The Research Unit on Local Self-Government at CDS has been carrying out research on agriculture and local self-government and on environmental challenges in urban areas. Gender has been a key theme in research on local government at CDS. This has included research on elected women leaders in Kerala's rural and urban local bodies, gender budgeting in panchayats, and the state-wide network of women's self-help groups under the Kerala State Poverty Alleviation Mission, the Kudumbashree. Recent work includes research into the opportunities opened by decentralisation for women of the most marginal communities in Kerala and the ways in which these women have availed of them. A small but significant theme that is emergent is about the challenges in urban governance in a rapidly-urbanizing Kerala. Studies on urban housing schemes implemented by local governments are ongoing. Gender and Development: Research in this domain has been quite diverse in terms of themes and disciplinary orientations. At present, there is cross disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary research that brings a gender perspective to bear on problems of labour, livelihoods, politics, health, migration and marriage. Gendered power relations were implicated even when not explicitly probed in the early research at the centre (1970s) on questions of fertility transition and human development. Even as research in the 1980s and 1990s brought a clear focus on women's work and employment, including the implications of wider definitions of work for computing national income, on women in agriculture and fisheries, and on understanding how women made good in the context of large scale male migration to the Middle East. The evolution of the CDS research agenda through critical engagement with earlier perspectives on development has been particularly marked in the case of the research on gender and caste since 2000. Gender in contemporary Kerala has been the focus of significant research. Recent research on gender and politics in Kerala has addressed decentralised governance, feminisation of local governance and student politics in higher educational institutions. Gendered livelihoods have come into focus in the context of self-help initiatives of women even as the persisting low female work participation in India and Kerala has continued to receive attention. There is ongoing work on state policy and the implication of gender and caste / religious identities in international migration of women workers from South India. Human Development, Health and Education: Human development continues to be a celebrated theme of enquiry at the centre for the