Development planners and project managers have used a wide variety of tools to manage a broad range of environmental risks, including those posed by climate variability, for a long time. Some of these tools have also now been modified to take into account the risks posed by climate change. At...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development commits the international community to support the modernisation and strengthening of national statistical capacities and systems in developing countries and to increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely, reliable and disaggregated...

This model of policy evaluation has been developed to identify factors that cause policy outcomes to diverge from the intended results. In this model the explanatory factors may be inherent to the conceptual and institutional framework to which policy makers adhere, or they may be ‘real...

This paper extends and applies principal-agent theory to the performance of donor projects. There is variation in the degree of divergence between the interests of the donor (the principal) and the recipient government (the agent). Further, the effort expended on observation of the agent is a...

The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a...

Zambia was a middle-income country when it achieved independence from Great Britain in 1964. After decades of international aid Zambia has become a low-income country, and its per capita GDP is only now returning to the levels it had reached over forty years ago. While aid is far from the only...

This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on...

Concerned consumers in the US and Europe are increasingly willing to pay an "ethical premium" for the social and environmental value of fair trade (FT) products. One of the fair trade criteria (aimed to enhance wellbeing and capacity building of marginalised producers) relates to producers’...