This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life...

This paper explores how the concept of resilience has been used in development studies. Set amidst the rise of resilience in sustainable development, it offers insights for scholars and policy-makers, alike. Sampling 419 resilience-oriented journal articles from 2017-22, it uses Kuhnian...

This paper sheds light on the complex recovery governance in Ukraine by providing a snapshot of the evolving national recovery actors' networks and examining them within a multi-level governance framework, using interviews, social network analysis, and a sense-making workshop. It highlights the...

The Brazilian Ministry of Social Development's co-operation with sub-Saharan Africa has shifted from an initial engagement in cash transfers to a recent engagement in food and nutritional security. This paper aims at understanding the main drivers for such shift considering lessons drawn from...

This paper examines the effect of education aid on primary enrolment and education quality. Using the most recent data on aid disbursements and econometric specifications inspired by the general aid effectiveness literature, we find some evidence that donors' increase in funding has...

In a 2017 UNU-WIDER project, 'Forced migration and inequality', one of us collaborated on a comparison of Afghan and Vietnamese refugee resettlement across four Western countries. In the light of the Taliban return to power in August 2021, we revisit the contributions of the Journal of Ethnic...

Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the...

Thailand's development strategy has been strongly market-oriented and open to trade and investment flows with the rest of the world. Since the late 1950s, its growth performance has been outstanding. Poverty incidence has declined dramatically, but economic inequality has increased. Economic...

This paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et al. 2009) have tagged these transformation...

Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world's largest donors for decades. Looking towards an uncertain future in which...