Institute of Development Studies
Abstract
The Everett Program at the University of California Santa Cruz (leading), the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California, and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) are collaborating on Rockefeller Foundation funded project to assist the Rockefeller Foundation???s Inclusive Economies team to develop and test their conceptual framework for understanding, measuring and promoting inclusive economies. The project involves three key streams of integrated research and convening activities: first the project will utilise existing datasets in three emerging economies, to refine the framework for sub-national contexts; second, working with others focused on market systems innovation, the project will investigate the ways in which indicators could examine local, national and cross-national conditions within market systems; and third, focused on national level processes, the project will explore developing a ???minimal viable product??? version of the national level database envisioned in our initial inclusive economies framework report, which will provide a basis for engaging scholars and practitioners around the insights this framework provides for national-level analysis of inclusive economies. Within the stream of research on adapting the inclusive economy framework to sub-national contexts, IDS are leading the sub-project on South Africa. The goal of this sub-project is to test out and adapt the Rockefeller Framework for Inclusive Economies, and in particular the indicator system elaborated by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor (Inclusive Economy Indicators: Framework and Indicator Recommendations), to the Metro Municipalities of South Africa. The adaptation will make a particular effort to consider rural-urban linkages and exclusion/inclusion across the rural-urban divide. The adaptation will cover the five principal categories of inclusion (equitable; participatory; growing; sustainable; and stable), and as many of the sub-categories as possible, and use the suggested indicators as a guide to choosing the most appropriate locally available and relevant set. The indicators will be analysed with a view towards understanding the level of inclusion/exclusion, how the different elements of the framework are interrelated, how they compare across the Metros, how they are changing over time, and how they can inform policy debate on achieving higher levels of inclusion. New or different indicators will be proposed as necessary to address aspects of inclusion important in the context of South Africa that have been omitted in the framework and indicators referred to above. This is likely to include new indicators relating to rural-urban linkages and exclusion/inclusion across the rural-urban divide, as well as racial and gender-based inclusion/exclusion.
