Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize the importance of informal institutions-such as norms of cooperation, non-discrimination, or the role of community oversight in the management of investment activities-in affecting well-being, poverty, and even economic growth. There has...

This article analyzes the decline of subjective well-being and a sense of national self-esteem among the Russian people that was linked with the collapse of the communist economic, political and social systems in the 1990s—and a subsequent recovery of subjective well-being that began more...

How is state capacity consolidated? While there is a growing literature on state formation and the long-term rise of state capacity, this literature typically deals with differences between countries, neglecting the fact that state formation also occurs differentially within a country over time....

This paper addresses two vital concerns in the debate on adaptation to climate change. First, how can countries prepare to manage the impact of climate-change induced natural disasters? Second, how can countries ensure that they have the governmental institutions required to manage the...

One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier thesis’ within sociology and political science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical...