Katrien Van Aelst
‘Gender, households and climate change. Adaptation
decision-making in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania’
Supervisor: Prof. Nathalie Holvoet
Patricia Bamanyaki
‘Evaluating effects of local-level outside government
gender budget initiatives in maternal health.
An application of theory-based evaluation, process tracing
and a quasi experiment in Kabale, Uganda’
Supervisor: Prof. Nathalie Holvoet
The IOB PhD in Development Studies attracts a diverse
range of students, who currently come from Belgium (13),
Germany (3), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3),
Italy (2), Ecuador (1), Cameroon (1), Tanzania (1), Uganda
(1), Nicaragua (1), Denmark (1) and the US (1) (see list for
details).
IOB is continuing to build its PhD training programme. We
currently offer six doctoral courses related to the thematic
research lines. IOB cooperates with the Netherlands-
based CERES Research School’s (Resource Studies for
Development) PhD network as a full member.
P h D N anneke W inters
Contested Connections.
Mobility and migration as
development experiences of
translocal livelihoods in Muy
Muy, Nicaragua
This thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing debate
on migration-development heterogeneity. Taking
people’s translocal livelihoods as its starting point, the
thesis shows the relevance of integrating a diversity
of interconnected yet differentiated (non)migration
experiences for understanding global human mobility
and its development implications. Migration has been
high on the development agenda for decades, and has
even been proposed to be included in the 2015 Sustain-
able Development Goals (SDGs). However, the links
between migration and development have been subject
to continuous debate, oscillating between often rather
simplistic positive and negative views. This thesis took
shape during a time when migration was predominantly
seen as a positive instrument for bottom-up develop-
ment, especially in terms of remittances. However, the
actual heterogeneity of migration-development interac-
tions indicates that both migration and development are
multi-dimensional and highly contextual phenomena,
and should be approached as such in order to deepen our
understanding of their interrelatedness.
What is more, the capability to decide on migrating
(i.e. mobility) as well as the actual act of migration can
be seen as forms of development in themselves. To
advance the debate on migration-development hetero-
geneity, this thesis seeks to further develop this rather
novel notion of mobility and migration as development
experiences. To do so, the thesis focuses on migrants and
their families in Muy Muy, a Nicaraguan village where
livelihoods take shape in an insecure context marked by
volatility, inequality and marginalisation, and tradi-
tionally involve different migrations. These migrations
include destinations in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and other
Central American countries, the United States and, in-
creasingly, Spain. The thesis employs an actor-oriented
approach to explore the ways in wich migrants and their
families organise their translocal livelihoods, the diversi-
ty of migrations they engage in, and the developmental
dimensions they deem important. Empirically, the thesis
includes a selection of results from a village-wide survey,
but its core and analysis mainly rest on multi-sited
ethnographic research that extends, along the livelihood
connections of migrant families, to Costa Rica and Spain.
The thesis seeks to further develop the notion of mobility
and migration as development experiences in two ways:
first by integrating theoretical insights from transna-
tionalism, translocal livelihoods and mobilities research,
and second by focusing on the three translocal livelihood
domains of carework, ‘illegality’ and remittances. These
domains were identified and interrogated through empir-
ical research and served as examples of how mobility and
migration experiences materialise. These domains also
provided the basis for proposing the framework of a mo-
bility spectrum. As an analytical tool, the mobility spec-
trum framework adds valuable insight to established
actor-oriented, contextual and multi-dimensional con-
ceptualisations of migration-development. In particular,
it enriches our understanding of the fundamentally
relational and differentiating aspects of mobility-migra-
tion experiences by explicitly integrating a diversity of
livelihood connections and the ways they are contest-
ed. The mobility spectrum framework provides insight
into mobility and migration as time- and place-specific
development experiences, as contested connections
of translocal livelihoods. As a generative proposal, the
mobility spectrum framework pulls together the different
insights of the thesis but also further substa