘flourishing diversity’. Scientific American has 3,500,000 print and tablet readers worldwide, 5,500,000 global online unique visitors monthly, and is translated into 14 languages [F].

For the Founder of SE and IUCN Patron of Nature, “Flourishing Diversity as both a principle and an action has transformed every aspect of my work” [G]. First introduced to the concept by Lewis in 2017 [R2], SE helped promote Lewis’s concept of ‘flourishing diversity’ by organising and funding FDS, including the ‘Listening Sessions’ that attracted 1,500 people by involving high-profile artists, actors and models such as Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Benedict Cumberbatch and Lily Cole to attract new audiences to listen to IPLCs’ ecological wisdom. Inspired, in 2020 SE established a new ‘Flourishing Diversity’ programme that closely maps onto [R2] and [R3]. SE donors have shown “significant interest in this work”, securing USD100,000 immediately and a further GBP144,705 “including GBP65,000 from someone who has not yet funded in the biocultural space before” [G]. SE is now supporting the establishment of a charity dedicated to Flourishing Diversity, “providing administrative, operational, and accounting expertise, alongside financial and in-kind support” [G].

International organisations have incorporated ‘flourishing diversity’ into their agendas. ‘Flourishing diversity’ will be one of the two ‘pathways’ through the World Conservation Congress (WCC), attracting 10-15,000 global conservation leaders and attended by 100,000 people in September 2021 (postponed from June 2020 due to COVID-19). WCC is organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - the global authority on the natural world and the measures to safeguard it. The director of IUCN’s NatureCulture initiative adopted ‘flourishing diversity’ as an IUCN goal for 2020 [G]. Talks are ongoing with UNESCO and the Convention on Biological Diversity to embed ‘flourishing diversity’ into their policy frameworks [G]. During FDS the ‘Amazon Alliance’, a network of experts and funders collaborating to provide financial support to threatened indigenous communities was established. As the SE founder explains, “This group is operating under the radar so as to protect those involved, but to date has supported three initiatives: $50,000 granted to the Guaranì and a further $70,000 secured; $100,000 granted to the Kayapo for guard posts to help them secure their territories from external threats; and £90,000 to an urgent funding pot for forest defenders.” [G].

Participating in FDS led to its adoption by Extinction Rebellion Youth (XRY) in 2019. A Coordinator of Alliance-building and Education for the XRY Internationalist Solidarity Team explains, “the XR movement was struggling to make our activism relevant to marginalized groups across the world” [H]. The concept of ‘flourishing diversity’ was transformational: “Collaborating with and learning from Flourishing Diversity was invaluable both for our theory of change and to be able to work in true solidarity with communities of resistance across the world” [H]. Guided by Lewis, XRY developed “a new, decolonised model for working with indigenous groups as their allies, guided by their approaches”. They have changed their practices: “instead of informing people about them and their issues, we have consistently worked to platform Indigenous peoples themselves”; instead of replicating assumptions “we are platforming radical worldviews that question those assumptions in the first place” and instead of planning campaigns to support indigenous rights without consulting indigenous peoples, “we have worked on getting to know them and develop relationships, so that we can understand what work they are already doing and ask them what we can do here to empower their work on the ground” [H]. As a result, XRY now has working partnerships with indigenous peoples that enact change and the team grew from 5 people in September 2019 to 10 core members and 20 part-time volunteers in June 2020 and continues to grow. XRY raised GBP8,000 to support 400 Guarani families during COVID-19 to self-isolate [H].

Working with the Guaranì in Brazil, XRY “launch[ed] an international campaign that persuaded Brazilian Supreme Court judge Mr. Edson to temporarily overturn a government directive calling for all Indigenous lands that weren’t recognised in 1988 to be declared non-Indigenous and be given to miners and loggers. Without that joint campaign we waged with the Guaranì, the majority of Indigenous lands in Brazil may have been cleared of their communities and of their ecosystems” [H]. As a result of these successes, XR Germany have asked to adopt the approach developed from FDS by XRY UK.

Geismar and Knox’s research has impacted UK government approaches to digital governance by transforming the methods used by user-researchers in the civil service to assess the social impact of government IT systems, and by shaping UK policy-approaches to addressing broader societal implications of new public and private data systems.

Influencing professional development in UK government Digital Services and changing how user researchers design systems

As government services move on-line, the UK government has been investing in user design and research. Until recently, anthropology has not been significantly represented in this work but in part as a result of Geismar and Knox’s work, the UK government now recognises digital anthropology as an important source of expertise in the design of digital government. On the basis of [R5], and her work developing the Centre for Digital Anthropology, Geismar was invited in 2015 to make several formal presentations about the value of digital anthropology to the Heads of User Research across the civil service, and from this the UK government commissioned a short course to bring these methods and insights into their practice. Geismar, in collaboration with UCL’s Digital Anthropology research team (Geismar, Knox, Antonia Walford, Jerome Lewis, Shireen Walton, David Jeevendrampillai, and Ludovic Coupaye), developed a course, The Tech Taster, that allowed user researchers working within the civil service to understand how they could extend the social methods and remit of their practice by using theories and methods from UCL’s material-culture inflected version of digital anthropology [R3/R5]. The course drew specifically on elements of Knox and Geismar’s work, which has shown how digital systems are material and need to be understood as objects and images in the world, and that digital design needs to extend beyond the interface between user and system [R5]. The team delivered this course five times (in 2017, 2018 (twice), 2019, 2020), to more than 100 civil servants in HM Revenue and Customs, Home Office, the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency, the Cabinet Office, and the Department for Work and Pensions, plus Government Digital Services, Companies House, Disclosure Scotland and the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. These teams are responsible for both research into and design of UK digital government services (gov.uk). Between its launch in 2012 and 2015, gov.uk received 2,000,000,000 visits from users across the world. The Tech Taster transformed the approaches of user researchers by introducing research insights and methods: that digital systems are material and need to be understood as objects and images in the world [R5]; that digital design needs to extend beyond the interface between user and system to understand broader social and digital infrastructures [R4]; that cultural assumptions are regularly coded into digital platforms [R6]; the importance of the methods of ethnography, auto-ethnography, material and visual anthropology to digital research [R4/R5].

A survey of all course participants demonstrated how The Tech Taster influenced professional methods, ideas and ethics used in the design of government digital services, contributed to continuing personal and professional development, and changed the ways user researchers design systems. Feedback obtained at the end of the course highlighted that the research had influenced participants’ learning and given them the tools to create better systems to support users. One commented that they “would like to try some of the digital anthropology methods in my role as a user researcher”, while another said, “I'd feel more confident to include 'deeper' ethnographical research. Also, I can apply the techniques around object ethnographies to my work in digital” [A]. The Head of User Research in the Home Office confirms that “Through attending the Tech Taster course, our researchers now use ethnography as one of our key methodologies” [B]. This has changed their systems design: “This has led to the design of services that place the user’s context and environment at the heart of the design of systems.” For example, in developing an app for front-line police officers, “ethnography informed the researchers and technical teams that users often wear gloves […] which restricts the use of a touchscreen device. Changes were made to the design of the technology with this in mind” [B]. The training enabled participants to reconceptualise their work and recognise its relevance in a wider context. For example, the Head of User Research notes that this introduction to scholarly work has led to user researchers “actively engaging in these texts in their day to day work”. User researchers now “incorporat[e] time for [academic desk research] into their project research plans, and mak[e] use of these learnings to inform their own research”. Furthermore, the Head of User Research notes that this introduction to the theories and methods of digital anthropology led to “a reduction of duplicated research efforts, and helped user researchers to build more persuasive, evidence-based justification for their research findings” [B].

Digital anthropology is now specifically highlighted as an essential qualification for the Home Office Digital Service internship program [C]. Interns trained in anthropology explained in a blog post for the Home Office Digital, Data and Technology blog (hodigital.blog.gov.uk) in 2016 that “our studies taught us to understand that everybody’s experiences are different – even when many of the circumstances are the same – and the work we’re doing at Home Office Digital gives us an opportunity to put this learning into practice” [D]. They explained that this is a ‘core skill’ for a user researcher because “inclusion is fundamental to the Home Office Digital’s mission to aid the Home Office in becoming digital by default” [D].

Influencing the development of UK policy approaches to the challenges of governing emerging forms of data

Knox was a core member of the Data Governance working group of the Royal Society and British Academy project on data governance and use. In 2017, the group produced a high-level policy report, Data Management and Use: Governance in the 21st Century (2017) to which Knox contributed. This has led to a change in the institutional landscape of data governance in the UK and shaped the focus and methods of evidence gathering to inform this ongoing area of public policy discussion. As a member of the working group, Knox drew on the underpinning research on digital systems in social life [R2/R3] to actively contribute to seven high-level round table meetings between October 2016 and May 2017 and to read, comment on and contribute to three drafts of the final report [E]. As a result, the report included key concerns emerging from Knox and Geismar’s research, including the politics of consent [R1], the differential effects of data infrastructures on diverse publics [R3], and the cultural work done by key concepts like privacy and ownership [R4]. The section ‘Consent in a digital age’ [E, pp. 36-37] was written by Knox and built on her work on people’s everyday engagement with infrastructures to highlight how consent must be understood to extend beyond box ticking [R1]. In addition, she advocated for a digital anthropology-informed approach to data governance that recognises the socially negotiated nature of data ownership, reconceived as a practice of exchange [R4]. This was reiterated in a presentation by Knox at a Royal Society event on Data Ownership which [Text redacted for publication] described as “a very well received presentation of different cultural notions of ownership” and “an important contribution to understanding the socially negotiated nature of data ownership” [F].

The recommendations of Data Management and Use, and Knox’s subsequent presentation to policymakers on an anthropological approach to data ownership, have contributed to a significant change in the public policy landscape. In 2017, the UK government committed GBP9,000,000 over 3 years to create a new Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) that would focus on enabling and ensuring safe and ethical innovation in AI and data-driven technologies. Consultation documents on the establishment of the CDEI highlights the Data Management and Use report and its recommendation that a new data-stewardship body be established as a key influence [G]. Moreover, [Text redacted for publication] corroborated the influence of the report in establishing the CDEI [F], noting “The policy project has led to significant impact. The report’s recommendation that a new body be established to steward the data governance landscape was welcomed by the then Minister the Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP, Minister of State for Digital […who] publicly announced support for the body” in 2017 [F].

The report also played a significant role in the establishment of a new deliberative policy-facing body, the GBP5,000,000 Nuffield Foundation funded Ada Lovelace Institute launched in 2018 [H]. The Ada Lovelace Institute’s Policy Director directly credits the Data Management and Use report as influential in the establishment of the institute, writing that “we were influenced by the recommendations in the British Academy and Royal Society joint report on Data Governance which Dr Knox was a part of, and the recommendations. […] The 2017 Data Governance report was directly referenced in our announcement and commitment to create a data ethics body” [I]. The announcement launching the Ada Lovelace Institute cited the Data Management and Use report as evidence that “momentum has been building” on the issue of the social and ethical implications of data that the institute was set up to address [H]. In addition the Data Management and Use report’s influence in shaping the work of the Ada Lovelace Institute was further corroborated by the inclusion, in the announcement, of a quote from the Chief Executive of the Royal Society, who stated “The current framework for governing the management and use of data cannot keep pace with technological advances. A report the Royal Society published last year with the British Academy highlighted the need for careful stewardship to anticipate future challenges, and to ensure that new technologies can be developed in the way that the public want, that exemplifies good practice, and that will allow everyone to benefit. The Ada Lovelace Institute can play an important part in making that happen” [H].

Knox’s work has also been influential in shaping the work programme of the Ada Lovelace Institute. The Institute’s Policy Director has confirmed that the “Nuffield Foundation Chief Executive and I attended the one-year-on event where Dr Knox spoke in 2018, and her comments were part of a catalyst for a cornerstone programme for The Ada Lovelace Institute, which was agreed that day, to convene diverse perspectives around the notion (or limitation) of data ownership”. She confirmed that the ‘Data Narratives’ strand of the Ada Lovelace programme “can be directly traced back to Knox’s speech on different interpretation of notions of ‘ownership’” [I].

Building on the Ada Lovelace’s interest in Knox’s anthropological approaches to data, in January 2020 Knox was invited by the Institute to advise on the use of digital ethnography to inform a policy project looking into the use of predictive data analytics in Local Government [I/J]. Knox sourced two ethnographic researchers for the project from the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL, drew on the methodological innovations outlined in underpinning research [R4] to advise on the design of the project’s methods, helped identify emerging themes and participated in meetings to feed preliminary results back to a policy audience. The report has generated novel insights about the bottom up, everyday ethics of data and the gap between locally situated and national-policy based understandings of data-ethics. As The Ada Lovelace Institute’s Policy Director puts it, “the research that Dr Knox has helped us design and put in place has the potential to alter the way that public services are delivered in a range of contexts, and thereby affect citizens’ lives directly” [I]. These findings are in the process of being applied to local government and national policy settings but due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic the publication of the report has been delayed from October 2020 to March 2021.

In sum, Geismar and Knox’s approach to digital anthropology informed their design of a professional ‘Tech Taster’ course offered to civil servants in UK government that changed the way user researchers design systems, and provided the basis for contributions to high-level UK policy discussions that have shaped emerging UK approaches to the governance of new forms of data.