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This paper explores how women in Nairobi’s informal settlements use everyday care and grassroots networks to meet gendered welfare needs amid limited state support, revealing both the empowering possibilities and the structural limits of these alternative systems.

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This paper examines alternative social welfare practices in Nairobi’s informal settlements to understand how gendered needs are recognized, negotiated, and addressed in contexts of limited state support. While non-state actors—ranging from community groups to non-governmental organizations—increasingly provide essential services, their ability to meet the specific needs of women remains uneven. Drawing on an ethics of care and feminist relational perspectives, the paper foregrounds women’s lived experiences to explore how everyday acts of care function as informal welfare mechanisms. It identifies key gendered needs, including protection from domestic violence, sexual and reproductive health rights, access to childcare, and economic security, and assesses the extent to which alternative welfare systems incorporate these concerns or reproduce gendered hierarchies. Special attention is given to the practices of marginalized groups such as sex workers, refugees, and single mothers, whose access to welfare support varies significantly across social and spatial divides. By tracing how women organize, negotiate, and create their own support structures when existing mechanisms fall short, the paper demonstrates how grassroots agency both compensates for state absence and challenges entrenched inequalities, but also reveals the limitations of these arrangements—such as resource scarcity, exclusionary norms, and the emotional burdens placed on women. Ultimately, it shows how everyday care practices reshape the meaning of welfare from below while highlighting the constraints that continue to hinder more transformative gender justice.

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This paper makes visible patterns of support and solidarity that extend among displacement-affected populations and translocally across borders. It contributes to better understanding the role of informal aid in displacement, especially as institutional actors may become less prominent.

Paper long abstract

The military coup of February 1st, 2021 in Myanmar intensified a long-standing situation of conflict-induced displacement, with a dramatic increase of people seeking shelter away from their hometowns and villages. In this context, existing networks of informal support become ever more important for people’s immediate survival, and mid-term livelihoods. As part of a larger project on protracted displacement economies, we investigated how social networks become conduits for cross-border support; how existing modes of aid are being transformed, and how new ones come into being. These do not necessarily consist of conventional international organisations, but rather a multitude of actors which can be less visible to others. They include networks sustained by kinship links, ethnic solidarities, faith-based groups, and diasporic support. Many of the people involved have past or current experience of displacement themselves. Our broader aim is therefore to make visible patterns of support and solidarity that extend among displacement-affected populations, translocally across borders, and further afield. This helps us to better understand informal aid in displacement which come into view especially as formal actors are less prominent. We ask how pre-existing mechanisms of support function in crisis, what forms they take- and not least, how sustainable they may be in the long term.

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This paper examines how refugee leaders from Bethlehem reimagine aid and development through grassroots initiatives that operate within and against dominant aid systems. It also analyses how transnational solidarity networks allow new modes of organising while reproducing global power hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Palestinian refugee leaders in the camps surrounding Bethlehem are reimagining aid and development through grassroots, refugee-led initiatives that operate both within and against dominant aid systems.

Based on long-term ethnographic engagement in Dheisheh, Aida, and Azza camps in occupied Palestine, the paper analyses efforts by refugee organisers to fund and run community-based projects that respond to everyday needs amid military occupation, protracted displacement, declining UNRWA funding, and international aid agendas that often clash with local political and social values. These initiatives seek to provide alternatives to internationally driven development projects, instead foregrounding local priorities and explicitly contesting dominant aid-sector logics, including depoliticisation, upward accountability, and professionalised relationships.

At the same time, refugee leaders must navigate entrenched global funding and surveillance regimes that continue to reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to disrupt. To circumvent restrictive donor frameworks, many have cultivated transnational solidarity networks with European and North American supporters. While these networks open new spaces for organising and resource mobilisation, they also reinscribe asymmetries of power, privileging those able to translate their struggles into the languages of Global North audiences. The paper ethnographically traces these tensions to show where Palestinian grassroots actors are able to reshape how aid, solidarity, and care are practiced in their communities, but also where the global aid system has created impenetrable walls.

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This paper examines how women state welfare workers navigate caste and gender hierarchies and digital governance in India's Dalit localities, showing how digitalization and financial reforms reshape their everyday labour and deepen inequalities.

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This paper examines how women state welfare workers navigate policy reforms and digital governance in India’s gendered and caste-segregated geographies. It analyses the everyday labour of frontline women welfare workers in so-called Harijan (Dalit) colonies, where caste segregation shapes access and delivery of social welfare. The study investigates ongoing reforms in selected state welfare schemes - both structural and operational - to understand how workers negotiate daily practices, power relations and hierarchies within their communities and in their interactions with the state.

Drawing on qualitative interviews, state-level data and policy analysis, the paper traces how caste and gender dynamics intersect with expanding tools of digital governance and financialization. As some of the most marginalized and spatially isolated caste geographies, Dalit colonies reveal the uneven presence of the state and the growing role of private and non-governmental actors in welfare provision, along with the consequences of these shifts for frontline workers. The analysis shows how digitalization, financial reforms, infrastructural deficits and changing labour relations reshape workers’ lived experiences, reconfiguring the intersections of caste, class and gender in welfare implementation.

Focusing primarily on Dalit localities in Delhi and Karnataka, the study highlights how care work, caste discrimination, gendered precarity and unequal access to technology and education shape workers’ engagement with welfare delivery. The paper argues that the Indian welfare state - along with emerging private actors - plays an active role in administrative and digital practices that can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the structural marginalization of historically oppressed communities.

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Institutionalized co-financing through informal taxation and diaspora contributions is reshaping welfare provision in fragile contexts. Drawing on cases from Somalia and Mexico, this paper shows how communities mobilise resources beyond the state, alongside the risks and inequalities this entails.

Paper long abstract

As international aid contracts, communities, diasporas, and local associations are increasingly filling the gaps in financing essential public goods. This paper examines co-financing mechanisms—hybrid arrangements combining informal taxation, community and diaspora contributions, and government or donor funding—as an emergent form of welfare and mutuality in fragile contexts. Drawing on evidence from Somalia and Mexico, we show how these mechanisms function as locally rooted but transnationally supported systems of collective provision, operating in spaces where state welfare is absent, fragmented, or contested.

The paper shows that co-financing arrangements can mobilise substantial resources for public goods; expand citizen participation and ownership; strengthen horizontal and vertical trust; and, at times, generate unexpected state-building dividends. Yet these benefits coexist with significant risks: regressive burdens on vulnerable households, elite capture, uneven access across communities, politicisation of funds, and exposure to criminal or armed group interference. Using four case studies—Mexico’s 3×1 Programme, the Sokaab and Bulsho Kaab digital crowdfunding platforms in Somalia, the Somali government’s Bulsho Programme, and IOM’s emerging CFM2PFM (community financing mechanism to public financial management) model—we trace how design features, political economies, security dynamics, and diaspora engagement shape outcomes.We argue that co-financing mechanisms reveal not only how communities survive shrinking state support, but how they actively re-imagine welfare and development “from below.”

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This presentation examines humanitarian organisations as meso-level brokers of welfare in crisis settings. It analyses how ethical commitments to care are translated into delivery systems governed by private-sector logics, producing tensions between survival, solidarity, and profit.

Paper long abstract

Amid shrinking state capacity and declining international assistance, humanitarian organisations increasingly act as key providers of welfare in crisis-affected settings. This paper offers a meso-level analysis of humanitarian governance, focusing on how humanitarian actors broker welfare through partnerships with private-sector actors in contexts of conflict and state fragility. Rather than treating private involvement as inherently exploitative or humanitarian action as purely altruistic, the paper conceptualises disaster capitalism as a structural tension within humanitarian welfare provision.

Drawing on an emerging body of literature on humanitarian–business collaboration and preliminary findings from a comprehensive project on the topic, the paper examines how humanitarian organisations translate ethical commitments to care and protection into delivery systems shaped by private-sector. Particular attention is paid to humanitarian programming through which welfare becomes operationalised and governed.

The analysis highlights how these meso-level arrangements reshape the meaning and practice of welfare, mediating who is included, how care is delivered, and under what conditions solidarity is enacted. By foregrounding humanitarian organisations as brokers between moral economies of care and market-oriented infrastructures, the paper contributes to debates on welfare beyond the state and offers a nuanced account of how survival, governance, and profit coexist in contemporary humanitarian contexts.

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This paper examines the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar & parts of Thailand in March 2025 to theorise transnational ties between Burmese migrant workers, diaspora support and the everyday practices sustaining relief, social order and resistance against Myanmar’s post-coup dictatorship.

Paper long abstract

In late March 2025 a half-finished building collapsed in Bangkok, Thailand, trapping dozens of Burmese construction workers and killing at least 20. At the same time, much of Mandalay and surrounding areas in Myanmar were reduced to rubble, destroying thousands of lives and livelihoods. These tragedies were linked by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck near Mandalay and rippled across the region. The quake, its aftershocks, and the transnational outpouring of mutual aid disrupted the perceived separation between the lives of Burmese migrant workers abroad and the politico-economic crisis confronting their families and communities at home.

Building on scholarship that treats disasters as moments revealing relations of inequality and solidarity, this paper examines how precarity, interconnectedness, and mutual struggle sustain survival and resistance to dictatorship in Myanmar more than five years since the 2021 coup. It connects dynamics often analysed separately: the mass exodus of predominantly young people since the coup—especially to Thailand, now home to 6–8million Burmese migrants—and the locally embedded systems of social governance, humanitarian support, and resistance across much of the country under anti-dictatorship administration.

These systems depend on financial, logistical, and political support from migrant workers and the wider diaspora amid limited international engagement, and were central to organising relief after the 2025 earthquake. We argue that tracing material bonds and reciprocal obligations linking migrants to communities in Myanmar reveals a transnational moral economy of precarity, solidarity, and resistance that helps explain the resilience of anti-dictatorship struggle more than five years after the coup.

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This paper explores how residents in high-density and low-income urban settings in Bangladesh experience formal and informal support in a context of permanent precarity. Findings point to a balancing act between short-term gain vis-à-vis long-term cost and practical versus strategic needs.

Paper long abstract

Life in high-density and low-income urban settings in Bangladesh constitutes a state of permanent precarity. Insecure housing, high levels of informality, poor infrastructure and environmental hazards lead to a context where uncertainty is rule rather than exception. It requires residents to engage in the constant act of navigating the forms of support that might be available to them – from formal social protection schemes to community-based mechanisms and international remittances – and negotiating access to them. Doing so comes with trade-offs between short-term gain vis-à-vis long-term cost, practical versus strategic needs, and social vis-à-vis economic benefits.

This paper explores how residents in urban Bangladesh access and experience formal and informal support in coping with permanent precarity. It does so based on two research projects that took place across two neighbourhoods in Dhaka and one neighbourhood in Chattogram between 2020 and 2023, pulling together primary quantitative and qualitative data about the types of support that residents accessed, their reasons for doing so, and the self-reported impacts of such support.

Findings point to (i) continued reliance on longstanding forms of informal support within family networks – including to the village of origin, and the importance of adhering to social norms to maintain access to those, (ii) reluctance to request support from friends or community members, especially when doing so undermines social expectations, and (iii) the two-edged sword of formal social protection in terms of offering rights-based and stigma-free support in theory but causing shame and embarrassment through its delivery in practice.