In rich and poor countries alike, a core challenge is building the state’s capability for policy implementation. Delivering high-quality public health and health care – affordably, reliably, at scale, for all – exemplifies this challenge, since doing so requires deftly integrating refined...

The notion of 'empowerment' has been more often deductively claimed than carefully defined or inductively assessed, by development scholars and practitioners alike. We define and assess empowerment through an in-depth examination of the extent to which a large community development project in...

We use detailed ethnographic evidence to design and interpret a broad representative survey of 800 households in Delhi's slums, examining the processes by which residents gain access to formal government and develop their own, informal, modes of leadership. While ethnically homogeneous slums...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration of growth since the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rodrik (1999) has demonstrated that the magnitude of a country's growth deceleration since the 1970s is a function of both the...

"Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal,...

Development debates frequently focus on making economic growth sustainable or ensuring that natural resources are used sustainably; such debates rest on longstanding scholarship and largely shared understandings of how such problems should be addressed. Increasingly, there are also calls for...

Reform committees (also known as reform councils) are institutional mechanisms or structures tasked with holding policy discussions pertaining to (and making specific recommendations on) regulatory issues, to monitor improvement efforts and ensure regulatory coherence between agencies while...