The salience of the concept of “empowerment” has been more often deductively claimed than carefully defined or inductively assessed, by development scholars and practitioners alike. Using evidence from an in-depth, mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) in rural...

Improved household accessibility to credit is identified as a significant determinant of intra-household re-allocation of labour resources with important implications for productivity, income, and poverty status. However, credit accessibility could also have wider impacts on poverty if it leads...

Several prominent recent works in comparative politics explore the relationship between democracy and economic inequality, centring on the expectation by economic elites that democratisation will lead to the redistribution of elite wealth. But, in practice, state extractive capacity is necessary...

We provide an overview of some practical guidelines for using both qualitative and quantitative methods to assess social capital in low income countries. Drawing on two longer and more detailed source documents, we use a six-dimension conceptual framework to show how a more complete picture of...

While there is broad agreement among scholars and practitioners on the importance of ‘good governance’, ‘the rule of law’ and ‘effective institutions’ for ensuring positive development outcomes, we have a much poorer understanding of how such goals should be realised. Whether...

The Lewis dual economy model is widely recognised in development economics for its profound explanatory power and applications in economic development. However, there remain some confusions and ambiguities, especially with respect to the definition of surplus labour and the wage determination...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...

Peace agreements form a crucial element of strategies to bring security from outside: they involve third party mediators during the negotiation stage and often peacekeeping troops to guarantee the agreement at an implementation stage. Peace roundtables usually involve top politicians and...

Active citizens can become a powerful driver of development by holding to popular account those that traditionally hold decision-making power at the local and national levels. Active citizenship draws from a long history of understanding the importance of community participation and ownership of...

Understanding the relationship between macroeconomic policies and poverty still remains a key policy challenge. This paper develops a framework to link key macroeconomic variables with poverty and tests the effect of policies, namely the government-led channel of development spending and...