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 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...

Understanding the efficacy of development projects requires not only a plausible counterfactual, 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...

Arguments and evidence from the social sciences, natural sciences and development practice are used to frame a broader discussion of the role of social relations in the process of economic development. We trace the intellectual history of social relations within theories of economic development...

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 stylised facts on recent trends in poverty and inequality in developing countries. Second, it...

There has long been broad agreement on the importance of building—and enhancing access to—“rule of law” systems in developing countries, but efforts to do either of these things have a long and unhappy history. These disappointments, we contend, stem largely from a prevailing theory that...

Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because this is how most people in the global North (and elsewhere) ‘encounter’ development issues. To this end, and building on the broader agenda...

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 book examines issues related to reducing inequality in Brazil. As the volume's editors assert with authority, the current national political climate in Brazil provides an unprecedented space for discussing this topic. Among the several investigations that have looked at exclusion and social...