The broader issue dealt with in the paper is to what extent multi-party development efforts are accountable to their intended beneficiaries. One mechanism for ensuring accountability is human rights. Traditionally, only States carried human rights obligations. International law has evolved,...

The main advantage of decentralization over centralized government is its informational superiority. Local service delivery can then be tailored to the needs and preferences of the citizens. This paper analyses if this assertion, that holds for developed countries, is also valid in the case of a...

Poverty assessment and targetting usually relies on expensive, large scale survey data. We argue that, in some cases, exploiting information villagers have on their immediate neighbors in close-knit agricultural societies might provide an alternative. We use the results of a participatory wealth...

Over the last few years a remarkable shift has taken place in the aid instruments advocated for low-income countries, characterised by a conversion from project to more programme oriented aid and by the inclusion of 'broad-based civil society participation' as a form of new aid conditionality....

Most rural development interventions consciously or unconsciously make use of local intermediation mechanisms in their endeavour to combat poverty at the local level. At the same time, how these local intermediation mechanisms occur in practice exerts an important infl uence on the functioning...

In poor societies where nutrition and health status is very low, consumption of basic needs amounts to investment. It enhances labour productivity and reduces morbidity. In this paper it is shown that inequality can persist in rural Ethiopia due to the existence the low nutrition- low...

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) framework introduced by the World Bank and the IMF at the turn of the century goes well beyond the mainly macroeconomic conditionalities of the structural adjustment era by requesting that civil society participates in the preparation and the...

Post-genocide Rwanda has been trapped in a situation of armed peace. Paul Kagame has used repressive state machinery to rule over the entire political space. The opposition has either been eliminated or forced into exile, leaving the regime politically and intellectually unchallenged in the...

This paper assesses the gender sensitiveness of Belgian aid at the turn of the century by looking at gender policy discourse and practice. It is shown that declarations regarding the integration of gender issues into development interventions largely live up to standards set at the Beijing...

At a time when technological innovations are making our world increasingly smaller and our production systems are becoming increasingly more efficient, the benefits of economic growth and development as a whole have not been able to reach all of society. Indeed, many poor countries,...