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Summary: Motivation: Fragility and closing civic space present significant challenges for research, making research processes more onerous and difficult, particularly on social and political issues. And yet these contexts may be those that may most need to be researched to understand the trend in democratic backsliding being witnessed in many parts of the world. Purpose: How can researchers navigate difficult contexts characterized by fragility and closing space to conduct rigorous yet safe research? We contribute to a growing literature on this question by exploring researcher strategies in contexts characterized by both fragility and closing civic spaces, as well as the obstacles and challenges they face. Methods and approach: We draw on the reflections and experiences of researchers directly engaged in managing and undertaking research on social and political action in four contexts affected by varying levels of conflict and violence over a five‐year period. Their insights were gathered through observations, informal interviews and discussions over that time, and a focus group discussion. Findings Based on the experiences of these researchers we argue that fragile citizen–state relations make the research process and its associated relationships themselves more fragile, indeterminate, and tentative. We note challenges of access, both formal and informal, low trust, and ethical dilemmas. We then highlight four strategies that stand out as common in navigating these challenges and undertaking research successfully. Policy implications: We argue that research in fragile contexts with closing civic spaces needs long‐term collaboration with local partners that includes building the capacity of emerging researchers and maintaining close accompaniment to create relationships of equality and a community of practice. This requires such research to be more rather than less involved and engaged with participants and research partners located in these contexts, in contrast to suggestions elsewhere that more remote or virtual engagement is the answer. But this research needs to take account upfront of the inherent challenges and uncertainty of research process, and where findings can be safely shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we close persistent gender gaps in political participation? We develop a theory highlighting the role of male household members as "gatekeepers" of women's participation in patriarchal settings and argue that the answer involves targeting these men. We conduct a field experiment in Pakistan and find that targeting women with a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaign has no effect on their turnout in a national election. However, women's turnout increases substantially when male household members are canvassed to support women's participation. Households where both men and women are canvassed see the largest increases in women's turnout and additional increases in political discussion and men's practical support to help women vote. Using a costly behavioral measure, we also demonstrate lasting effects on men's supportive behavior in these households two months after the election. Our results address the importance, and tangible benefits, of engaging men to ease constraints that hinder equal participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does research on informal sector workers and the state entail in the time of Covid-19? The pandemic has limited possibilities for in-person interactions and required adaptations in research approaches. These challenges are exacerbated when the subjects of the research are informal sector workers with limited access to technology and undefined spaces of work. In this article, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has magnified distances: between researchers located globally; between researchers and respondents; and between the state and people within informal employment. However, these distances also create new ways of working and opportunities for doing research. We discuss the challenges faced in the field, document the adaptations introduced to ensure robust research in difficult settings, and set out the limitations that remain. We also examine the ethical dimension of confronting dangerous misinformation related to the pandemic while conducting interviews, and the questions it raises about the distance between research and prescriptive advocacy in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic is in many ways a crisis of governance. It has created a set of unique challenges that underscore the need for governments to collect revenue more efficiently and equitably; and to spend it more inclusively, transparently, and accountably, especially on the most vulnerable and marginalised populations. In this article, we suggest a set of governance interventions to help create conditions for building effective and inclusive institutions that can support efforts to build back better. We propose that the impact of the pandemic can be dealt with through a mix of some interventions that deal with the immediate impacts of the crisis, and other interventions that can transform development in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCAS) present particular challenges for researchers seeking to study the effect of social and political action (SPA). These challenges are not simply due to prevalent violence and conflict, but contexts of insecurity can restrict the flow of information, key actors can be hard to identify, and if information can be found, vital pieces of the picture may be missing. This paper seeks to explore what particular combinations of empirical methods are best suited for research into three distinct aspects of SPA: the context in which it occurs, its type and nature, and the identification of pathways through which SPA can lead to empowerment and accountability. The paper assesses nine methodologies in order to suggest an effective and innovative mix of strategies to match to criteria in making decisions about how to study SPA in fragile and conflict-affected settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing scholarly and policy awareness of the fact that public authority is rarely exercised only by the state. In fact, a host of actors and institutions -- some visible and recognised, others invisible and less obvious -- exercise authority over and regulate the everyday life of local populations across large parts of the world, with important implications for public policy. While we recognise more and more that such actors and institutions take on various governance-related functions within local communities, our understanding of the role that they play is fairly limited and, possibly because of this, our discomfort with them is often fairly high. This paper represents an effort to deal with this gap. It is led by a central puzzle -- as the incidence of electoral democracy has increased across the world, we would expect to see an accompanying formalisation of governance through the consolidation of public authority within institutions of the state. This has not happened. Instead, we find that the role and importance of informal local institutions that take on governance functions has increased and that they are a central component of 'multicentric' governance in large parts of the world. Why is this so and how do these informal institutions sustain and perpetuate the local public authority that they exercise across multiple domains? I provide a number of explanations for the persistence of such institutions in large parts of South Asia, Africa and the Western Balkans. Our interest in these informal local institutions is practical and policy-oriented, and I use empirical evidence from a decade of primary research in South Asia and the Western Balkans to draw a boundary around a set of institutions that we call informal local governance institutions (ILGIs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]