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...

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

Cover; Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; About the Authors and the Contributors; Abbreviations; Overview; Citizens' expectations; Local successes: Autonomy, accountability, and participation; Figures; O.1 Voiced opinion to public officials in the last month: MENA and other regions, 2013; The cycle...

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...

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....

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...

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...