Quantitative analysis indicates that variation in use of regulated and unregulated financial services in a low-income area of Mexico City can only partially be attributed to differences in socio-economic variables including gender, employment, education and housing status. Qualitative evidence...

The article examines the institutions governing relations between grant using national NGOs and grant giving international donors in three regions of Ghana (Upper West, Northern and Greater Accra Region). Formal procedural rules and professional norms can be viewed as necessary to minimise...

The United Nations (UN) has designated the 2020s as the 'decade of action' to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper responds to the call for universities to join this effort by reviewing how the University of Bath could support the SDGs more fully. A first step is monitor...

The paper enquires into the long-term effect of development finance institutions (DFI) on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies of companies in which they have invested. It does this through a review of secondary data on the ESG policies of ten companies operating in Africa and...

Evaluation choreography - or who knows what when through the process of impact evaluation - has an important influence on the credibility and usefulness of findings. We explore such choreography from technical, political and ethical perspectives through reflection on a collaborative case study...

Recognising that aid effectiveness critically depends upon the quality of host country institutions and policies, international aid agencies have sought to inform their activities through more systematic political economy analysis (PEA). Three analytical frameworks for PEA are compared,...

International aid is often analysed as if it was a homogeneous product exclusively distributed between a relatively small numbers of public agencies. In contrast, this paper contributes to thinking about aid as a quasi-market with many different suppliers, users, channels, products and brands....

The use of challenge funds to promote economic and social development continues to grow, but has been the subject of relatively little research. This paper develops a definition of what challenge funds are and how they differ from other development funding mechanisms, taking into account their...

This paper contributes to the literature on qualitative approaches to impact evaluation, particularly in complex contexts. It reports on substantive and methodological findings from four pilot studies of a protocol for qualitative impact evaluation of NGO sponsored rural development projects in...

This paper contributes to an on-going conversation between development studies (DS) and social policy (SP) as academic fields, particularly in the UK. Drawing on Andrew Abbott's analysis of the social sciences as an evolving system of knowledge lineages (KLs) it reflects first on the status of...