The concept and practices of accountability enjoy considerable interest today, not least due to the World Development Report WDR 2004 on service delivery, which formulated the ëtriangle of accountabilityí - specifying relations between the poor, service providers, policy makers and...

Over the last two decades, an estimated 4 million people in Vietnam have been affected or had their lives disrupted by the loss of or the forced eviction from their land or though land conversion where the state decided that it was to be used for other purposes. Most of them are farming...

We exploit variation in the design of sub-national health care financing initiatives in Indonesian districts to assess the effects of these local schemes on maternal care from 2004 to 2010. The analysis is based on a district pseudo-panel, combining data from a unique survey among District...

Arjan de Haan and his co-authors are keen to use the ISS Indicators of Social Development (hereafter the ISDs) to show how institutional structuration processes can cause improvements in human well-being, including economic growth (de Haan et al, 2011). Developing this aspiration, though not...

In recent years, international organizations, think-tanks, and the social sciences have contributed to a dramatic expansion in the range of composite indices measuring concepts such as human development, governance, or social capital. This paper discusses challenges faced in the design of...

In recent years there has been growing interest in including estimates of "intangible" capital, such as knowledge, skills, and institutions, in national asset accounting. In accordance with these efforts, this paper attempts to provide the first worldwide evaluations of "social" institutions,...

Waste picking has become a prominent activity in the urban landscape, bridging the gap between shortfalls in service delivery and personal income generation in virtually all cities of the developing world. Overcoming previous stigmatization and work fragmentation through organization and...