Two authors who have been leaders of the "social quality approach" that emerged in European social policy circles in the 1990s, and two authors who have worked with the "human development" and "human security" approaches that emerged in international development policy circles in the 1980s and...

Leadership is a matter that social scientists often are ambivalent about, but is important in knife-edge' situations and when people choose direction within wide-open possibilities. "Good leaders" need contexts that stimulate and discipline them, good "followers"/ collaborators, and ability to...

What interpretation of human flourishing, what ideas of value does capitalism in practice embody and promote? To address this question the paper clarifies first that "capitalism" must be understood as more than merely a system of private property and markets. It contains "the prerogative of...

This study addresses political participation rights from the perspective of a social movement. We focus on the case of the NO movement which emerged in Costa Rica in 2007 in the run-up to the Referendum on ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The study explores some...

This paper raises two questions to take a first step in developing a research agenda to assess the developmental relevance of responsible production, which includes both Fair Trade and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The first question is: How likely is it that responsible...

Pakistan's Vision 2025 connects a policy commitment to greater gender equality with inclusive growth. It prioritises a "good quality of life and high living standard for all citizens across regions, gender" and to "achieve an annual average growth rate of 7 to 8 per cent that is inclusive and...

The essay proposes to re-orient feminist debates on epistemology towards the care-security nexus as a pathway that can plausibly provide an integral understanding of a human-centred and eco-minded security. Seeing "gender" in binary terms tends to produce an understanding of "care" as "female"...

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor -- their "morals" and "culture" -- responsible for their own situation and b) positioning the causes...

This report discusses concerns raised by participants of Thematic Area 4 (Force, Fraud and Coercion) of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held in August 2014. There has been a significant body of research on intercountry adoption practices over the past 30...

Low renewal rate is a key challenge facing the sustainability of Community-based Health Insurance (CBHI) schemes. While there is a large literature on initial enrolment into such schemes, there is limited evidence on the factors that impede renewal. This paper uses longitudinal data to analyse...