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This chapter examines genetic discrimination through the lens of international law. The main questions asked are: What is the meaning of genetic discrimination? How can laws on genetic privacy prevent discrimination? What is the relationship between international and domestic law in fields such as insurance, employment, and criminal investigation, and what is the best way to protect individuals? How are particular groups affected by and vulnerable to genetic discrimination?

Adolescents represent a large proportion of the population in developing countries, yet within these countries policy rarely addresses their particular needs. This chapter sheds light on previously ignored aspects of adolescent lives which are of major public health significance in Tanzania and elsewhere. It begins by presenting information that can be gleaned from routine statistical sources and surveys. It then presents further insights gained from interviews and discussion groups with vulnerable adolescents, for example, those working in mines and plantations, commercial sex workers, street children, refugees, and other children living in difficult circumstances. The final part of the chapter draws lessons for future research and policy development in Tanzania.

The financial crisis has had an impact on communities, and particularly on vulnerable groups. How can the most vulnerable groups be protected, and what support can be given? This chapter examines the issues for vulnerable people and, more generally, for community cohesion. It uses a range of different examples to demonstrate the need for support, and the response from public agencies to protect community members. As a potential multiplier of social exclusion and inequality, the chapter examines the financial crisis for its effect on those already seen to be vulnerable.

This chapter addresses the increasingly strong targeting of welfare provisions on the most ‘vulnerable’ groups. In the current era of heightened pressure on resources and often increasing social polarisation, focusing resources on more intensive support for the most vulnerable is an inviting option for policy makers. Indeed, key international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have begun to adopt the language of vulnerability to this end. The chapter then considers the rise of this vulnerability rationale, but investigates its application in practice to demonstrate that a heightened focus on the most vulnerable can contribute towards an intensified competition for resources among the least well-off, obscuring questions about the distribution of resources and opportunities across the whole of society. In such a context, debates about who is vulnerable become increasingly key, with attempts to define and classify people accordingly often serving to exclude groups not seen as vulnerable in the popular imagination.

This chapter summarises the key points derived from the previous chapters. Some of the common points stand out from this analysis. First, the government since 1997 has undeniably taken tackling poverty and social exclusion very seriously, in a way not done before. In most of the areas discussed, there is proof of the recognition of the range of problems faced by Britain in the mid-1990s. Second, the issues have been acknowledged as multifaceted and interlinked. Although policy debates have focused on cash incomes and services today, they have also recognised the drivers of disadvantage and of life chances for children. Third, New Labour has become more prolific in its use of its targets. Poverty and social exclusion have become top priorities of the government. However in some cases there have been omissions, such as working-age poverty and overall inequality. Fourth, in the individual policy areas, there is a variation in the speed and scope of policy. Education, employment, child poverty, vulnerable groups, and neighbourhood regeneration were continuing priorities with substantial new resources. However, the scale of action in other areas and for other marginalised groups was less fast and less impressive. The inclusion agenda has, literally, had borders. Finally, there are recurring problems. In many areas, there is an unacknowledged conflict between government objectives of raising standards for all and of reducing differences between disadvantaged groups and others. There are a number of gaps and areas where people are still left behind and the default policy for most social security benefits and tax credits is linked to their values in prices and not to general standards of living. Overall, however, it can be said that the tide has turned, however, there is a long way to go to reach the unambiguous picture of success.

This chapter discusses some ethical issues that may arise in developing and using scales. These include considerations of informed consent in recruiting participants, testing vulnerable groups, confidentiality, and the duty to warn.

This chapter explores the perspectives on the research of wartime and intervention-related sexual violence, which has become an important subfield of conflict and intervention studies. It discusses the practicalities and ethics of research among sex workers as part of wider peacekeeping economies. It also reflects on Kathleen Jennings' research among sex workers in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where she observes a worrying proliferation of research with “victim-survivors” of wartime sexual violence. The chapter emphasizes the researchers' ethical obligation to interrogate themselves and their motives when deciding to interview members of vulnerable groups. It also critically examines the ways and limits of empathic research among vulnerable subjects and addresses practical questions of access to and compensation for research participants.

This chapter draws together the key issues to emerge from the previous chapters of the book, focusing specifically on the advantages and challenges in participatory research, in order to advance new and more creative participatory methods and approaches within the social sciences and beyond. With this advancement in mind, the chapter also considers the need to posit or locate participatory methods more broadly within a defined participatory model. Such a model is constructed and presented from a participant-oriented standpoint, and is intended as an aid to researchers (and others) who are planning, or reflecting on the use of participatory methods with different participant populations, including vulnerable, marginalised or socially excluded people.

Climate change will touch virtually every country in the world and every region of the United States, but it will not affect every place and person equally. Small island states, for example, face an existential risk from sea-level rise and industry loss. The impacts of climate change deprive communities of resources, and social prejudice can impose the bulk of that scarcity on women and girls, with severe consequences. This chapter describes how climate change magnifies existing economic and social inequalities and identifies strategies that can help buffer this effect. Looking through a wide-angle lens, it views the nexus of climate change and inequality from a global perspective before homing in on the United States.

This chapter draws attention to the complex trajectories of the history of biomedicine among the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of the Andaman Islands. It argues that the scattered traces one follows to address historical or anthropological research in the tribal reserves of the Andaman Islands have led to questions that have often muddled assumptions about the category of the ‘medical.’ The chapter does a close reading of state medical discourse as it takes shape in the memoirs of a government physician in the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. It argues that Dr Kar’s memoir cum ethnography offers important insights into the contingent formations of the ‘medical’ in the interstices of tribal welfare practice in the Andaman Islands.

Chapter 4 explores the origins of Bangladesh’s relatively advanced policies regarding women in the development project, which it traces to the perception that the economic basis for customary gender relations had broken down irretrievably in the wake of the war and the famine. The break had its roots in a longer process of agrarian crisis, but was triggered in particular by mass wartime rapes and the emergence of a distinct population of women without male protection in the early 1970s. Following Deniz Kandiyoti, this moment of rupture is analysed as the ‘breaking of the patriarchal bargain’. From this moment, several of the key orientations towards gender-aware public policies and programmes emerged.

Despite their conspicuous absence from the literature, questions of autonomy in South Asia have recently become more central. Three reasons could be attributed to this: (a) the general wave of populist protest commencing with the ‘Arab Spring’ which has provided a fillip for public protest, much being channelled through identity-based politics; (b) the states in the region are relatively young, with decisions taken at their birth driven by political expediencies which are coming under pressure; (c) the scope for public expression of identity is creating preconditions likely to be exploited (for beneficial or malicious reasons) by a range of new assertive actors. Thus the prediction in this chapter is that questions of autonomy (territorial and non-territorial) are likely to become accentuated in South Asia, where they have merited relatively low levels of public engagement, caused by the distance of vulnerable groups from sites of power.

What is it that makes the Election Commission of India (ECI) a trusted institution, which performs its functions more effectively than other institutions of the state? Notions of India as a ‘flailing state’ point at the dissonance between the strength of higher bureaucracy in drafting policy and its weakness in implementing them. Others have talked of ‘embedded autonomy’ to puzzle over the bureaucratic state apparatus in India, which is not embedded enough to have strong networks in civil society and the dominant classes. The ECI can be seen, however, as an example of a centralised bureaucratic apparatus which has sustained itself as an institution where the head is as robust as its limbs in the states and districts. The robustness of the ECI and its ability to renew itself, despite flaws in its design, and the influence of the political field, has largely emerged from its ability to enhance its constitutional powers. The ECI’s powers of self-regulation and its tendency to consolidate and enhance its powers have contributed to making the ECI a relatively autonomous institution, with a distinctive identity deriving from the democratic logic of the state.