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

Inequality, exclusion and lack of mobility are unfortunate characteristics of life for Brazil's poorest and minority citizens. It is a pervasive and debilitating problem that is perceived to be the result of fair rules but poor administration. Policy changes are needed to ensure fair...

The importance of building effective legal and regulatory systems has long been recognized by development professionals, yet there have been few programmatic initiatives that have translated empirical evidence and political intention into sustained policy success. Justice sector reforms have...

The authors are grateful to a number of people who helped at various states in the drafting of this paper. In particular, Nicholas Menzies (Justice Reform Specialist, LEGJR) for his continuous support and extensive comments on earlier drafts; Milena Stefanova (Project Officer, LEGJR), Daniel...

The experience of development, as well as understandings of and responses to it, are uniquely rendered via popular culture generally, and popular music in particular. Music has been a medium of choice through which marginalized populations all over the world convey their (frequently critical)...

Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are...

Responding effectively and with professional integrity to the many challenges of public administration requires recognizing that access to more and better quantitative data is necessary but insufficient. Overreliance on quantitative data comes with its own risks, of which public sector managers...

This paper reviews the main challenges and opportunities for incorporating mixed method approaches into research and evaluation on the effectiveness and impacts of international development. It draws on the authors' experience over several decades working in both academia and with a wide range...

Drawing on an integrated mixed methods research design, the authors explore the dynamics of the development-conflict nexus in rural Indonesia, and the specific role of development projects in shaping the nature, extent, and trajectories of every day conflicts. They find that projects that give...