The Article explores Rwanda's ongoing social experiment in people's courts (gacaca) from the perspectives of international fair trial standards and normative ethics and seeks to challenge some of the major intuitive and counter-intuitive assumptions regarding the necessity and utility of the...

The World Development Report 2008 highlights the need for a green revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reflects upon the visions and ambitions of Rwandan policy makers to make this happen. It first analyses the political economy of Rwanda in a historical perspective. It outlines how...

International human rights lawyers tend to focus on establishing the universality of human rights rather than on improving the usefulness of human rights in addressing local problems. This paper draws attention to the need to make human rights more locally relevant, particularly in a context of...

The new aid approach (NAA) pays particular attention to the politico-institutional dimension of development. It is largely centred around a reform-driven governance agenda. Donors must facilitate and support reform, and this implies that they move away from micro-managed and donor-driven...

During the last two decades the concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has gained ever-increasing attention among a wide public of scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The main premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private...

This paper critically analyses the challenges and priorities for Rwanda’s rural sector policies in the fight against poverty. The lessons drawn are important, as this sector will be at the forefront of Rwanda’s new Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS or PRSP-2). The...

The Rwandan government has recently adopted new agricultural and land policies that strive to increase productivity in the agricultural sector though land consolidation and concentration, and through the promotion of regional crop specialisation and monocropping. This paper, however, identifies...

The first international african war is going on. From august 1998 on 2.5 million people have been killed directly or indirectly in this media-silent war 1, this is almost one tenth of all 'casualties' incurred by the Soviet Union during the second world war. A first important but partial...

The idea of scaling up aid to developing countries has increased fears of “Dutch Disease” in the donor community and recipient countries. Through its impact on inflation and the exchange-rate, aid could slow down growth and human development, undermining the aims of donors and recipients. By...

The mandatory participation of civil society in the PRSP is hardly ever questioned. It is on the contrary generally applauded by the experts inside and outside of the aid business. If only there could be more of it, things would even be better than they already are, but any start, however...