A Development Emergency: the title of this year's Global Monitoring Report, the sixth in an annual series, could not be more apt. The global economic crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. No region is immune. The poor...

After falling out of fashion somewhat (Schmitz, 2006) there has been a resurgence of interest in conditional or results-based instruments over the last few years. Faced with increasing pressure on budgets and sometimes frustrated with the perceived ineffectiveness of development spending, policy...