Annual report 2016 jaarverslag 2016 web | Page 25

DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION AWARDS In 2016, the Province of Antwerp awarded its Prize for De- velopment Cooperation to three students from the Master programmes run by IOB. Gelagay Megos Desalegne (Master in Development Evaluation and Management) won the prize for his dis- sertation, “The impact of Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on economic empowerment of women: The case of North-East Ethiopia”, supervised by Dr. Els Lecoutere. Gelagay looks at the economic empowerment of women as a result of participating in Ethiopia’s Productive S afety Net Program ( PSNP), a conditional cash transfer program. It uses original data randomly collected by the Interna- tional Food Policy Research Institute and employs the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) for measuring ten different aspects of economic empower- ment of women. His results show a positive impact of PSNP participation on women’s access to and decision-making power about savings and credit, while women’s decision-making over agricultural production and household assets seems to have declined by program participation. The PSNP did not have any effect on other aspects of women’s economic empowerment. The morale of this study seems to indicate that the design and implementation of the PSNP should more explicitly aim to economically empower women, and primarily focus on addressing its negative effects on women’s economic empowerment Ana Julia França Monteiro (Master in Governance and Development) received an award for her dissertation, “The Political Governance of the Brazilian Racial Issue”, super- vised by Prof. Stef Vandeginste. Ana Julia analyzes how, since the end of World War II, the racial segmentation of Brazil’s society has been addressed in parliament. For her analysis, Ana Julia studied draft legislation tabled at the Chamber of Deputies. As a theoretical framework, she used the literature on accommodation versus integration versus assimilation based responses to societal cleavages. Her work covers a period of more than 50 years and three different political regimes. She shows that after the end of the military dictatorship, which coincided with the end of the Cold War, legislative activity in parliament addressed Brazil’s racial segmentation more frequently and more openly, and from a predominantly accommodation orient- ed perspective. Her work is truly innovative and combines methodological rigour with great policy relevance that reaches beyond the case of Brazil. Mary Ann B. Manahan (Master in Globalisation and Development) received an award for his dissertation, “Painting the Town REDD-Plus?: Competing Narrati- ves on Forest Tenure, Land Rights, and REDD+ within Contentious Politics in the Philippines”, supervised by Prof. Johan Bastiaensen. Ms. Manahan’s study makes an original contribution to the current debates surrounding the links between development and the environment, in particular how forest tenure and land rights are tackled within REDD+ strategies in the Philippines. Her study highlights four interrelated findings. First, forest tenure and land rights are defi- ning, if not central, themes in REDD+ interventions in the Philippines. However, there are competing views on how these issues are framed, largely informed by differing interests, motivations, and claims of various development actors. Second, the crafting of policies and projects on REDD+ has become an arena where various interest groups push for their ideas and agen- da, which generated collective actions for or against it, participatory development planning and project implementation, and interest group politics. Third, rather than the usual top-down versus bottom-up policy translation, her study paints a more dynamic, messy, and two-directional process. Finally, the Phi- lippine REDD+ experience underscores the capacity of indigenous peoples and civil society to redefine REDD+ to fit their own interests and co-shape the future of global mechanisms such as REDD+. Her stu- dy thereby challenges the common-held notion that there is a smooth transmission belt for global policy application to local ground realities. Cathy Berx and Rik Röttger (resp. governor and counsellor of the Province of Antwerp) together with the winners of the prize of development cooperation. Annual report 2015 • 25