Social capital has not merely risen as a social scientific term in the scholarly literature; it has become routinized into everyday conversation and policy discourse across an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines and substantive domains in countries around the world. It currently enjoys...

The capacity to act collectively is not just a matter of groups sharing interests, incentives and values (or being sufficiently small), as standard economic theory predicts, but a prior and shared understanding of the constituent elements of problem(s) and possible solutions. From this...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry — that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. In...

This paper explains the ideas and approaches that underpin the World Bank's Justice for the Poor (J4P) program. J4P is an approach to legal empowerment that focuses on mainstreaming sociolegal concerns into development processes, in sectors ranging from community-driven development and mining...

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that 'institutions matter' for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that 'history matters' since institutions clearly form and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognise...

This overview essay on policy responses to global poverty and inequality over the last ten years is structured around four themes. First, drawing on the most recent empirical data, it provides some stylized facts on recent trends in poverty and inequality in developing countries. Second, it...

This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations about development issues....

Understanding the efficacy of development projects requires not only a plausible counter factual, but an appropriate match between the shape of impact trajectory over time and the deployment of a corresponding array of research tools capable of empirically discerning such a trajectory. At...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

A recurring theme in the literature on common violence is that it stems from the combined impact of divided societies (poverty, ethnic diversity, economic inequality) and weak institutions (non-democratic, authoritarian government). This statistical regularity may hold in the aggregate, but as...