The need for agricultural ministries to have the capacity to develop appropriate policies and effectively implement them is becoming increasingly important as African countries, following on their commitment to Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP), pursue economic growth...

In view of the market failures and the state failures inherent in providing agricultural extension, community-based approaches, which involve farmers‘ groups, have gained increasing importance in recent years as a third way to provide this service. The paper discusses the conceptual...

"In 1993, India introduced quota-based political reservations for women in rural areas with the objective to promote gender equality in human development by making rural service provision and local governance inclusive and responsive to the needs of women. Recent evidence shows that reservation...

Providing safe drinking water in rural areas is a major challenge because it is not easy to establish institutional arrangements that will ensure that drinking water facilities are provided, maintained, and managed in an efficient, equitable, and sustainable way. Like many other countries, Ghana...

Large-scale social safety net programs such as Indias National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) are difficult to implement due to governance challenges related to elite capture, leakages, and corruption. The ability to identify how the governance challenges of program implementation can be...

"Many developing countries are currently in the process of designing regulatory systems that should allow them to use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for agricultural development, while also managing the food safety and environmental risks potentially associated with these technologies....

"This paper provides an assessment of information flows and the acquisition of knowledge in water governance of the Upper East Region, Ghana. These flows are patchy, often parallel, disconnected or slow. In many cases a great deal of information is gathered but for a number of reasons not...

"Participatory approaches are an increasingly prominent technique for designing agricultural strategies within Sub-Saharan Africa. However, such approaches are frequently criticized for either not involving enough stakeholders or limiting the scope of their participation. By analyzing the role...

"Decentralization has the potential to improve the accountability of government and lead to a more efficient provision of public services. However, accountability requires broad groups of people to participate in local government. Thus, voter turnout at local government elections is an important...

"Many countries have recognized the need to revive agricultural advisory or extension services (the terms are used interchangeably here) as a means of using agriculture as an engine of pro-poor growth; reaching marginalized, poor, and female farmers; and addressing new challenges, such as...