Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS

Development in Practice prides itself in being one of the most international of development journals, based on both authorship and readership. To reinforce our commitment to this international participation we are pleased to announce that our editorial team will now be strengthened by a group of regionally based contributing editors, who will provide a perspective on the key development issues, authors, and publications from those regions.

The world is standing at a major point in its history as I write, with European politicians still deliberating as to how a deepening of the international economic crisis will be averted or at least mitigated. The longer term implications for developing and emerging economies cannot yet be known. At one level we may see a major change in the emphasis of development aid, as well as priorities within developing countries as the demand-led consumer boom falters, but new opportunities arise in those countries still maintaining their economic growth.

The university holds a privileged place as the site of knowledge production in social development. Simultaneously, traditions of pedagogy drawing from the liberal arts have evolved within Northern/Western post-secondary educational systems which claim to create citizens through developing the skills of freedom; this claim was central to interventions in post-Soviet university reform projects.

As we come to an end of 2011, will the year mark a historical turning point for international development as we know it, or will this corner not be reached for a couple of years yet? The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) international summit was held at the end of 2010, yet in reviewing this summit it is not clear that much has really changed. Many donors are still keen to support the MDGs through to target point of 2015, but most are following plans already laid out in their existing budgets.

At whatever level we are working, or researching, it is probably a truism that development is a slow business. Recently a UN official said to me that there is no appetite for longer term solutions to the socio-political structural issues which maintain poverty; and that people have been coming to the same conclusion for at least 30 years. Similarly we are often poor at researching longer term trends, not least because the current trend is for short-term ‘results’ from development aid, and evidence to back it up.

This is a good issue. Wahey.

In 2008, a German-funded interdisciplinary research project in Khorezm province, Uzbekistan, initiated a participatory approach to innovation development and diffusion with local stakeholders. Selected agricultural innovations, developed by the project and identified as ‘plausible promises’, have since then been tested and modified accordingly by teams of researchers, local farmers and water users.

Besides wars and revolution, Russia and its neighbours suffered two major agricultural shocks in the last century: the collectivisation crisis of 1929–33 and the collapse of the collective farms in the 1990s. Both were in some sense policy-induced and linked with sharp declines in agricultural terms of trade. The crises were connected by the historical coincidence of the formation and collapse of the collectives, and the political and philosophical bases of Communist rule.

This study addresses the impact of global food prices on domestic food prices, the short-term policy responses taken by national governments, and major constraints on long-term food security in Central Asia. A surge in domestic food-price inflation in Central Asian countries was almost perfectly simultaneous with the spike in international food prices. Food-price inflation was spurred in part by adverse weather conditions in 2007, and exacerbated by the decision of the government of Kazakhstan to temporarily impose export tariffs and suspend wheat exports.

This article examines the extent to which the World Bank-funded Village Investment Project in Kyrgyzstan promoted empowered participation of citizens in co-financing arrangements. It is based on in-depth qualitative interviews and focus-group sessions in 16 rural communities. The study found that the poor and marginalised did not always have the ability to engage in the processes of consensus building, influencing local decision making, and exercising free choice with regard to the contribution requirement.