East Asia

The article presents the results of participatory monitoring and evaluation of projects which aimed to aid the establishment and development of 24 modern rural cooperatives in Shandan County, Gansu Province, China. The evaluation was designed to assess the economic and community development outcomes of the cooperatives after three years of operation. The data were collected from four cooperatives using surveys, group work, and semi-structured interviews of stakeholders. The evaluations showed that within two years of inception cooperatives were improving social and economic outcomes for members and communities. Improvements for establishing and sustainably operating rural cooperatives are suggested.

The full article is available here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.713913

This article describes a holistic approach to organisational development that promotes learning and its integration into everyday work practice. It presents the approach and how it leads to genuine organisational transformation, increased organisational efficiency, and resilience during change. When an organisation is both willing and able to engage with a holistic approach, the results are significantly better than any that external one-off interventions or standalone training programmes can produce.

The full article is available here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696581

Traditional approaches to protecting children are insufficient to meet the complex issues they now face, and inter-sectoral, child-centred strategies are needed. Addressing this, the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD) developed the Circle of Rights (COR), a participatory action research approach to involve children in ‘bottom-up’ protection work. This paper describes COR in Thailand through the Child Protection Partnership (CPP), a project focused on ICT child protection.

While Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a relative success in a growing number of countries, there are also difficulties in assuring all community members can build and use toilets. This paper draws on experiences of IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and its partners in strengthening inclusiveness and sustainability in CLTS interventions. It presents practical measures to strengthen gender and poverty equity, community-based monitoring and capacity development for community institutions and the local private sector.

The full article is available here:

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.

Although herders in Mongolia are embracing modernity, their livelihoods remain largely dependent on the weather and resulting grassland conditions. In recent years, natural resource degradation has made livestock production more risky. Severe weather events such as storms, droughts, and extremely harsh winters have been on the increase. Timely and adequate weather forecasts could help herders to cope more effectively with these changing circumstances. The Erdenedalai weather and early warning network in the Gobi desert represents a unique initiative to read the weather more carefully.

Post-tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction activities in Aceh have been criticised as focussing on vertical reporting at the expense of lateral coordination, leading in some cases to ‘overlaps and redundancies, mis-targeting and hastily planned and implemented programs’. Our experience is that effective coordination between implementing agencies, linked to appropriate Indonesian government agencies, can effectively improve the delivery of services, in this case to coastal aquaculture farmers in Aceh.

The present article reviews the adaptation of the popular farmer field school (FFS) approach to integrated watershed management in several Indonesian provinces, under the auspices of a major environmental management project. Indonesia is the site of origin of the FFS concept, developed to promote integrated pest management (IPM) in rice during the 1980s. Since the conclusion of the National IPM Programme in 1999, FFS alumni groups and approaches have continued to evolve in Indonesia, and the FFS model has been taken up in scores of developing countries around the world.

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.

Remittances from migrant workers play a significant role in keeping the economy of Bangladesh vibrant, adding around six per cent to the country's GDP and helping to maintain the balance of payments. This article examines remittance flows from Hong Kong and Malaysia to Bangladesh; the dynamics of remittance practices; and the impact on the well-being of migrant families. Data were collected from 126 labour migrants (56 in Hong Kong and 70 in Malaysia) between November 2004 and October 2006.