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AbstractThis paper explores a moment in a policy meeting in Nairobi in 2009, at which pastoralist customary leaders criticised development agencies' framing of their situation as poverty stricken and in crisis. Analysing the communicative moment, providing context from field research and drawing on ethnography and philosophy, I explore what we can learn about the conduct of a long battle between dominant and subaltern discourses of pastoralist development. I conclude that this is just one incident in a long war between development's universalising discourse and those of people in the rest of the world who see things differently. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogates this period of historical rupture in the global system of subsistence, getting behind the headlines and inside the politics of food for people on low incomes. The half decade of 2007-2012 was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of popular mobilization, including protests and riots. Detailed case studies are included here from Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Kenya and Mozambique. The case studies illustrate that political cultures and ways of organizing around food share much across geography and history, indicating common characteristics of the popular politics of provisions under capitalism. However, all politics are ultimately local, and it is demonstrated how the historic fallout of a subsistence crisis depends ultimately on how the actors and institutions articulate, negotiate and reassert their specific claims within the peculiarities of each policy. A key conclusion of the book is that the politics of provisions remain essential to the right to food and that they involve unruliness. In other words, food riots work. The book explains how and why they continue to do so even in the globalized food system of the 21st century. Food riots signal a state unable to meet a principal condition of its social contract, and create powerful pressure to address that most fundamental of failings

Participatory research studies utilizing qualitative data drawn from large, diverse samples appear increasingly common in the social sciences, particularly in international development. This reflects demand for participatory approaches to researching human well-being at scale, comparative research on globalization and development, and breadth and scale in evidence-based policy making. "Big Qual" studies in international development increasingly combine qualitative with participatory methods and incorporate action research, oral histories, case studies, and visual methods. Apart from their scale (more sites and research participants than conventional "face-to-face" research) and diversity of contexts, these studies broadly share a focus on application, and an epistemological and ideological commitment to hearing and amplifying the voices of research participants and contributing to positive change in their lives. Some ethical challenges of Big Qual research—for example, reuse, storage, and sharing of third party data—have been thoroughly debated. Less is known of how complexities across time, space, and culture may shape researcher relations in large-scale participatory research, biasing results against context-specificity and meaningful local political analysis. Drawing on almost a decade's experience with large participatory research, this article explores why and how scale, encompassing a complex network of institutions, relationships, contexts, and cultures, affects the ethics of these studies. We propose that Bradbury and Reason's (2001) five criteria for judging the value and contribution of social inquiry are helpful: (a) the quality of relationships built, (b) the usefulness of the research, (c) its trustworthiness, (d) its relevance to vital issues of human society, and (e) its enduring consequence. Drawn from an action research tradition, these criteria constitute a comprehensive ethical framework particularly applicable to Big Qual participatory work in development studies. Through an empirical application of these criteria, the article highlights emerging ethical challenges facing applied social research in increasingly complex, multiscalar, and globalized contexts.