• It has become a cliché that potential beneficiaries will tell aid agencies whatever they understand to be the current ‘Open Sesame’ discourse that will open up the treasure trove. This received wisdom is handed down by generations of seasoned aid workers as a warning to inexperienced programme staff not to take at face value what they are told, for example, about the supplicants’ commitment – whether to principles such as gender equity, environmental conservation, and indigenous rights, or to ways of working such as transparency, democratic practices, and good governance. One could imagine ‘the locals’ providing similar briefings before being visited by an aid-agency representative: not to take too much notice of invasive questioning about ‘intra-household decision-making strategies’; to be careful not to tread on toes in any ‘wealth ranking’ exercise, which could have undesirable consequences; to go along with rituals and games, role plays and maps in the mud, timelines and activity charts, guided tours around the area, and so on, without giving away too much information. You never know where this information might end up, so it’s safer to work on the basis that if they don’t already know, it’s probably because they don’t need to.

    Certainly it has long been recognised in this journal that ‘participation’ can mask authoritarian practices on the part of external ‘change agents’ and also foster apparent compliance with the aid agenda on the part of the ‘participants’ (see, for example, Anacleti 1993; White 1996; Jackson 1997), while the more powerful players actually determine what constitutes knowledge.1  In this issue, John D. Cameron illustrates the subtle ways in which the ‘public performance’ of Andean communities involved in participatory budgeting differs from their backstage whispers; he helps to explain how they manage to ‘subvert’ the process in favour of  their own preferences for infrastructural projects – the bags of cement referred to in the article’s title. Lucy Earle considers the limitations of NGO interpretations of the ‘failed’ mobilisations by indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon, campaigning against the activities of extractive industries operating in their territories. In particular, she highlights the risks of romanticising what it means to be part of an indigenous community that must face a range of economic and political challenges to their identity and well-being. Norma Fuller addresses the political and ethical issues faced by anthropologists, who are often sought out by these same industries to interpret local realities and so smooth the way for the companies’ operations: how to avoid being co-opted by an agenda that local communities do not share. Elizabeth Rattine-Flaherty and Arvind Singhal also focus on the Peruvian Amazon in their description of the work of a local NGO which promotes gender equality and reproductive health, using a feminist participatory action–research approach to understanding the kinds of change that occur in the lives of the women involved. Turning to Colombia, Loramy Conradi Gerstbauer describes a Lutheran World Relief (LWR) programme which sought to form solidarity-based partnerships between peace-sanctuary churches in Colombia and congregations in the US Midwest. Two central themes emerge: that solidarity is based on mutual accountability; and that, if the voices of the South are not heard unless amplified via Northern NGOs, then the relationship could unintentionally create or deepen dependency. In exploring the valuable potential for partnership to contribute to peace-building work in the South when it is not mediated by funding from the North, the author makes a candid assessment of the pitfalls to be avoided.

    The theme of partnership is also picked up by Thomas Franklin, who emphasises the importance of acknowledging differences between the respective organisations, and the need for all parties to be clear about what it is that collaboration is intended to achieve, in order for reciprocity and mutual respect to flourish. Tina Wallace describes issues raised by civil-society organisations, and particularly those concerned with gender equity and the rights of women, regarding their virtual absence from the Paris Declaration on harmonising aid, and yet again from the progress meeting held in Accra in September 2008. Too many Northern NGOs, however, are opting to shore up rather than challenge a donor-defined development agenda, despite the fact that even some donor officials are beginning – albeit off the record – to acknowledge that the new architecture is simply not working. Ines Smyth reports on a recent congress on gender, climate change, and disaster-risk reduction (DRR) where evidence was tabled to show that climate change exacerbates existing gender inequality. Yet, once again, ‘the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) does not mention gender, and its decisions and mechanisms remain devoid of a gender perspective’. If the invisibility of gender issues at the highest levels is the outcome of some 15 years of gender mainstreaming, something is profoundly awry – and more of the same will simply not fix it.

    Climate change is expected to intensify and accelerate natural cycles such as the El Niño phenomenon, which affects the Indian Ocean, Australia, and Indonesia as well as the coastal regions of Peru and Ecuador. Predicting the onset of El Niño and taking precautionary measures to limit the damage caused is clearly of fundamental importance. Peter B. Urich, Liza Quirog, and William Granert describe a successful intervention in the island province of Bohol in the Philippines which built on adaptive community-based resource management, ensuring not only that information was communicated in a timely manner, but also that communities were able to assimilate and act on it.

    Two further contributions focus on Latin America. Jutta Gutberlet describes the many challenges faced by a network of waste-recycling co-operatives in São Paulo, ranging from their lack of working capital to the bureaucratic and logistical obstacles preventing their access to micro loans; their lack of organisational skills and experience; stigmatisation and police harassment; and the ubiquitous intermediaries who all want a cut. Worldwide, recycling performs an increasingly important social and environmental function, as well as generating employment, particularly for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. With the right support, collective recycling efforts can also increase people’s social skills, as well as providing a source of income; without this, it will remain a marginal activity undertaken by marginalised sectors. In the rural context, Ruerd Ruben, Ricardo Fort, and Guillermo Zúñiga-Arias assess the impact of Fair Trade on co-operatives of coffee and banana producers in Peru and Costa Rica. Some of the impacts are direct and tangible, in the form of increased earning potential; others are less immediate, such as increased organisational skills and, importantly, the ability to obtain credit and other inputs. At the same time, ever more plantations and multinationals are obtaining Fair Trade-like certification, and this is changing the configuration of the global market in relation to small producers. Finally, Katie Wright and Kasturi Sen report on a series of workshops held in various regions of the world to pool information and share concerns and analysis about the worrying effects of counter-terror legislation on civil-society organisations, and on the prospects for equitable development, both within countries and internationally.

    While many of the contributions in this issue focus on Latin America, the questions raised have resonance for those working in any geographical setting in which issues of polarisation are a daily reality (whether on economic, ethnic, or gender grounds, or because of other forms of discrimination), and where deep social divisions increase the prospect of armed conflict or repression, or have indeed already done so.

    Notes

    1. Mompati and Prinsen (2000: 630) illustrate the literal suppression of inconvenient knowledge during a PRA pilot project in which ‘one particular woman from a subordinate ethnic group spoke out loudly against the discriminatory practices of the dominant group. It was evident that she was breaking gender and ethnic rules by a serious intake of alcohol, but quite a number of the other participants were also quite inebriated. The

    kgosi

    quickly pointed at a policeman, who took the woman by the arm, lifted her off the ground, and brought her to the shade of a tree about 50 metres from the meeting place. Thereafter the meeting continued as though nothing had happened.’

    References

    Anacleti, Odhiambo (1993) ‘Research into local culture: implications for participatory development’, Development in Practice 3 (1): 44–7.

    Jackson, Cecile (1997) ‘Development work at the sharp end: field-worker agency in a participatory project’, Development in Practice 7 (3): 237–47.

    Mompati, Tlamelo and Gerard Prinsen (2000) ‘Ethnicity and participatory development methods in Botswana: some participants are to be seen and not heard’, Development in Practice 10 (5): 625–37.

    White, Sarah C. (1996) ‘Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of participation’, Development in Practice 6 (1): 6–15.

  • Reflecting on observations of participatory budget schemes in the Andean region of South America, this article argues that the statements and behaviour of those who take part in participatory budget meetings should be understood as a form of public performance which often differs significantly from the ‘backstage discourses’ of participants once they are no longer performing in public.

    Most importantly, the widespread prioritisation of small-scale infrastructure projects that involve large volumes of cement highlights the ways in which the participants in participatory budget meetings quietly but strategically adapt external schemes and policies to their own goals and strategies.

  • This article examines the nature of social protest undertaken by an Amazonian indigenous organisation against international energy companies working in Peru. It analyses the response of Peruvian and international NGOs to the indigenous group’s activities and challenges certain stereotypes concerning the nature of indigenous collective action and perceptions of community. In particular, it focuses on the way in which NGO workers attempt to explain the failure of the indigenous organisation to mobilise and sustain collective protest. The paper highlights the dissonance between romanticisation of indigeneity and the lived reality of the indigenous group. It advocates the use of anthropological studies and social movement theory to explore the limits to indigenous mobilisation and suggests their use for more sensitive planning of initiatives with indigenous groups. As demand for oil and gas grows across the globe, and governments in developing countries seek to increase revenues from lucrative extractive industries, clashes between indigenous groups and energy companies are likely to increase. The need for sensitive engagement between NGOs and indigenous groups is therefore of the utmost importance.

  • In 2003, Lutheran World Relief (LWR), an international relief and development NGO, began a peacebuilding initiative in Colombia. They facilitated the formation of a partnership between peace sanctuary churches in Colombia and six communities of faith in the US Midwest, coordinated by LWR staff. This partnership, called Sal y Luz (salt and light) has the goal of education and advocacy both in Colombia and in the USA. Sal y Luz represents a powerful example of transnational solidarity for peace. There are also implications and lessons of this case study for the broader field of NGO peacebuilding work. The Sal y Luz model of peacebuilding brings benefits in terms of NGO accountability and effectiveness in peacebuilding. The key innovation of the model is how LWR effectively helped their US constituency understand and become involved in peacebuilding work.

  • This article analyses the social change practices of Minga Perú, an NGO in the Peruvian Amazon that promotes gender equality and reproductive health through radio broadcasts and community-based interventions. This analysis, grounded in participatory research methods, reveals a feminist and gender-equitable approach, allowing participants to take the role of leader rather than of passive research subject. Further, such participatory research methods helped empower both individuals and their communities in the Peruvian Amazon, encouraging the development of more productive group dynamics and leadership.

  • Lack of working capital hinders collective commercialisation of recyclables. Social exclusion and bureaucratic constraints prevent recyclers from accessing official bank loans. As they continue to depend on intermediaries, the cycle of poverty, dependency, and exclusion is perpetuated. The article discusses collective commercialisation and the micro-credit fund created among 30 recycling groups in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. A committee of eight women recyclers manages this fund. The article contextualises reflections on empowerment and community-based development, applying the theoretical framework of social and solidarity economy. The author finally suggests that inclusive governance structures have the potential to generate greater justice and sustainability.

  • This article discusses the ethical challenges posed to anthropologists working as experts in mining companies and in tourism and alternative solutions that are coherent with the ethical principles of their discipline.

  • A workshop was convened in February 2008 to identify the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the post-Paris Declaration aid agenda, prior to the High-Level Forum to review progress towards achieving aid harmonisation held in Accra in September 2008. The article highlights the many concerns about the focus on the mechanisms rather than the purpose or impacts of aid; the ways in which donors force through their own agendas; and the continuing gap between rhetoric and practice on issues such as gender equity and local ownership.

  • Experience from adaptive and community-based resource management suggests that building resilience into both human and ecological systems is an effective way to cope with environmental change. El Niño phenomena are increasingly signaled in advance of their onset. We argue that it is beneficial to heed warnings of potential harm and to intervene in society to possibly avert extreme negative ecological and social impacts which can trigger socio-political stress and widespread human suffering. The El Niño of 2004 in the island province of Bohol in the Philippines is used as an example of a successful intervention.

  • This study on the impact of fair trade relies on new field data from coffee and banana cooperatives in Peru and Costa Rica, including a detailed assessment of its welfare effects by comparing FT farmers with non-FT farmers as a benchmark. Attention is focused on three major effects: (a) direct tangible impact of FT arrangements on the income, welfare, and livelihoods of rural households; (b) indirect effects of fair trade for improving credit access, capital stocks, investments, and attitudes to risk; and (c) institutional implications of fair trade for farmers’ organisations and externalities for local and regional employment, bargaining, and trading conditions. Although direct net income effects remain fairly modest, important benefits are found to include capitalising farmers and strengthening their organisations.

  • Partnerships can achieve results but they do not develop smoothly.  Members must explore their differences before they can perform well together.  Some agencies look inwards at their own priorities and expect their partners to follow them.  This leads to a blend of cooperation and competition.  Other organisations turn outwards and look for partners who can contribute to shared results.  They see themselves as others seen them.  They do not look back to make sure that others are following.  This leads to a blend of mutual respoect and reciprocity which is as important for successs as finely honed memoranda of understanding.

  • The effects of counter-terrorism legislation on civil society organisations (CSOs) based in the South have received little attention in the wider literature. This article reports on the findings of a series of international workshops to examine the effects of such legislation held in Lebanon, the Kyrgyz Republic, India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. The evidence presented at these workshops suggests that counter-terror legislation is undermining the work of civil society in complex and interrelated ways.

  • The Gender in Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Congress held in Manila 19–22 October 2008) was the Third Global Congress of Women in Politics and Governance. Its purpose was to provide a forum for decision makers to formulate gender-responsive programmes related to gender in climate change and disaster risk reduction (DRR). Over 200 people participated, including parliamentarians, representatives of environmental and women’s organisations, and donor agencies. Proceedings focused on the fact that climate change magnifies existing inequalities, in particular and gender inequality. The Congress issued the Manila Declaration for Global Action on Gender, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction.

  • Communication and its role in development and social change is still poorly understood and supported by large development players, despite decades of innovative practice and positive outcomes. Gaps between discourse and action, outdated evaluation methods, short timeframes, red tape, and power relations, combined with vertical and externally-driven communication models, and confusion between information and communication, all prevent development donors from giving support to participatory and community owned and managed communication initiatives. On the basis of decades of experience and observation, four key recommendations are made for transforming the communication profession both in higher education and in donor and development agencies.

  • While there is a near unanimity on the need for participation, there is as yet no such agreement on the type and degree of participation to be adopted in projects. One thing that has never been doubted is the fact that local people have not been accorded their rightful recognition and respect by most intervention agencies, hence the failure of some projects. So, how does a project that seeks to address issues of citizenship, participation, and accountability using a variety of participatory methodologies fare, especially against the backdrop of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and politically complex society like Nigeria? This paper examines the use of these methodologies, highlighting issues drawn out, and the successes and limitations of the findings for future research. Effective as the methods appeared to be, there were many questions and issues unanswered beyond the immediate mandate of the project, which beg for attention in order for the communities to move towards genuine development and stop open display of sometimes misplaced aggression.

  • This article makes a case for using participatory communication in research. It introduces participatory communication as a citizen-led approach to both creating and expressing knowledge; within research this means that researchers are not simply responsible for generating information and communicating about it, neither are they acting alone. From this perspective the emphasis of participatory communication is on communicating rather than extracting or delivering information. Participatory methods can communicate research findings in new ways and add depth and meaning to articulations of knowledge. This knowledge can easily get ‘lost in translation’ when findings are synthesised or communicated though conventional research outputs alone.

  • In spite of its long history on different countries, ‘citizens communication for social change’ is little known in Spanish academic and social institutions, so few communication professionals know how to address and undertake in-depth planning of communication for development. Since the 1990s, there is still a growing need to build truly participative communication in Spanish society. This article describes the main reasons for this widespread ignorance and offers a small ‘cartography’ of the field in order to advance towards a full recognition of the sector in Spain.

  • Social movements have generated interest in development circles since the mid-1990s as relatively independent expressions of civil society, mobilising people to set their own development priorities and agendas for issues as diverse as water privatisation, neo-liberal trade policies, the rights of women and indigenous peoples, and access to HIV anti-retroviral treatment. In the case of HIV and AIDS, independent civil-society initiative has been key to successful responses. Social movements of people living with HIV and AIDS, gay men, women, sex workers, and people who inject drugs have developed innovative institutions and responses to HIV and AIDS, and organised against stigma and discrimination. By bringing people together and advocating effectively, social movements have amplified voices of people most affected by HIV, enabling them to influence governments and decision makers.

  • Among processes towards democratisation, it has been asserted that alternative radio has a central role in the citizen making of the poor. However, it is important to analyse in detail what possibilities an alternative or citizens’ radio has to strengthen ideas of citizenship and transform the public space into a critical and deliberative public in urban sites. This paper focuses on one local Catholic radio station in Huaycan, a shantytown in the outskirts of Lima. It describes the radio’s journalistic work, showing examples of how they mobilise local leaders and monitor democratic processes, such as municipal elections and the district’s participatory budget. In addition, it shows how the public uses the radio to channel their claims. It also identifies the factors that prevent the radio from fully empowering the public and transforming public space into a more critical and democratic one.

  • This paper seeks to understand the restrictions media actors face in their day-to-day work in Acholiland, northern Uganda, and identify the strategies they adopt to maintain a space for dialogue and debate. Two case studies reveal that it is difficult to see how media actors in this conflict environment can play a significant role in holding the ruling government to account and promoting peace building when they are facing repressive media laws, intimidation, a lack of information, and weak managerial support. This paper calls for policies to support the daily struggles of media actors, such as the adoption of the African Peer Review Mechanism – an instrument used for self-monitoring by participant countries of New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Thus, the investigation turns away from questions of censorship to investigating what can be done to support the daily struggles of media actors who are constantly negotiating their way through a labyrinth of restrictions.

  • Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for development advocates and communities regarding advocacy for a policy environment supportive of community media. It reflects on the licensing process and financial sustainability of the projects. In demonstrating how practically media policy can be reshaped to meet civil society needs, two case studies are considered: the UK, where the communication regulator has opened a process to license community radios; and Brazil, where thousands of ‘illegal’ community stations are facing repression, but where the regulator has inaugurated a consultation process with practitioners.

  • Mobile cellular phones have already been used widely around the world for activism, social and economic development, and new cultural and communicative forms. Despite this widespread use of mobile phones, they remain a relatively un-theorised and un-discussed phenomenon in community and citizen’s media. This paper considers how mobile phones have been taken up by citizens to create new forms of expression and power. The specific focus is the use of mobile phones in community development, with examples including the Grameenphone, agriculture and markets, the Filipino diasporic community, HIV/AIDS healthcare, and mobile phones in activism and as media. It is argued that mobile phones form a contact zone between traditional concepts of community and citizen media, on the one hand, and emerging movements in citizenship, democracy, governance, and development, on the other hand

  • This article uses the example of a mobile mixed-media platform – a converted three-wheeled auto-rickshaw – in Sri Lanka in order to explore whether and how content-creation activities can enable marginalised communities to have a voice. It draws upon research into participatory content-creation activities conducted in 15 locations across India, Indonesia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The main findings are: the need to pay attention to context when thinking about what might be locally appropriate, relevant, and beneficial in terms of participatory content creation; the benefits that can be gained from creatively reaching out to and engaging marginalised groups and encouraging a diversity of voices; the usefulness of locally produced content for generating local debate around local issues; and the benefits of encouraging participation at all stages of content creation, so that content is locally meaningful and might lead to positive social change.

  • The synergies created through the careful application of both organic and symbolic communication demonstrably reach those most vulnerable to the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS. The Clown Project uses labour-intensive face-to-face street theatre and dialogue, participatory workshops, and symbolic communication such as print-based materials. Some lessons learned in selected communities in Guatemala and other countries in Central America are shared. The paper puts forward an argument in favour of careful and critical analysis of culture in formulating communication strategies with and for specific groups. This analysis takes into account relations of power within and between vulnerable groups, examining the centre–periphery dynamic between classes, genders, ethnicities, age groups, and other social identities. Both appropriately supported insider perspectives and appropriately processed outsider knowledge are recommended, along with ways of bridging science and the field, theory and practice.

  • Citizens’ media and communication are still poorly understood in the mainstream of development policy and practice – and are prone to simplistic forms of implementation, because of the lack of a coherent grasp of the social, cultural, and political processes that make them transformative. Introducing the articles in this guest issue, the authors find that citizens’ media is about more than bringing diverse voices into pluralist politics: it contributes to processes of social and cultural construction, redefining norms and power relations that exclude people. Local ownership and control of their own media can allow people to reshape the spaces in which their voices find expression.

  • Given the centrality of communication to society, who ‘owns’ the media, who gets to speak on behalf of whom, and to what end are critical issues. The regression of ‘mainstream’ media from ‘watchdogs’ of democracies to business ventures resulting in Habermasian ‘refeudalisation of the public sphere’ is worrying. Community media re-engage communities on the periphery, opening possibilities for social change. The dominance of mainstream players in media governance, complicated by sustainability concerns of grassroots enterprises, result in legislation that impedes the potentiality of community media access and participation – as mapped in this paper with the case of community radio struggle in India.

  • The communication practices of three US anti-poverty groups in the San Francisco Bay Area – Coalition on Homelessness, Poor News Network, and Media Alliance – are discussed whose communication strategies work for the recognition and rights of low-income and homeless people, and for policies to better redistribute economic and communications resources. In the wake of media closures in the local public sphere, and major restructuring of social welfare programmes, these groups’ creative and engaged communication strategies empower poor people and support the building of counter-public spheres working in interaction with, and as alternatives to, dominant media spheres.

  • The radio can help to stimulate better governance. However, state-run broadcasting organisations in the South are usually ill-prepared for their public-service role in new democracies. They are often poorly funded compared to their new, commercial rivals and often still bound by the same ‘rules of the game’ that governed them prior to the democratic era. Broadcasters typically remain accountable to government and not to their listeners, and promote the interests and agendas of the political elite. This paper focuses on the experiences of DFID support to a radio programme in northern Nigeria that sought to improve communication and debate between the government and the electorate. It argues that there are legitimate circumstances for development partners to engage with state-controlled media outlets, not least in rural areas where commercial broadcasters lack the financial incentive to establish stations and provide programming that has relevance to the poor. The authors critically examine the lessons learned from DFID’s support and identify measures that could assist similar initiatives in the future

  • The article examines the notion of development as self-determination in the context of current politicisation of indigenous peoples’ affairs. It looks at the links between development studies, indigenous social movements, and community media practices; and more specifically between specific views on development, self-determination, and identity, and how these terms become embodied in specific media-making (video) practices. The article summarises two case studies of indigenous media production in a transnational context: the UNESCO-funded project Information and Communications Technologies for Intercultural Dialogue: Developing Communication Capacities of Indigenous People (ICT4ID), and the emergence and consolidation of CLACPI, a network of indigenous media producers in Latin America.

  • An Action Learning process integrated with Sen’s Capability Approach can support development agencies to formulate interventions that enhance freedom. The authors show that putting this approach into practice has important implications for the manner in which ‘development’ is undertaken as an ideological project. It may help to examine and challenge those who hold power in development—the guardians. This finding is the result of an emergent Action Learning process that was initiated by applying Sen’s principles to focus-group interviews with women who care for people affected by HIV and AIDS. One of the findings of these focus groups was that the participants valued the process because it opened a space for them to influence the work of the implementing NGO. Essentially, they could hold the implementing agency to account. Reflection on this outcome by the agency led to important shifts in processes that are more supportive of freedom.

  • This article examines the changing status of villagers’ knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes towards gender roles and gender relations over time. Data were collected from eastern part of Bangladesh through survey and in-depth interviews. Findings show that knowledge about discrimination, empowerment, violence against women, and marital issues increased remarkably and attitudes on those issues including general perceptions towards men and women changed positively but not change much as expected. Traditional patriarchal norms, values, culture, and social structures still were recognised as barrier to gender equality.

  • This article presents results of a quantitative/qualitative enquiry into ‘transformative learning’ and ‘mind-change’ dynamics among rural community representatives participating in the Government of Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme [NSP]: a community-driven, nationwide initiative to rehabilitate the country’s infrastructure. Drawing on frameworks for ‘transformative learning’ proposed by Mezirow (1990) and Freire (1993), and ‘mind-change’ proposed by Gardner (2004), it is argued that NSP catalysed transformative development learning through (1) its responsiveness to the expressed needs and interests of project participants; (2) engagement of community representatives as active development partners; (3) delegation of project management responsibility throughout all stages; (4) provision of social space for reflection and critical analysis; (5) opportunities to achieve project outcomes that are meaningful, attractive, and profitable; and (6) programme features compatible with the social and cultural realities of rural Afghanistan.

  • This article examines the impact of NGO professionalisation on who works in NGOs and why. Based on an in-depth survey of employees in 20 advocacy NGOs in Jordan, it demonstrates the gendered impact of professionalisation. The majority of NGO employees are highly educated women, often Western educated, who work in NGOs primarily for career opportunities and because they are drawn by the NGO's goals. In contrast to existing literature, this article argues that gender considerations, such as job flexibility to accommodate household duties, play less of a role in determining why women seek work in NGOs and their job satisfaction.

  • This ethnographic case study addresses the question of how women in Jopadhola patriarchal society in Eastern Uganda remember three decades of civil war and violence and survived its aftermath. When the war ended, little changed for these women, who are still exposed to a continuum of gender-based violence and continue to use the same tactics that, during the war, enabled them to somehow live with their suffering. The Mifumi Project, an indigenous NGO founded by one of the women whose life history was recorded for this article, has started to assist Jopadhola women to improve the quality of their present-day lives. By rebuilding their human and social capital, this NGO is also creating the space for women to heal their war memories.

  • This article looks at the experience of privatised urban water supply and sewerage services in Turkey, focusing on the case of three cities that have opted for such privatisation. The article opens with an examination of the management of urban water and sewerage services in Turkey, and explores the development of water services and water policies in local government institutions. The second section introduces case studies of cities that have transferred the management, operation, and maintenance of urban water services to private operators.

  • This article highlights lessons learned from field research and related analysis, to address three fundamental aspects of development that are often overlooked: culture and governance, inclusive development, and market-based approaches. All three cases address issues of poverty and inequality. In addition, the critical role of institutions in governance and development is also highlighted. Finally, by bridging the gap between culture, economy, and society through these approaches, better and more effective development policies and programmes can be formulated and implemented.

  • This is a case study of an integral local development project combining elements of agro-ecology, fair trade and risk-conservative finance operated in partnership between a grassroots and promoter organization. We conclude that insurance is a key element in the transition from a traditional rural household economic unit to a family enterprise. We reflect on the need for, and limits of development projects to meet the complexity of structural poverty. The text concludes with an exhortation to value experimentation in development practice, with ethical responsibility, and in terms that can be shared in the larger public arena.

  • This article outlines a comprehensive approach to facilitating the transfer of research into practice. It encompasses three main issues of importance: activities should be seen as part of a long-term endeavour rather than isolated one-off events; there are many audiences which may make use of the research findings in various ways; and there are many modes in which the process can be facilitated.

  • Understanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, hoUnderstanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, however, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Ceara, Brazil, is a joint effort of the public sector and civil society designed to create a process of participatory development planning which integrates local-level contextual variations. In this effort, the use of a Participatory Geographic Information System (PGIS) stimulates the participation of community members in analysing their needs, goals, and priorities. The visualisation of these factors through easily understood maps facilitates communication and contributes to a democratic and transparent planning process, thus permitting the articulation of local priorities with the state-level planning apparatus. MAPLAN represents part of a shifting paradigm for rural development planning in the state and provides the tools for the effective inclusion of citizen voice in development policywever, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Cear

  • The Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (TPAF) has been working in the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China since 1998 to increase the income and assets of rural Tibetans. From the beginning TPAF recognised that high morbidity and mortality were a constraint on efforts of rural Tibetans to improve livelihoods. Early interventions to train township doctors and midwives were not sustainable. In 2005, in partnership with local health authorities, TPAF launched a Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) strategy to build villagers’ capacity to improve health and hygiene practices and to make informed choices about using Government primary and preventive health services. Results from counties and townships in three Prefectures are preliminary but show significant changes in health knowledge and practice and growing links between village needs and Government services. Next steps include strengthening implementation and institutionalising Government support to extending and supporting the approach.

  • This article reviews experiences of implementing empowerment interventions in Tanzania. Data are based on field visits to programmes, projects, and organisations involved in implementing empowerment interventions in various regions in the country. These visits involved key informant interviews, sample surveys, and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with farmers. The review highlights the perceptions of empowerment at project staff and practioner/beneficiary levels, as well as the approaches used by various organisations/projects in implementing empowerment activities. Furthermore, the article discusses the factors perceived to lead to empowerment as well as its consequences.

  • Huge amounts are being invested in information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and their telecommunications infrastructure. Development agencies provide a conventional view on the ‘climate’ needed to encourage such investment; particularly that good governance and security are required. We question this conventional view with a study of mobile telecommunications in three insecure states that score very badly in the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Data are limited but suggest insecurity and ‘bad governance’ may not be the barriers to investment that are normally supposed. Indeed, it is possible—at least for this type of digital technology—that they may encourage investment.

  • On 29 August 2008, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee (WHC) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) co-organised a one-day seminar entitled ‘World Heritage and Public Works: Development Cooperation for Poverty Alleviation’, held at the United Nations University in Tokyo. The seminar focused on the role of World Heritage Sites in development and poverty alleviation, balancing public works that sustain community life and preservation of World Heritage properties, and the role of development cooperation – especially international finance organisations – in culture and development projects.

  • This article reports on the tenth anniversary conference of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), drawing attention to the irony that just as progress is being made on the situation of home workers (among the least protected of all working people) the two organisations that have done so much to raise awareness of these issues themselves face closure for lack of funding.

  • In English only

  • This article examines the semantic evolution of the term Community Development (CD) in the latter twentieth century. It is argued that CD has acquired different meanings, theoretical grounding, and practical application starting with a focus on traditional societies up to the 1960s, social and/or civil rights movements up to 1980s, and the modern middle class from the 1990s. The thrust of argument is that the concept is not cohesive and unified but represents a repertoire of meanings that encompass many shades of CD that are not necessarily mutually compatible but reflect the particular political and social practices in the contexts in which they occur.

  • Concerns about gender equity have been at the fore of discussions and analysis of NGO interventions and action since the 1970s. Gender equity, defined as equal rights to access, opportunity, and participation for men and women, has always been a distinctive feature in the programmes of Gram Vikas, a leading NGO in the Indian state of Orissa. Conscious efforts to identify and address these issues began in the mid-1980s. Several specific initiatives have been made to create a level playing field between women and men in the village communities where Gram Vikas works, and within the organisation. There have been resistances and challenges to several of these interventions, and while some of them have embedded themselves to create lasting impact, others have had only limited effect.

  • This article discusses the process of transforming partnership from a conceptual framework into a practical, operational framework for field-level interaction among humanitarian organisations. The authors approach this transformation from the perspective of the core values of the partnership concept and the ability of field workers to behave in ways that are consistent with these core values, illustrated by an empirical study of the relationships between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and NGOs in a refuge-assistance programme in northern Uganda. The authors connect inter-organisational structures with the role of people charged with making partnership work, concluding that the structures and context in which individuals operate make it impossible for them to ‘act out’ the core values of partnership. By identifying the major challenges to creating field-level, operational partnerships, the authors offer lessons for current and future partnership-building initiatives, such as the Global Humanitarian Platform.

  • The article offers a reflective analysis of various problems encountered and lessons learned in implementing a programme to improve the livelihood security of the urban poor in Bangladesh. The study is based on the author’s involvement as an external action-research partner and a review of the literature. The key lessons for success are identified as (i) a clear understanding by all staff of the links between project activities and project objectives; (ii) building staff capacity that is tailored to their needs; (iii) clear targeting criteria and programme coverage; (iv) having all the necessary operational guidelines, workplans, and M&E design before implementation; (v) ensuring ‘partnership of organisations’ not ‘partnership of activities’; (vi) ensuring the real involvement of beneficiaries in all aspects of the project; (vii) staff ‘empowerment’ and a ‘flexible approach’ to operations is more rewarding; (viii) conducting routine reflections on project progress, and finally (ix) being sufficiently bold to make necessary strategic changes even if this means deviating from pre-set activities and hypothetical schedules laid down in the project proposals.

  • Crop genetic diversity and poverty are linked: first, resource-poor farmers often maintain genetic diversity; and second, crop diversity, when properly valued by the market, has the potential to alleviate poverty. This article examines this supposition based on three case studies of the intersection of the market with poverty and maize diversity in Mexico. These cases suggest that the bulk market for maize offers little room for maize landraces (local maize varieties known as criollo maize), in that it does not reward qualitative variation in maize grain, and instead presents incentives that make planting ‘improved’ maize germplasm the rational economic choice for small-scale farmers. Meanwhile, attempts to add value to maize landraces via market differentiation have had varying success. Although there is potential for differentiated markets to contribute to successful business models and poverty alleviation, these cases exhibit tradeoffs between product consistency, investment of labour and resources, and genetic diversity conservation.

  • This article reports on research into the impacts of micro-finance on gender roles, the extent to which socio-cultural factors influence these changes, and how such changes affect the well-being of rural Bogoso households in the Wassa West District of Ghana. Findings indicated that micro-finance has changed men’s and women’s control over decisions and resource allocations, which consequently affected financial responsibilities and education of children, and largely contributed to household well-being. However, the small size of the loans was a limitation. The article concludes that socio-cultural factors may promote or inhibit well-being in rural households, and that micro-finance is not a sufficient tool in itself to promote women’s and household’s well-being. It is recommended that if rural people’s well-being matters, collaborative efforts in the appraisal, monitoring and evaluation of micro-finance initiatives, with the government providing leadership, are imperative.

  • A variety of interventions to mitigate the increasing impact of the HIV and AIDS epidemic on smallholder agricultural production and food security are currently implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. However, documentation and dissemination of such interventions is limited and patchy. Building on emerging experiences from the field, this article seeks to move beyond charting the impacts of HIV and AIDS on rural livelihoods and to review existing mitigation policies and programmes, identify the challenges to mitigation, and provide suggestions for future mitigation strategies and policy priorities. The experiences cited in the article are mainly drawn from the hardest hit Southern and Eastern African regions, but these provide useful lessons for AIDS-affected rural communities in other contexts. The main conclusion is that, as current initiatives are to a large extent ad hoc and localised, there is a need for documentation, dissemination, and scaling up of existing interventions, as well as greater coherence and coordination in policies and programmes to extend their reach and make the most of limited resources.

  • This article examines the role of free-trade agreements that integrate profoundly asymmetrical economies in simultaneously benefiting the more powerful nation and exacerbating inequalities within and between the countries involved. The latest in a series of such agreements in the Americas, the Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) opens up the economies of these small nations to US investment and exports, as multinational companies are able take advantage of lower production costs and weak labour legislation. In the global economy, South–South trade agreements offer a far better alternative for countries with weak institutions and little economic or political leverage.

  • Adequate pricing of environmental goods is essential for the sustainable management of natural resources. It is not easy, however, to place a value on natural resources as the excludability problem makes it difficult to protect natural resources from unpaid use and to exercise property rights over them. This article discusses the achievements and limitations of current natural resource policies from the perspective of view of efficiency and equity. It argues that a trust fund operating via market-based transactions is a promising approach to help achieve simultaneously the goals of efficiency, sustainability, and poverty reduction, provided that property rights over the environmental resources are distributed fairly within current generations as well as between present and future generations.

  • In recent years understanding of poverty and of ways in which people escape from or fall into poverty has become more holistic. This should improve the capabilities of policy analysts and others working to reduce poverty, but it also makes analysis more complex. This article describes a simple schema which integrates multidimensional, multilevel, and dynamic understandings of poverty, of poor people’s livelihoods, and of changing roles of agricultural systems. The article suggests three broad types of strategy pursued by poor people: ‘hanging in’; ‘stepping up’; and ‘stepping out’. This simple schema explicitly recognises the dynamic aspirations of poor people; diversity among them; and livelihood diversification. It also brings together aspirations of poor people with wider sectoral, inter-sectoral, and macro-economic questions about policies necessary for realisation of those aspirations.

  • The development of a cadastral system for the Republic of Guatemala was one of the priorities of the 1997 Peace Accord that ended 30 years of civil war. While uncertainty of land ownership and land title are contentious issues, the development of a national cadastre, equitable land distribution, and land tenancy are viewed as key to maintaining peace in Guatemala. This article addresses the most significant barriers to developing a National Land Information System used to support cadastral reform. Findings from interviews with government agencies indicate that while technical improvements can be readily implemented, social factors associated with NGO and government interaction, diffusion of equitable government policy towards land rights, and the costs of the land-registration process seriously hinder the completion of the cadastral process. These findings are discussed in light of international aid and development policy.

  • In recent years understanding of poverty and of ways in which people escape from or fall into poverty has become more holistic. This should improve the capabilities of policy analysts and others working to reduce poverty, but it also makes analysis more complex. This article describes a simple schema which integrates multidimensional, multilevel, and dynamic understandings of poverty, of poor people’s livelihoods, and of changing roles of agricultural systems. The article suggests three broad types of strategy pursued by poor people: ‘hanging in’; ‘stepping up’; and ‘stepping out’. This simple schema explicitly recognises the dynamic aspirations of poor people; diversity among them; and livelihood diversification. It also brings together aspirations of poor people with wider sectoral, inter-sectoral, and macro-economic questions about policies necessary for realisation of those aspirations.

  • In English only

  • This article challenges the terms on which donor agencies evaluate development success, drawing on a particular case to make its point. It describes the resettlement of 60,000 people squatting along the railway tracks in Mumbai, a process planned and carried out by a federation of the railway dwellers themselves, with support from the NGO SPARC (the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres). The article argues that this effort, which met donor criteria for a successful project, was the tip of an iceberg. Without an appreciation of the years of learning and innovation that preceded it, and the underpinning of principles and relationships built up over many years, this achievement cannot be adequately assessed or understood - and certainly not replicated. Yet in the world of formal assessment and evaluation, there tends to be a lack of interest in the deeper learning about social change that makes such success stories possible.

  • All over Gaya District in Bihar, irrespective of a person's caste or economic status, irrigation is the overriding topic of concern on public platforms and in private conversations. In the absence of adequate government action, different kinds of community endeavour are emerging to answer the need, some supported by radical political movements, others by organisations of a religious persuasion, and still others primarily by prominent local citizens.

  • Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) has been adopted in many countries to help disabled people. This article analyses the interplay between CBR and the self-alienation of physically disabled women from their communities. In-depth interviews with 40 women with physical disabilities in northern Thailand found that CBR was barely capable of enabling women with physical disabilities to realise their sense of self within their community, because in itself CBR was unable to change the community's false impression of disability. Despite participating in CBR programmes, the self-alienation of physically disabled women from their community remained; the authors argue that this was due to the heavy reliance of CBR on medical practice, ignoring gender as a major contributing factor. In addition, CBR field workers obviously failed to grasp the magnitude of social models in disability rehabilitation.

  • This article analyses in detail the impact and effectiveness of peer-education projects implemented in Cambodia under the Reproductive Health Initiative for Asia (RHI), in an attempt to provide important lessons for the design and implementation of such interventions and to contribute to the development of best practice. Under RHI, which was the first programme in Cambodia designed specifically to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of young people, peer education was implemented as if it were a directly transferable method, rather than a process to be rooted in specific social and political contexts. Consequently, peer-education concepts of empowerment and participation conflicted with hierarchical traditions and local power relations concerning gender and poverty; peer educators were trained to deliver messages developed by adults; and interventions were not designed to reflect the social dynamics of youth peer groups.

  • Engaging with and assisting marginalised communities remains a major challenge for governments of developing countries, as many national development strategies tend in practice to further marginalise chronically poor communities. Development aid strategies, including poverty-reduction initiatives, have focused primarily on economic development. As a result they have contributed to the erosion of the asset base of these communities, and in particular their access to natural resources. While questioning the impact of aid arrangements on the poorest and most vulnerable communities in society, this article recognises that current aid arrangements, such as national poverty-reduction strategies, have created an environment in which chronic poverty can be addressed by national governments and other stakeholders. The authors emphasise the need for greater sensitivity in the processes of planning and managing national development strategies that seek to reduce poverty, as well as a commitment to institutional arrangements that include marginalised groups in the country's political economy.

    Image

  • The World Bank and IMF have proposed the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) framework for all poor countries as a condition of receiving unconditional debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. The PRSPs will also be the key vehicle for the World Bank and IMF and other donors for various assistance packages, including loans. Like its predecessors, the PRSP framework promotes the ideas of 'participation' and 'ownership'. This article argues that ownership of such a grand framework cannot possibly rest with the poor countries or their people if the whole idea is the product of World Bank and IMF think-tanks. It discusses participation in the development of Bangladesh's PRSP and argues that neither participation nor ownership was the target in preparing a national poverty-reduction strategy: they were merely necessary components of a document required for the continuation of debt and lending relationships with the World Bank and IMF.

  • This article examines the inadequate delivery of social services by city governments in Nigeria. It identifies three problems: lack of transparency and accountability in governance; under-qualified staff and administration; and the tenuous relationship (an 'us' versus 'them' dichotomy) between the urban residents and local governments. It can no longer be argued that lack of funds is the key constraint.

  • Good governance is essential for sustaining economic transformation in developing countries. However, many developing countries currently lack the capacity, as opposed to the will, to achieve and then sustain a climate of good governance. This article addresses, from a practitioner's field perspective, the fundamental objectives, principles, and key areas that need to be addressed for developing capacity for good governance. These frameworks are now beginning to be recognised, as both governments and donor institutions attempt to take advantage of the current demand and opportunities for addressing governance deficits. In pursuing capacity development for good governance, developing countries must ensure that such initiatives are comprehensively designed to be simultaneously related to change and transformation at the individual, institutional, and societal levels and to be owned and controlled locally.

  • Much internal migration in India, including the states of Rajasthan and Orissa, is distress-led. Previously issues pertaining to gender were overlooked, because migration tended to be viewed as chiefly a male movement, with women either residual in the process, or dependent followers. Contemporary migration is taking place in a world marked by a deeper belief in the importance of equality of opportunity across socio-political divides. This article stresses the need to analyse migration through the differential experiences of women and of men in the context of a highly gendered world.

  • An approach to establishing improved private extension-service provision for smallholder horticultural producers in Kenya was developed between 2003 and 2005 by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology and Natural Resources Institute in the UK, in collaboration with EurepGAP FoodPLUS GmbH and the House of Quality-South Africa, international NGOs, export companies, and out-grower farmer groups. The approach focused on good agricultural practices, food safety, EU regulations on maximum pesticide-residue limits, and the EurepGAP Standard. The approach is not a blueprint, but the lessons learned are applicable to similar smallholder production systems in other African countries.

  • A common challenge faces development organisations, from the highest policy-making circles to local, grassroots organisations: how to work with other groups to build stronger partnerships and achieve consensus on goals? This article describes the Net-Map Toolbox, a new tool which builds and expands upon existing social-networking approaches. The article highlights the experience of using the Toolbox with the White Volta Basin Board in Ghana, a multi-stakeholder organisation responsible for overseeing local water resources. The authors discuss how the Net-Map Toolbox can assist members of development-oriented organisations to better understand and interact with each other in situations where many different actors can influence the outcome.

  • Recognising that the stance of investigators could make a major impact on the quality and/or interpretation of development-study findings, a small investigation to explore researcher positions and roles was implemented. This was a subsidiary component of a larger health-development study which aimed to explore the evidence base for psychosocial and mental-health policy formulation and implementation in two conflict-affected, low-resourced countries. Five of the research team were interviewed by a sixth member in an open, semi-structured interview format, and the data were analysed thematically. The primary learning for the team, with wider implications for others in development research and practice, is that if the aim is to produce credible findings from investigations of this nature, it is important to exhibit a high degree of transparency regarding the role and position of each researcher, and an explicit attempt to be reflexive in relation to the associated challenges.

  • Co-operation between researchers in the global North and South is critical to the production of new knowledge to inform development policies. However, the agenda-setting process is a formidable obstacle in many development research partnerships. The first section of this article examines how bilateral donor strategies affect collaborative agenda-setting processes. The second section explores researchers' motivations for entering into North-South partnerships; the obstacles that Southern researchers encounter in agenda-setting processes; and the strategies that they employ to ensure that research partnerships respond to their concerns. This analysis suggests that while strong Southern research organisations are best placed to maximise the benefits of collaboration, donors and researchers alike are well advised to recognise the limitations of this approach and use it prudently, because North-South partnerships are not necessarily the best way to advance research agendas rooted in Southern priorities.
  • Development research has responded to a number of charges over the past few decades. For example, when traditional research was accused of being 'top-down', the response was participatory research, linking the 'receptors' to the generators of research. As participatory processes were recognised as producing limited outcomes, the demand-led agenda was born. In response to the alleged failure of research to deliver its products, the 'joined-up' model, which links research with the private sector, has become popular. However, using examples from animal-health research, this article demonstrates that all the aforementioned approaches are seriously limited in their attempts to generate outputs to address the multi-faceted problems facing the poor. The article outlines a new approach to research: the Mosaic Model. By combining different knowledge forms, and focusing on existing gaps, the model aims to bridge basic and applied findings to enhance the efficiency and value of research, past, present, and future.
  • Partnership has become a key word in the jargon of international development. This article presents the results of research into the perspectives of Cambodian and Filipino NGO workers on their funding relationships. Largely confirming the negative literature about partnership, practitioners generally expressed a view that their relationships with funders are not consistent with the rhetoric of power sharing and collaboration that often accompanies discussions of the subject. In spite of this, practitioners articulated a desire for collaborative relationships with Northern organisations, ideally with a greater focus on the local context and personal relationships. Practitioners believe that an important part of their role is mediating development in order to make it more relevant and responsive.
  • Starting from an analysis of social and environmental injustice, the author argues that the concept of environmental racism is integral to the hegemonic model of capitalist development. She reveals how the financial mega-conglomerates, helped by the media, exploit such prejudices, and highlights the relevance of environmental racism in the struggle to overcome inequalities, to value the importance of diversity, and to build full citizenship for all.
  • This article argues that the practice of poverty alleviation is greatly limited by a vision of poverty that fails to capture the locally specific causes of and solutions to the challenges that threaten human well-being. This problematic vision of poverty takes real-world form in such initiatives as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. It is a key reason why this and other contemporary poverty-alleviation efforts do not show greatly improved results compared with previous efforts. By reframing our understanding of the challenges to human well-being from poverty to 'poverties', however, we might envisage a new approach to policy development in relation to poverty that moves us towards a truly sustainable development.
  • Advocates and activists for human rights are currently facing a paradox: the coexistence of profound challenges in familiar territory (civil liberties) alongside expansion into new areas. Rights-based approaches (RBAs) are a part of this latter expansionary stream. This article argues that four kinds of potential value-added can be claimed. First, value-added can be sought through direct, indirect, and strategic uses of the law. Second, value can also be added by re-centring the state and (re)asking the question about its appropriate role in development (delivery, oversight), and strategising engagement with the state. Third, in relation to accountability, RBAs add value by calling the state to account; building capacities of rights holders and duty bearers; and encouraging a new kind of ownership of human rights among NGOs. Fourth, the article explores claims that RBAs re-politicise development, redefining it as rights-based rather than based on benevolence; reclaiming or re-politicising the key (process) terms of development; addressing the root, structural causes of poverty and conflict, rather than the symptoms; and speaking truth to power. Not all of these contributions are unique to RBAs, however, and on all counts it remains to be seen if RBAs will deliver on their promise.
  • The behaviour of international NGOs (INGOs) continues to impede aid effectiveness. The reasons for this are identified. Six prescriptions are offered which, if adopted by INGOs, would reduce the harm that they cause.

  • Over the past 10-15 years there has been an expansion of interest in the subject of Development Studies (DS). There are now significantly more taught courses focused on DS, and research funds are booming. However, over the same period, DS has faced sustained critiques about its essential nature. This has led us to ask: what is Development Studies? And what could or should it be?
  • This brief article highlights some major contributions made by the United Nations to development thinking and practice from 1945 to 2000. The term 'development' is used here broadly to refer not only to increases in economic growth and per capita income and to structural change, but also to progress in promoting human rights, poverty reduction, employment generation, fairer distribution of the benefits of growth, participation in decision making at different levels, equality of men and women, child development and well-being, and social justice and environmental sustainability. There is first a discussion of the values that have underpinned UN work on development. This is followed by a summary of some key contributions made by the UN system to thinking on development issues. The article concludes with some observations on the ways in which these contributions were made and on strengths and weaknesses of the system in generating development ideas and action.
  • The quality of NGO work is hugely dependent on the quality of critical thinking and analysis of poverty among all levels of staff. In particular, the quality of the work in the field - at partner and community levels - depends on an understanding of development processes and on strong facilitation skills, both of which rely on strong levels of critical thinking. While these are innately present in almost everyone, rote learning in education systems and patriarchal and top-down power structures often impede their development. This article suggests some practical means by which development agencies can develop strong analytical thinking and strong facilitation skills among their staff. While the article is mainly aimed at frontline staff, the implication is that such mechanisms are required at all levels if organisations are going to develop their own capacities.
  • The vast natural resources of India's forests, including non-timber forest products (NTFPs), such as medicinal and aromatic plants, leaves, fruits, seeds, resins, gums, bamboos, and canes, offer employment that provides up to half the income of about 25 per cent of the country's rural labour force. However, poor harvesting practices and over-exploitation in the face of increasing market demand are threatening the sustainability of these resources, and thus the livelihoods of forest-dependent tribal communities. This article analyses the role of NTFPs in livelihoods-improvement initiatives and considers recent initiatives intended to enhance their conservation and sustainable management. It recommends policies to optimise the potential of NTFPs, both to support rural livelihoods and to contribute to India's social, economic, and environmental well-being.
  • Much has been researched and said about the impacts of international trade liberalisation at the country level; but little is known about its social and environmental local-level impacts. Since national averages can mask the existence of winners and losers, national-level studies may be a poor guide to addressing the plight of the rural poor and the environment that are at the core of the agenda of the social and conservation movement. This article compares the international trade-liberalisation debate with the findings of local rural-based case studies in seven countries, co-ordinated by WWF and the World Bank during 2004-2007. It discusses some actions that the conservation and social movement could take to improve the discussion and the practice of trade liberalisation, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.
  • So much work has been done on participatory research and gender analysis - their implementation, evaluation, and institutionalisation - that it is difficult to recommend a limited set of resources. The context here is 'challenges to operationalising participatory research and gender analysis', so we have sought out resources which shed light on some new practical issues and are based on empirical evidence. Some of the classics in the field have also been included. Readers will find additional resources in and through the bibliographical references of articles included in this issue. pp 658-669
  • This case study from Búzi district, Mozambique investigated whether gender equality, in terms of male and female participation in groups, leads to gender equity in sharing of benefits from the social capital created through the group. Exploring the complex connection between gender, groups, and social capital, we found that gender equity is not necessarily achieved by guaranteeing men and women equal rights through established by-laws, or dealing with groups as a collective entity. While there were no significant differences in the investment patterns of men and women in terms of participation in group activities and contribution of communal work, access to leadership positions and benefits from social capital were unequally distributed. Compared with men, women further found it difficult to transform social relations into improved access to information, access to markets, or help in case of need. pp 650-657
  • International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CIMMYT) projects on new resource-conservation technologies (RCTs) in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of Nepal aimed to strengthen equity of access, poverty reduction, and gender orientation in current rural mechanisation processes - more specifically, to promote machine-based resource conservation and drudgery-reduction technologies among smallholder farmers. These projects, together with other projects and other actors, gave rise to an informal 'coalition' project, which used participatory technology development (PTD) approaches, where farmers, engineers, scientists, and other partners worked towards equitable access to new RCTs. This experience showed that PTD projects need to be flexible, making use of learning and change approaches. Once successful adoption is occurring, then what? Such projects need to ensure that everyone is benefiting in terms of social inclusion and equity; this might necessitate new unforeseen work. pp 643-649
  • Evaluations involving stakeholders include collaborative evaluation, participatory evaluation, development evaluation, and empowerment evaluation - distinguished by the degree and depth of involvement of local stakeholders or programme participants in the evaluation process. In community participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E), communities agree programme objectives and develop local indicators for tracking and evaluating change. PM&E is not without limitations, one being that community indicators are highly specific and localised, which limits wide application of common community indicators for evaluating programmes that span social and geographic space. We developed community indicators with six farming communities in Malawi to evaluate a community development project. To apply the indicators across the six communities, we aggregated them and used a Likert scale and scores to assess communities' perceptions of the extent to which the project had achieved its objectives. We analysed the data using a comparison of means to compare indicators across communities and by gender. pp 633-642
  • While rural poverty is endemic in the Andean region, structural adjustment programmes have led to a dismemberment of agricultural research and extension services so that they are unable to serve the needs of smallholder farmers. The NGO Practical Action has been working in the Andes to address farmers' veterinary and agriculture needs. The work has included the training of farmer-to-farmer extension agents, known locally as Kamayoq. The Kamayoq have encouraged farmer participatory research, and local farmers pay them for their veterinary and crop advisory services in cash or in kind. The Kamayoq model is largely an unsubsidised approach to the provision of appropriate technical services and encouragement of farmer participation. The model also illustrates that, in the context of encouraging farmer participation and innovation, NGOs have advantages over research organisations because of their long-term presence, ability to establish trust with local farmers, and their emphasis on social and community processes. pp 627-632
  • PETRRA was an agricultural research-management project which used a values-based approach in project design, planning, and implementation. Through an experiential learning process, agricultural research and development (R&D) institutes, NGOs, private agencies, and community-based organisations rediscovered and improved the understanding of their strengths in meeting development commitments. The project successfully showed how values-based research can meaningfully be implemented and a sustainable pro-poor impact achieved. pp 619-626
  • Women play the major role in food supply in developing countries, but too often their ability to feed their families properly is compromised; the result is high levels of food-borne disease and consequent limited access to higher-value markets. We argue that risk-based approaches - current best practice for managing food safety in developed countries - require adaptation to the difficult context of informal markets. We suggest participatory research and gender analysis as boundary-spanning mechanisms, bringing communities and food-safety implementers together to analyse food-safety problems and develop workable solutions. Examples show how these methodologies can contribute to operationalising risk-based approaches in urban settings and to the development of a new approach to assessing and managing food safety in poor countries, which we call 'participatory risk analysis'. pp 611-618
  • The real experts on poverty are poor people, yet the incidence and trends in poverty are usually measured by the use of official economic indicators assumed by researchers to be relevant. Poor householders themselves distinguish between subsistence and cash income. In a 'self-assessed poverty' exercise, poor villagers in rural China specified and weighted key poverty indicators. Eight key indicators describing three basic types of poverty were isolated and used to construct a participatory poverty index (PPI), the components of which provide insights into core causes of poverty. Moreover, the PPI allows direct comparison of the incidence of poverty between villages - differences in social, cultural, and environmental characteristics of each village notwithstanding. As a result, the PPI offers an objective method of conducting poverty monitoring independently of physical and social features. This article provides a brief description of the PPI and the data needed to construct a village-specific PPI. pp 599-610
  • This study assessed the extent to which participatory methods had been used by CIMMYT, and how the scientists perceived them. Results suggest that participatory approaches at the Center were largely 'functional' - that is, aimed at improving the efficiency and relevance of research - and had in fact added value to the research efforts. The majority of projects surveyed also placed emphasis on building farmers' awareness. This is understandable if we think that the limiting factor in scientist-farmer exchange is the farmers' limited knowledge base. Thus, in situations such as marginal areas and in smallholder farming, exposure to new genotypes and best-bet management options would be a first requirement for effective interactions and implementation of participatory approaches. pp 590-598
  • Until recently, participatory and conventional approaches to agricultural research have been regarded as more or less antagonistic. This article presents evidence from three sub-projects of a Thai-Vietnamese-German collaborative research programme on 'Sustainable Land Use and Rural Development in Mountainous Regions of Southeast Asia', in which participatory elements were successfully integrated into conventional agricultural research as add-on activities. In all three sub-projects the costs of studying local knowledge or enhancing farmers' experimentation consisted of additional local personnel, opportunity costs of participating farmers' time, and travel costs. However, these participatory elements of the research projects constituted only a small fraction of the total costs. It may be concluded that conventional agricultural research can be complemented by participatory components in a cost-effective way, while producing meaningful benefits in terms of creating synergies by blending scientific and local knowledge, scaling up micro-level data, and highlighting farmers' constraints affecting technology adoption. pp 576-589
  • The popularity of participatory research approaches is largely driven by the expected benefits from bridging the gap between formal agricultural science institutions and local farm communities, making agricultural research more relevant and effective. There is, however, no certainty that this approach, which has been mainly project-based, will succeed in transforming agricultural research in developing countries towards more client-responsive, impact-oriented institutions. Research managers must consider appropriate strategies for such an institutional transformation, including: (1) careful planning of social processes and interactions among different players, and documenting how that might have brought about success or failure; (2) clear objectives, which influence the participation methods used; (3) clear impact pathway and impact hypotheses at the outset, specifying expected outputs, outcomes, impacts, and beneficiaries; (4) willingness to adopt institutional learning, where existing culture and practices can be changed; and (5) long-term funding commitment to sustain the learning and change process. pp 564-575
  • This study explores the intra-household impact of improved dual-purpose cowpea (IDPC) from a gender perspective, in terms of productivity and food, fodder, and income availability, the impact of which is linked to the income thus placed in the women's hands. Surplus income is important in providing food and nutritional benefits to the home, particularly during periods of risk. More importantly, income generated through the adoption of improved cowpea varieties has entered a largely female domain, where transfers of income reserves were passed on between women of different ages, with significant impact in terms of social and economic development. However, the technology has strengthened the separation of working spheres between men and women. Future technologies should, from the outset, explore provisions existing within the local rubric, to focus on women with the aim of expanding their participation in agriculture with the associated benefits to their families. pp 551-563
  • The need to increase agricultural sustainability has induced the government of India to promote the adoption of integrated pest management (IPM). An evaluation of cotton-based conventional and IPM farming systems was conducted in India (2002-2004). The farmers managing the IPM farms had participated in discovery-based ecological training, namely Farmer Field Schools (FFS). The evaluation included five impact areas: (1) the ecological footprint and (2) occupational hazard of cotton production; and the effects of IPM adoption on (3) labour allocation; (4) management practices; and (5) livelihoods. The analysis showed that a mix of approaches increased the depth and the relevance of the findings. Participatory and conventional methods were complementary. The study also revealed different impacts on the livelihoods of women and men, and wealthy and poor farmers, and demonstrated that the value of the experience can be captured also in terms of the farmers' own frames of reference. The evaluation process consumed considerable resources, indicating that proper budgetary allocations need to be made. pp 539-550
  • The debate on empowerment encompasses an older discourse about the intrinsic value of empowerment, and a newer discourse about the instrumental benefits of empowerment; the concept of agency is useful in understanding this distinction. In agricultural development, empowerment efforts are often instrumentalist, viewed as an advanced form of participation that will improve project effectiveness, with adoption rates that promote compliance rather than intrinsic empowerment. Nevertheless, it is possible for projects to enhance the means for - and facilitate the process of - intrinsic empowerment. With regard to process, research and extension can make use of a constructivist rather than the behaviourist approach to support changes in knowledge, behaviour, and social relationships. In assessing empowerment, both developers and 'developees' need to look for evidence that people are taking control of their lives. Case studies - such as those used by the Indonesian Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme - will help to capture context and chronology, with unplanned behaviours being particularly useful indicators. pp 524-538
  • This article is based on participatory development research conducted in Soroti district of Uganda with the aim of assessing the impact of agricultural development among poor farmers. The central argument is that a combination of farmer empowerment and innovation through experiential learning in farmer field school (FFS) groups, changes in the opportunity structure through transformation of local government staff, establishment of new farmer-governed local institutions, and emergence of a private service provider has been successful in reducing rural poverty. Based on an empirical study of successful adaptation and spread of pro-poor technologies, the study assesses the well-being impact of agricultural technology development in Soroti district. The study concludes that market-based spread of pro-poor agricultural technologies requires an institutional setting that combines farmer empowerment with an enabling policy environment. pp 506-523
  • This article traces a history of agricultural participatory research, largely from the author's personal experience. Participatory research in the 1970s was mostly led by disciplinary scientists, and characterised by innovative activities and open academic debate, with some recognition that policy and development practice was a political process. The 1980s saw a shift to learning from past experience, and a participatory mainstream developed, seeking methods for scaling up. Meanwhile, others sought to understand and influence policy and institutional change in their political and cultural contexts, and to keep open the academic debates. The author considers the 1990s as 'lost years', during which mainstream participatory practitioners became inward-looking development generalists, not so interested in learning from others outside their paradigm. The late 2000s provide a chance to re-recognise the political and cultural embeddedness of science and technology; re-introduce strong, widely based disciplines; and learn from past activities that resulted in positive development outcomes (planned or unplanned). pp 489-505
  • This article reviews, through reference to the published literature, some key questions about participatory research. When should participatory research be used? How should participatory research be applied? What about quality of science in participatory research? Are there any institutional issues associated with the use of participatory research? And what are the benefits and costs of participatory research? The article is not a comprehensive literature review on participatory research, it is not meant to set standards for participatory research, nor to define what constitutes 'good' participatory research, but rather it seeks to summarise the realities of implementing participatory research, as discussed and debated by several published authors, and to provide some useful background for this special issue. pp 479-488

  • Participatory research approaches are increasingly popular with scientists working for poverty alleviation, sustainable rural development, and social change. This introduction offers an overview of the special issue of Development in Practice journal on the theme of 'operationalising participatory research and gender analysis'. The purpose of the special issue is to add value to the discussion of methodological, practical, philosophical, political, and institutional issues involved in using gender-sensitive participatory methods. Drawing on 16 articles, we place some of the main issues, empirical experiences, and debates in participatory research and participatory technology development in the context of implementation, evaluation, and institutionalisation of participatory research and evaluation approaches. pp 467-478

  • In English only

  • In attempting to rebuild post-conflict failed states, the international community has drawn heavily on neo-liberal development paradigms. However, neo-liberal state building has proved ineffectual in stimulating economic development in post-conflict states, undermining prospects for state consolidation. This article offers the developmental state as an alternative model for international state building, better suited to overcoming the developmental challenges that face post-conflict states. Drawing on the East Asian experience, developmental state building would seek to build state capacity to intervene in the economy to guide development, compensating for the failure of growth led by the private sector to materialise in many post-conflict states. The article concludes that such an approach would, in the first instance, require the international community to accept more honestly its developmental responsibilities when it decides to intervene to rebuild failed states. pp307-318
  • In the emerging ‘post-Washington Consensus’ era, neo-liberalism is searching for alternatives that once again emphasise the state. Yet neither Latin American dependencia nor East Asian developmentalism – two development models actually practised ‘on the ground’ – shares the basic assumptions of the liberal, rationalist state. First, there persists a significant ontological divide over the purpose of the state. Developmentalists and dependentists advocate deep, dynamic state agency rather than the hands-off, liberal, night-watchman state. Second, development theory has unfolded within a modern liberal framework of science, democracy, the interests of US foreign policy, and increasingly a commitment to poverty alleviation. Dependency and developmentalism reject these neo-liberal benchmarks in the interest of state consolidation and autonomy. The persistence of dependentist and developmentalist understandings of the state precludes a uniform, post-neoliberal reversal in development theory back to the state. pp319-332
  • This article offers strategies for women’s empowerment in conservative, tribal, and religious environments, based on an innovative programme in Pakistan. Mainstreaming Gender and Development (MGD) encouraged participants to build on their communities’ strengths, minimised resistance among families and communities by including them in the development process, and succeeded in building a cadre of women activists. Drawing on its experience, the author questions the importance of collective action, suggests that the selection of participants should be based on aptitude rather than socio-economic status, and highlights the potential for women’s empowerment in challenging environments. pp333-344
  • Increasingly development theorists and practitioners view NGOs as catalysts of sustainable development. NGOs have been regarded as champions of democratisation and promoters of new ways of engaging in politics, with considerable influence on the development of civil society and new partnerships in environmental and social advocacy. This article analyses the ways in which Costa Rican environmental NGOs (ENGOs) engage in politics, by focusing on their perceptions of their roles in environmental governance and in representation of civil society. The results of this study suggest that the ENGOs’ ways of engaging in politics differ little from traditional forms of governance, while their conceptions of engaging in politics without being political are novel. While most ENGOs had no clear conception of the stakeholders whom they were supposed to be representing, the notion of representativeness is complex and should be revisited. pp345-356
  • This article discusses the history and evolution of international volunteer-sending agencies and volunteers as a response not only to symptoms but also to causes of global poverty and inequality. It considers how international volunteers might be defined, what makes their role different from other forms of overseas development assistance (particularly their contribution to capacity development), and the positives and negatives that may accompany those differences. It also reflects on international volunteers’ suitability as contributors in the transition to a globally more ecologically sustainable state, presenting some insights from volunteers and other stakeholders. pp357-370
  • This article explores efforts to bridge multi-disciplinary research and policy engagement to tackle child poverty in the contexts of developing countries, based on the experiences of Young Lives, an international longitudinal policy-research project. It focuses on a case study involving the application of research evidence on child poverty to shape policy debates concerning Ethiopia’s second-generation Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (2006–2010). The discussion is situated within theoretical literature on the interface between knowledge, policy, and practice, which supports the conceptualisation of policy making as a non-linear dynamic process. It pays particular attention to the importance of understanding the political and policy contexts of Southern countries, rather than assuming that they should simply import Northern-derived models of advocacy. It concludes by identifying general lessons for translating research into social-policy change. pp371-384
  • While it is internationally agreed that the worst forms of child labour should be eliminated in order to promote children’s welfare, the consensus breaks down when trying to define what constitutes ‘light work’. This article seeks to show why it is difficult to get everyone to agree on this issue, focusing on the definition of child labour proposed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). pp385-394
  • Post-conflict governance is an increasingly important aspect of foreign development assistance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the weakening and disintegration of the state undermine sustainable human development. A major challenge in post-conflict rebuilding in SSA concerns the incorporation of subnational non-state structures and informal institutions into the post-conflict governance apparatus. In order to tackle this apparent gap in sustainable peacebuilding, more theoretical and empirical research is needed into the nuanced role(s) and contribution(s) of the post-conflict state in reconstituting governance and rehabilitating communities. This article discusses the post-Washington Consensus (PWC), an emerging development approach which seeks to re-introduce the role of the state in development and post-conflict studies. The central proposition of the article is that, contrary to the anti-statist premise of the Washington Consensus, states, non-state structures, and informal institutions play an important role in cultivating institutional reconciliation, interpenetration, and integration between macro-level government structures and subnational social institutions. pp395-402
  • The world is at a critical point as humanity contemplates how our own activity is contributing to changes in the earth and atmosphere. Formidable challenges require raising fundamental questions and learning from unlikely sources. Drawing on field research conducted on the Zambian Copperbelt, this article explores how public conversations concerning differing views of reality can inform development-related thinking about the environment. Enumerating practical examples where words and images both conveyed and shaped conflicting viewpoints in the industrial mine setting, the article asserts that much can be learned from the experiential viewpoints of underground miners. Policy making could benefit, for instance, from lessening its dependence on dominant economic thinking and increasingly drawing upon historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological insights when devising policies, projects, and procedures. Questions of power, control, and humanity’s self-conception in relation to the physical world are also explored. pp403-411
  • Women planners in Africa do not constitute a critical mass: their numbers remain negligible and their output unrecognised, while mentors and role models still tend to be male. Women’s experiences are undervalued, and their knowledge is often excluded in policy, project planning, and implementation. This article arises not from systematic academic research but from confessional, reflective, pilot research based on personal experience and the experiences reported by 25 women planners between 1999 and 2004. It deliberately seeks to break the monotony of drawing from survey results, which are often detached from experiential and emotional encounters. Using anecdotal material from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, it examines the training and professional environment of the ‘planneress’; and discusses the emotions, expectations, and experiences of female planners in everyday encounters. pp412-419
  • Though less than expected, resources are available for simple, cheap interventions that can accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Results-based management has been the key to increasing access to education and health care, but it does little to change the political, social, and economic conditions that make people poor. Unless there is a better balance between the drive to achieve measurable impact, investments in long-term poverty-eradication measures, and the creation of space where poor people can discuss and develop strategies for achieving equality and social justice, it will not be as easy to make poverty history as many people think. pp420-423
  • While there is often a heavy emphasis on disaster response, disaster preparedness and mitigation are, rightfully, receiving more attention. In examining the state of preparedness in Indonesia, this article is divided into three sections. First, it reviews the hazards present in the country, such as conflict, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Second, it considers some of the current efforts underway by the government and international community. Finally, the article contends that the disaster- preparedness process is not yet complete. The main challenges remain: improving co-ordination between different organisations, creating a culture of disaster-risk management, implementing appropriate methods, and maintaining momentum on this issue in the future. pp424-429
  • Development brings about changes in people’s lives and their ways of understanding and dealing with their world. It is possible to distinguish between two types of development intervention: (a) improvements in the external situation, chiefly through the provision of public goods; and (b) strengthening people’s inner capacities, an endeavour which depends on cognitive processes. The article links basic concepts from cognitive theory to development practice and proposes avenues for further research to study the way in which people develop their capacities and to find ways of supporting such processes. A fuller understanding of cognitive change as a key factor could greatly enhance the sustainability of development projects. pp430-436
  • This article reports on a study to explore the factors and motivations that contribute to community volunteers’ participation in a nursery feeding project in Malawi. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with community volunteers in 15 of the 32 sites in the programme. The findings pointed to a mix of intrinsic motivations, namely a deep concern for orphans and vulnerable children, a moral obligation to help, and a declared love of the work undertaken, and also to external factors such as spirituality, links of reciprocity, and the building of social capital. Understanding what motivates volunteers to take part in resource-poor settings is crucial to recognising, facilitating, and sustaining the work that they do. Further research into volunteering in the South is crucially needed. pp437-445
  • The boom in the construction industry in South Africa has drawn attention to the need for skills development. This article reports on an evaluation of the ‘People at the Gate’ training programme initiated by Group Five in Gauteng and Mpumalanga Provinces. The programme aims to empower unemployed local community members in areas where the company operates. The programme targets women and men who come to the company’s sites looking for possible employment and are unable to be accommodated due to their lack of skills. The study evaluated the difficulties that trainees are faced with during and after the project; employment opportunities that are created; and the skills most needed in different trades and provinces. pp446-449
  • In English Only pp161-163

  • Governments in developing countries need effective programmes to advance public policies and improve social welfare. NGOs often have well-tested programmes and research outcomes that are relevant to such needs, yet the scaling up of pilot programmes to national level is difficult to achieve and frequently unsuccessful. This article presents a case of successful scaling up for an adolescent sexual-health and psychosocial-competencies programme in Mexico, through an NGO–government partnership involving IMIFAP, a Mexican NGO. The case illustrates how an NGO can create a successful partnership with government to scale up effective programmes, in ways that meet key needs of the target population while protecting the NGO’s core values. pp164-175

  • HIV threatens the survival of many civil-society organisations (CSOs) in Africa. While we know the range of potential costs to such groups, we lack a detailed picture of the extent of the impact. This article highlights important findings from exploratory research in Malawi. Respondents perceived that overall performance in the four CSOs studied declined by an average 20 per cent because they were working in a context of high HIV prevalence. Yet the CSOs’ workplace response to this threat was very limited, and they remain highly vulnerable to future impact. We consider why the CSOs have not been more proactive, and we recommend that donor policy should help partners to respond to the epidemic and enable them to remain effective. pp176-189
  • This article analyses the international humanitarian response to the earthquake in Jogjakarta, Indonesia in May 2006. It also compares it with a small but very successful local initiative. It identifies inherent weaknesses in the international system, and argues for the possibility of scaling up lessons learned from the local example. pp190-200
  • Development practice is informed by theories of change, but individuals and organisations may not make these explicit. Practitioners may be unaware of the extent to which strategic choices and debates are informed by disparate thinking about how history happens and the role of purposeful intervention for progressive social change. In the past few years, some Oxfam GB staff have been creating processes to debate their theories of change as part of an effort to improve practice. In this context, the authors introduce four sets of ideas about change, with a discussion of how these have been explored in two instances, and some of the challenges emerging from this process. Through explicitly debating theories of change, organisational decision-making processes can be better informed and strategic choices made more transparent. pp201-212
  • NGOs in Asian countries often experience fluctuations in funding because of the constantly shifting priorities of their international donors. Without domestic sources, Asian NGOs are forced to re-align their priorities with donor interests in order to compete for funding. In the case of advocacy NGOs, the resulting asymmetry in donor–grantee relations often leads to a crisis of legitimacy and deteriorating effectiveness for the NGO. Because of the political nature of advocacy work, these NGOs must maintain a reputation for independence and legitimacy if they are to be influential in the political process. This article analyses the impact of fluctuating international donor assistance to advocacy NGOs in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and offers recommendations for donors. While donors have spent significant resources building the capacity of advocacy NGOs in South-East Asia, funding trends usually undermine the effectiveness of their grantees long before funding is ended. pp213-222
  • This article undertakes a critical re-evaluation of a DFID-funded project in South Africa which ran between 1998 and 2001. The evaluation sought to test whether the development of community-led indicators would improve governance. Since the project ended, a series of papers have been published that are critical of such participatory methods, arguing particularly that they are apolitical and adopt a technocratic approach. In the light of these criticisms, this article re-assesses the DFID project, following on from the initial evaluation carried out by the author in 2001. Sobantu, a black township in Pietermaritzburg, was one of the original project sites. It was chosen as the subject of our research because the local implementing agency was a politically astute, well-connected institution that understood the political nature of the process required to develop the indicators. Although the project achieved some positive outcomes, the long-term commitment to the indicators has since been compromised. This was in large part due to the inability of community members to engage meaningfully with key municipal service providers. However, recent changes to the South African planning regime might provide opportunities for the indicators to become more useful again. pp223-234
  • This article investigates the interaction between the processes of building development theory and development practice, arguing that theory must start with practice – and should not be top–down, starting with the ‘outside gaze’ of a supposedly detached academic or policy maker. The questions posed point to critiques of mainstream development narratives and notions of innovation through the diffusion of new technologies. The authors suggest that the assumptions embedded in mainstream development processes lead to unequal access to global and local markets, and that when they are imposed from the outside without a real understanding of the context, the development project is bound to fail. Parameters for assessing and evaluating outcomes also need to be based upon a close understanding of context – and this often comes through active involvement within it and not through being ‘detached’ and outside it. The assumption that an outside gaze is ‘objective’ is based in an implicitly colonial discourse, while building theory by being involved in the practice produces better methodologies for action and development. pp235-244
  • As they move from responding to needs and demands to a more rights-based approach, some French NGOs are rethinking both their areas of work and their ways of working. ‘Empowerment’ has become a key concept in this changing context, although it is sometimes difficult to know how best to apply it and understand what really means in an NGO setting. This article shares some thinking on empowerment, analysing its ‘object’ (individuals, organisations, networks, or movements) and the ‘process’ through which it is realised. Drawing on the author’s own experience and on a brief literature review, it is illustrated by the examples of the international disability and US gay movements. pp245-257
  • The article explores knowledge and practices of family planning among the tribal population of south Gujarat. The authors examine the reasons for discontinuation and non-use of various modern contraceptive methods by tribals and draw contrasts with practices in the urban population. They consider the roles of women, family members, local leaders, and effective communication, along with NGOs and the private sector, and make recommendations for increasing access to and usage of various family-planning methods by the tribals. pp258-266
  • Traditional approaches to fighting poverty have yielded unsatisfactory results in some African countries, and have been positively damaging in others. Economic growth and social expenditure on the part of both national governments and international donors have been ineffective in some countries, while in others they have exacerbated poverty. The author considers that this is due to the absence of participatory governance. From a theoretical perspective, support for participatory governance stems from Amartya Sen’s approach to understanding poverty, which conceptualises poverty as a lack of capabilities, leading to social exclusion. The lack of such governance has led to the failure of traditional approaches in the fight against poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, the author proposes a tool for assessing the quality of governance, and its application in Cameroon. pp267-272
  • With a rapidly growing population and limited resources, accountability has taken on increased importance, especially in the area of public management. To assess the effectiveness of public spending on education in the Caribbean, this article compares performance in five Caribbean nations, looking at input indicators such as the teacher–pupil ratio, expenditure per pupil, the number of adequately trained teachers as a proportion of total teaching staff, and public commitment to education. It analyses their impact on output indicators, including performance in English and mathematics, the repetition rate, and survival rate to the final grade in school. The article concludes that the levels of efficiency in the development of human capital in the Caribbean are very uneven, and that serious challenges face Caribbean countries as they seek to maximise the returns on their investment in education. pp273-279
  • Compared with the divisive views of the past, integrative thinking has recently come to characterise the methodological debate on poverty. 'Qualitative vs quantitative' has given way to 'qual–quant'; 'cross-disciplinarity' has replaced 'economics vs anthropology'. This article attempts to review this change. It begins with a historical overview of the pure economic approach to poverty and its critique. The critique, both from within economics and from the participatory and anthropological disciplines, is examined, and recent trends are considered. The current ‘qual–quant’ approach is illustrated with examples, and the author concludes that the future may well see the emergence of a 'participatory qual–quant' approach. pp 280-288
  • Values are an important theme in discussions in international NGOs (INGOs), helping to create the conditions for solidarity among staff. But at the same time they are also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise. They are idealisations, but they must be discussed in the everyday context. Conflict is inevitable, but the exploration of the nature of this conflict in daily practice is the only way of ensuring that the discussion about values is an enlivening process. pp 5-16

  • Based on a two-year, multi-method study of ‘development’ in one small community in rural Manitoba, Canada, the article examines how the community and people’s reasons for living there have both changed and remained consistent since the beginning of the area’s settlement by Ukrainian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The community has much in common with marginalised areas of the global South, in terms of its treatment at the hands of those in the centre and those who promote ‘development’. The author argues that the concept of ‘place-making’ allows for both a greater understanding of the dynamics in the community and greater possibilities for building sustainable, liveable places, than does the concept or practice of ‘development’. pp 17-29
  • Only in English

  • This article is an attempt to examine one of the better-known failures in UK community development – the Barrowfield Project in Glasgow (1986–1996) – and to compare and contrast it with other attempts at community development, especially some associated with the work of Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and the legacy of Paulo Freire. We conclude that both Freire and Yunus make assumptions about the pre-existence of community which limit the potential impact of their ideas in an area such as Barrowfield, where anomie and apathy were rife. We further find that just as actions intended to be liberating may reinforce the dominant hegemony, the converse may on occasion also be true. In recent years the Barrowfield Project has risen from the ashes of its previous demise, and so the present work needs to be seen in that context. pp 30-39
  • For the purposes of accountability and uniformity, and as a way of giving insight into their intellectual capital regarding development practices, NGOs in Southern Africa are required by donor agencies to describe their intended activities in very clear, unambiguous terms. These requirements may include the expression of theoretical approaches, the development of logical frameworks, clear objectives, indicators for success, criteria for sustainable development, and relationships to government policies. However, the interface between reality and these planning measures and tools, most often completed without the input and contributions of the communities whom they are to serve/service, produces a much more messy, dynamic, and involved picture of the development process. None the less, the NGOs are still required to be accountable on the basis of their original proposal and planning. The author presents examples of this phenomenon and discusses the challenges facing an evaluator when dealing with competing principles of accountability, autonomy, and authenticity. pp 40-52
  • In 1993 the World Bank assisted the Ministry of Water and Irrigation of Jordan in updating a review of the water sector, and thus began the process of private sector participation (psp) in service provision to improve the efficiency of the water sector and wastewater services. In this article, the privatisation of water and wastewater services is examined from the perspectives of stakeholders (input) and consumers (output). The goal is to assess the changes that have been taking place to date in relation to the principles of good governance. The results from interviews with stakeholders and from consumer questionnaires show that the privatisation process has to date shown only a few signs of ‘good’ governance. Despite the range of stakeholders involved, the state remains responsible for designing a good-governance approach that is responsive to the concerns and interests of all stakeholders. pp53-65
  • How do we move from identifying ethical principles to enhancing development practice? How can donors and NGOs move beyond the reporting of technical outputs to explore less tangible aspects of their health projects: contributions to rebuilding trust, promoting social cohesion, and enhancing good governance at community level? This article considers these questions in relation to health and peace-building activities in conflicted settings. It describes difficulties facing practitioners and donors seeking to undertake health and peace work, in particular focusing on the lack of appropriate tools for screening, monitoring, and evaluating projects. It critiques the logical framework, a tool commonly used in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and considers it alongside a new tool, the Health and Peace Building Filter, which has been designed to reflect on health programming in fragile or conflicted settings. The authors argue that such tools can help to move us beyond focusing on inputs and outputs to examining processes, relationships, and the indirect consequences of aid programmes. pp 66-81
  • The enthusiasm for civil society that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democratic regimes has been replaced in recent years by a backlash against civil society on many levels and fronts. This has particularly intensified since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror. This article examines the causes of this backlash within the context of the ‘Long War on Terror’, describes the overt and implicit manifestations of the backlash, and reflects upon the implications for the future. It considers how the growing prominence of concerns about security and the concomitant expansion of counter-terrorist measures across the world threaten the spaces for civil society to flourish and act. It argues that while the manifestations of the backlash, such as the crackdown on NGOs in Russia and the taming of NGOs by bilateral and multilateral agencies, may appear to be disparate, unconnected phenomena, on closer inspection it is clear that they are intricately intertwined. pp 82-93
  • Recent interest in migrant remittances as a development resource calls attention to a deeper issue: the relationship between migration and development. Remittances may be a significant source of economic inflows to poor countries and regions, but their actual development impact (positive or negative) is tied to the migration processes that generate them. Attention to migration in turn creates an opportunity to think about the broader context of development policy and practice, and to re-think the boundaries that we put around our work. pp 94-99
  • In early 2007, the Indonesian government decided to withhold its samples of the avian influenza (‘bird flu’) virus from WHO’s collaborating centres, pending a new global mechanism for virus sharing which would provide better terms for developing countries. The 60th World Health Assembly held in May 2007 subsequently resolved to establish an international stockpile of avian influenza vaccines, and to formulate mechanisms for equitable access to these vaccines. The article asks whether there are there analogous opportunities for study volunteers or donors of biological materials to exercise corresponding leverage to advance health equity. pp 100-109
  • News about Norway’s plans to establish a ‘doomsday vault’ for seeds in the permafrost of the Artic archipelago of Svalbard as a back-up for conventional gene banks reached the world press in 2006. The idea of a Global Seed Vault, which today is considered a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for seeds, was previously regarded with suspicion and considered to be unrealistic. In 1989/90 the Norwegian government offered to construct an international depository for seeds in permafrost, but the initiative was sidelined in the agitated debates between developed and developing countries over access to and control of plant genetic resources. The realisation of the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2004) resolved some of the most difficult issues and made possible the launching of a new Norwegian initiative to safeguard some of the world’s most important plant genetic resources for the future. pp 110-116
  • Both national and international policy-making institutions have acknowledged the contribution of NGOs in alleviating poverty, through empowering the poor and continuing to support their endeavours. In Bangladesh NGOs are working at national and local levels, but very few are working with the poorest and most vulnerable groups who live in the riverine and coastal areas, known as the char lands. These areas are unlike other parts of the country in terms of their physical, economic, and social structures, and they require a different approach in order to address the unique set of problems facing those who live there. Using experimental and innovative programmes, a small number of local NGOs have begun to make an impact in an area where government interventions and success are rare. pp 117-124
  • Patronato de Nutrición introduced a range of 18 optional agricultural technologies in the indigenous community of Chalite, Panama. Three of the technologies were adopted by more than half of the farmers surveyed, while an additional eight technologies were adopted by between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of the farmers. Farmers were more likely to adopt technologies associated with familiar crops, previously promoted by other groups, or requiring limited labour or financial resources. The article shows how development groups can quickly reduce the number of technologies promoted in order to deliver services more effectively. pp 125-130
  • This article discusses two organisations currently providing voluntary private health insurance in Uganda and considers their contributions to bridging the gap in provision in the country’s public health sector. pp 131-135
  • Only in English
  • This introduction presents the core concepts that shape this special issue on the impact of violence and the processes of development in Central and South America. The understanding of development is considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social and political aspects. With a similarly expansive scope, forms of violence are addressed that range from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more subtle aggression of racialised abuse or the pressures on community-centred production from dominant market forces. In these contexts, violence, economic initiatives, and political allegiances form unintended and often dangerous networks of consequence for development matters. All the articles in this volume exemplify further the spatial environments of violence and diverse ‘landscapes of fear’ that shape our existence, and help to define our actions, territories, and understanding of what happens around us. pp 713-724
  • From an analysis of recent empirical research in the Dominican Republic, this article addresses the ways in which racism underpins elements of governance and explores organisational and individual responses to racialised discrimination initiated by the state. The context is timely, given the steady rise in reported racist and violent attacks against people presumed to be of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic over the past five years. The government has intensified formal military and police round-ups of migrants and settlers suspected to be of Haitian origin, and this article assesses the group and individual responses to these state-led actions, analysing formal and informal interventions, their evolution, maintenance, and impact. pp 725-738
  • Although it is increasingly recognised that violence, crime, and associated fear are challenging democratic governance in Latin America, less attention has been paid to the ways in which state responses to crime contribute to the problem. By analysing El Salvador as a case study, this article addresses three key interconnected issues in this debate. First, it explores the dynamic of violence. It then locates youth gangs as violent actors within this context. Finally, it addresses the state response to the growing phenomenon of youth gangs. It is argued that current strategies, dubbed Mano Dura – Iron Fist – employed by the Salvadoran government serve to reveal the fragility of the democratic project, exposing the underside of authoritarianism that remains key to Salvadoran political life in the transitional process from civil war to peace. pp 739-751
  • A progressive piece of legislation in 1993 granted collective land rights to Colombia’s black communities living in the rural areas of the Pacific coast region. This measure aimed partly to support sustainable development strategies in the region through territorial empowering of local communities. Yet 14 years later, the escalation of the country’s internal conflict into the Pacific region has created unprecedented levels of forced displacement among rural black communities. Once referred to as a ‘peace haven’, the Colombian Pacific coast is now characterised by new spaces of violence and terror, imposed by warring guerrilla and paramilitary groups, as well as the armed forces. This article examines the nature of the externally induced violence in the region and shows how specific economic interests, in particular in the African Palm sector, are colluding with illegal groups that are used to spread fear and terror among local residents, to make them comply with the requirements of these economic actors. pp752-764
  • While everyday forms of resistance are not new in Argentina, the spontaneity that characterised the insurrection on 19 and 20 December 2001 was unprecedented. It showed how the absence of leadership, co-ordination, and promise might open the doors to powerful forms of mobilisation and radical practices in direct democracy. The author suggests that in challenging capitalism and the social paradigms that it generates, the values and practices of counter-power, self-affirmation, collectivity, and multiplicity can all play a vital role in the success and survival of radical democracy. The article is largely inspired by the works of Colectivo Situaciones, an autonomous research collective in Buenos Aires and draws on the example of the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD) Solano. This movement of unemployed workers struggles against capitalist and state violence by practising a constantly renewed spiral of rebellion and creativity. The article considers their successes, challenges, and limitations in developing radical democratic thought and practice from the perspective of a participant observer. pp 765-774
  • The article considers international advocacy concerning the exploitation of gas reserves in an area inhabited by an isolated indigenous group in Peru, the Machigengua. Considerable international advocacy activity was centred mainly in Washington, DC. Poor communication between those directly affected and international environmental NGOs illustrated very different and not always compatible agendas. The article concludes that this failure to adapt the international lobby both to the views of the indigenous population and to political realities in Peru severely weakened the impact of the international advocacy work. pp 775-783
  • Translation raises ethical and epistemological dilemmas inherent in cross-cultural research. The process of communicating research participants’ words in a different language and context may impose another conceptual scheme on their thoughts. This may reinforce the hegemonic terms that Development Studies should seek to challenge. The article explores the idea that a reflexive approach to translation can not only help to overcome the difficulties involved in cross-cultural research, but also be a tool with which to deconstruct hegemonic theory. It addresses the epistemological and political problems in translation, techniques of translation, and the impact of translation on the author’s own research, which is used to illustrate some of the ways in which translation can support deconstruction and highlight the importance of building a framework for talking with rather than for research participants. pp 784-790
  • National frontiers with ecosystems experiencing rapid changes pose difficult challenges for scientific contributions to democratic processes for environmental governance. We describe an innovative outreach model, the ‘knowledge exchange train’, which combines educational outreach with capacity-building mechanisms to broaden public participation in planning for sustainable development. This involved an international team of scientists and practitioners from conservation and development organisations who travelled across a tri-national frontier area of the south-western Amazon to share recent findings with local leaders and stakeholder constituencies of several municipalities. The knowledge exchange train quickly increased public awareness in many places and provided a means of broadening participation in planning and governance. This model supports planning for sustainable development and can be adapted to other geographic contexts and topics. pp 791-799
  • Although the emphasis in current thinking about work with street children has changed from aid-dependency towards youth protagonism, many organisations ignore the role of the children’s families in their interventions. In so doing, they reproduce obsolete welfare traditions and also violate rights guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and national legislation. This article illustrates the importance of child–family ties for both children and families, and argues that interventions that lack the involvement of parents and families serve to reproduce images of failed families and inadequate mothers. The author presents an alternative approach from Brazil which respects the rights and needs of children and families through family empowerment. pp 800-806
  • This review essay focuses on the most crucial points in the evolution of Celso Furtado’s contribution to economic and political thought in relation to development, in the hope that a wider readership will appreciate the importance of his ideas to Latin America’s ‘development’ during the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps even see value in reviving them. It opens with a description of the background to the rise of development economics, highlighting aspects of the discipline that this remarkable Brazilian economist confronted and transformed. This is followed by a description of his period as a development theorist or ‘reform monger’ (Hirschman 1963) and his subsequent exile (1964–1975). The article concludes with a discussion of some of the work produced on his return to Brazil. pp 807-819
  • Printable Buzzwords Lotto Game Promotion In English only
  • In English only
  • Despite its widespread usage, the meaning of the term ‘development’ remains vague, tending to refer to a set of beliefs and assumptions about the nature of social progress rather than to anything more precise. After presenting a brief history of the term, the author argues that not only will development fail to address poverty or to narrow the gap between rich and poor, but in fact it both widens and deepens this division and ultimately creates poverty, as natural resources and human beings alike are increasingly harnessed to the pursuit of consumption and profit. The survival of the planet will depend upon abandoning the deep-rooted belief that economic growth can deliver social justice, the rational use of environment, or human well-being, and embracing the notion that there would be a better life for all if we move beyond ‘development’.
  • A word analysis of six UK government White Paper policy statements on aid (selected between 1960 and 2006) compares the top 20 words and key word pairs used in each document. Characteristic sentences are composed of the top 20s to represent the spirit of each paper. Results illuminate changes in the content of White Papers on aid, and point to trends in the history of the UK’s approach to international development. A characteristic sentence to illustrate the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is contrasted with a sentence of words that did not appear in that document. Readers are invited and challenged to identify words they would like to be used and acted on more in development.

  • The idea of poverty reduction naturally attracts all kinds of angels – in NGOs, government departments and international financial institutions – but their ministrations are frustrated by many obstacles. These include the narrow and static way in which economists define the poor; the remoteness of the poor, their social invisibility and elusiveness to most forms of targeting; and the absence of political will to engage in poverty-reduction policies. The angelic response to these obstacles has been to trumpet a global campaign of poverty reduction with millennial goals, international aid targets, and poverty-reduction strategy papers. It would be better to re-discover the language of risk, vulnerability, and social insurance. The message of the association between risk and reward, and the collective need for social mechanisms that will allow individuals to bear increased risk without exposure to irreversible damage, is the one that really needs to be delivered.
  • The term ‘social protection’ has been widely used around the world and is often treated as synonymous with ‘social security’, which is misleading. This article considers the numerous terms that have become part of the language of social protection, indicating that the image conveyed by the term is rather different from what is meant by it.
  • The term ‘globalisation’ is widely used to describe a variety of economic, cultural, social, and political changes that have shaped the world over the past 50-odd years. Because it is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalisation has been attributed with a wide range of powers and effects. Its proponents claim that it is both ‘natural’ and an inevitable outcome of technological progress, and creates positive economic and political convergences. Critics argue that globalisation is hegemonic and antagonistic to local and national economies. This article argues that globalisation is a form of capitalist expansion that entails the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. Although economic in its structure, globalisation is equally a political phenomenon, shaped by negotiations and interactions between institutions of transnational capital, nation states, and international institutions. Its main driving forces are institutions of global capitalism – especially transnational corporations – but it also needs the firm hand of states to create enabling environments for it to take root. Globalisation is always accompanied by liberal democracy, which facilitates the establishment of a neo-liberal state and policies that permit globalisation to flourish. The article discusses the relationship between globalisation and development and points out that some of the most common assumptions promoted by its proponents are contradictory to the reality of globalisation; and that globalisation is resisted by over half of the globe’s population because it is not capable of delivering on its promises of economic well being and progress for all.
  • This article questions the growing use of the term ‘faith-based’ in development policy and practice. It is argued that it homogenises people in minority migrant and developing-country contexts and excludes many who are working for human rights and social justice from secular perspectives, thus providing an unsound analytical base for policy. Against the background of the ‘war on terror’, the author also examines the differences in US and British development policy arising out of the term ‘faith-based’.
  • Participation was originally conceived as part of a counter-hegemonic approach to radical social transformation and, as such, represented a challenge to the status quo. Paradoxically, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ‘participation’ gained legitimacy within the institutional development world to the extent of achieving buzzword status. The precise manipulations required to convert a radical proposal into something that could serve the neo-liberal world order led to participation’s political decapitation. Reduced to a series of methodological packages and techniques, participation would slowly lose its philosophical and ideological meaning. In order to make the approach and methodology serve counter-hegemonic process of grassroots resistance and transformation, these meanings desperately need to be recovered. This calls for participation to be re-articulated within broader processes of social and political struggle in order to facilitate the recovery of social transformation in the world of twenty-first century capitalism.
  • This article discusses the different meanings that citizenship has assumed in Latin America in the past few decades. Its main argument is that, in the perverse confluence between neo-liberal and democratic participatory projects, the common reference to citizenship, used by different political actors, projects an apparent homogeneity, obscuring differences and diluting the conflict between those projects.
  • This article traces the centuries-long evolution of the concept and practice of empowerment, its adoption by radical social movements, especially women’s movements from the 1970s onwards, and its conversion, by the late 1990s, into a buzzword. Situating the analysis in the context of women’s empowerment interventions in India, the article describes the dynamic of the depoliticisation and subversion of a process that challenged the deepest structures of social power. The ‘downsizing’ and constriction of the concept within state policy, the de-funding of genuine empowerment strategies on the ground, and the substitution of microfinance and political quotas for empowerment are examined and analysed.
  • In parallel with, and as complement to, globalisation, ‘social capital’ has enjoyed a meteoric rise across the social sciences over the last two decades. Not surprisingly, it has been particularly prominent across development studies, not least through heavy promotion by the World Bank. As a concept, though, as has been argued persistently by a minority critical literature, social capital is fundamentally flawed. Although capable of addressing almost anything designated as social, it has tended to neglect the state, class, power, and conflict. As a buzzword, it has heavily constrained the currently progressive departure from the extremes of neo-liberalism and post-modernism at a time of extremely aggressive assault by economics imperialism. Social capital should not be ignored but contested – and rejected.
  • This article is based on interviews with several staff members of NGOs located in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, regarding partnerships between them and their funding sources, such as foundations or agencies of the North that do or support development work in the South. The motive behind the interviews was an interest in the word ‘partnerships’, in particular strategic ones. Do partnerships exist now and, if they do, what does it mean for the NGOs to have a partnership with a funding source? The general conclusion was that strategic partnerships have indeed existed in the past, and may again emerge in the future, but that currently they exist only sporadically, given the distinct ways of viewing and carrying out development work within NGOs on the one hand, and foundations or agencies on the other.
  • This article reflects on the vocabulary commonly used within development organisations to communicate about ‘gender and development’. It argues that the relevant terminology, though frequently used, remains problematic. Some terms are almost entirely absent, while others are used loosely and inappropriately – with the subtleties of carefully developed and much-debated concepts often lost. Terms such as ‘empowerment’, ‘gender’, and ‘gender mainstreaming’ which originated in feminist thinking and activism have lost their moorings and become depoliticised. Despite these problems, there are indications that debates and language may be taking a more radical turn with the acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the practices of gender mainstreaming, the deepening of interest in the notion of empowerment, and the explicit adoption of a human-rights language.
  • As a consummately effective ‘boundary term’, able to link disparate groups on the basis of a broad common agenda, ‘sustainability’ has moved a long way from its technical association with forest management in Germany in the eighteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s it defined – for a particular historical moment – a key debate of global importance, bringing with it a coalition of actors – across governments, civic groups, academia and business – in perhaps an unparalleled fashion. That they did not agree with everything (or even often know anything of the technical definitions of the term) was not the point. The boundary work done in the name of sustainability created an important momentum for innovation in ideas, political mobilisation, and policy change, particularly in connection with the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio in 1992. All this of course did not result in everything that the advocates at the centre of such networks had envisaged, and today the debate has moved on, with different priority issues, and new actors and networks. But, the author argues, this shift does not undermine the power of sustainability as a buzzword: as a continuingly powerful and influential meeting point of ideas and politics.
  • This article offers an intellectual genealogy of how the concept of human rights has entered the development discourse—from the formulation of a ‘right to development’ to the rhetorical incorporation of rights within prevailing discourse, to the articulation of a ‘rights-based approach’ to development. It concludes with some propositions about the important role that a focus on rights might play in the practice of international development.
  • The idea of civil society has proved very elusive, escaping conceptual grasps and evading sure-footed negotiation of the concept itself. Resurrected in a very definite historical setting, that of authoritarian states, the concept of civil society came to signify a set of social and political practices that sought to engage with state power. The close connection with the re-emergence of the concept and the collapse of dictatorial states made civil society attractive to a variety of political agents pursuing different agendas: expanding the market at the expense of the state, transiting from mass politics to single-issue and localised campaigns, undermining confidence in accepted modes of representation such as political parties, and in general shrinking the domain of the state and that of accepted mode of politics. That the concept of civil society could suit such a variety of different political projects is cause for some alarm, for it might well mean that civil society has come to mean everything to everyone remotely interested in it.
  • Public and people-centred advocacy are shaped by the political culture, social systems, and constitutional framework of the country in which they are practised. It is the practice of advocacy that determines the theory, and not vice versa. If advocacy is not rooted in grassroots realities and is practised only at the macro level, the voice of the marginalised is increasingly likely to be appropriated by professional elites. However, the very credibility of advocacy practitioners depends on their relationship with mass-based movements and grassroots perceptions of what constitutes desirable social change.
  • The associations that the term 'NGO' has acquired in development discourse need to be critically analysed in relation to practice on the ground. Drawing on an analysis of the rise of NGOs in Palestine, the author suggests that the development of the NGO movement served to demobilise Palestinian civil society in a phase of national struggle. Through professionalisation and projectisation brought about by donor-funded attempts to promote 'civil society', a process of NGOisation has taken place. The progressive de-politicisation of the women’s movement that NGOisation has brought about has created a vacuum that has been increasingly filled by the militancy of the Islamic Movement (Hamas). As this case shows, 'NGOs' may be a development buzzword, but they are no magic bullet. Rather than taking for granted the positive, democratising effects of the growth and spread of NGOs as if they represented 'civil society' itself, this article contends, a more critical approach is needed, one that takes greater account of the politics of specific contexts and of the dynamics of institutionalisation.
  • This article focuses on the role that development NGOs play in capacity building, arguing that many conventional NGO practices are ultimately about retaining power, rather than empowering their partners. This leads to tunnel vision and to upward rather than downward or horizontal accountability, based on the assumption that the transfer of resources is a one-way process. At worst, this undermines rather than strengthens the capacities of the organisations that NGOs are attempting to assist. Sharing responsibilities and risks, mutual accountability, and committing to the long term rather than to short-term projects are more likely to create partnerships that can withstand vicissitudes and contribute to lasting change.
  • Harmonisation of donor efforts is one of the current buzzwords in the world of official aid. However, while it is an attractive idea in theory, as long as donors do not recognise and address the operations of power in the aid relationship, harmonisation is likely to be counterproductive in promoting locally initiated responses to development challenges.
  • The term ‘country ownership’ refers to a property of the conditionality attached to programmes, processes, plans, or strategies involving both a ‘domestic’ party (generally a nation state) and a foreign party (generally the IMF, the World Bank, the Regional Development Banks, and other multilateral and bilateral institutions). Under what circumstances and how can the concept of country ownership be relevant to a country with a myriad heterogeneous and often conflicting views and interests? Or to a country whose government’s representational legitimacy or democratic credentials are in question? The author argues that the term has been abused to such an extent that it is at best unhelpful and at worst pernicious: a term whose time has gone.
  • In this brief critique of the idea of ‘best practice’, the author argues that good practice is not replicable or uniform; it cannot be reduced to its component parts for replication elsewhere. Furthermore, the criteria for what constitutes ‘best practice’ are at best unscientific and tend to discourage diversity and local experimentation.
  • The concept of peacebuilding is a buzzword of the development policy and practice mainstream. The recent introduction of managerial tools and the focus on measuring the ‘effectiveness’ of peacebuilding have marginalised and depoliticised critical questions about the causes of violent conflict, and have replaced them with comforting notions for donors that peace can be built and measured without challenging Western understanding of economy, governance, and social aspirations of people.
  • The concepts of transparency and accountability are closely linked: transparency is supposed to generate accountability. This article questions this widely held assumption. Transparency mobilises the power of shame, yet the shameless may not be vulnerable to public exposure. Truth often fails to lead to justice. After exploring different definitions and dimensions of the two ideas, the more relevant question turns out to be: what kinds of transparency lead to what kinds of accountability, and under what conditions? The article concludes by proposing that the concept can be unpacked in terms of two distinct variants. Transparency can be either ‘clear’ or ‘opaque’, while accountability can be either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’.
  • This article engages with the ways in which corruption has taken centre stage in much development policy making and rhetoric. It argues that there is a need to destablilise ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about what corruption is and how it operates. This means generating an understanding of how meanings of corruption vary, and how this variation is determined by the social characteristics of those engaged in corruption talk. It also means examination of how discourses of corruption and anti-corruption are translated from international to national and local stages – from the anti-corruption ‘establishment’ to the realities of bureaucratic encounters in diverse contexts.
  • The concept of good governance originated among African scholars in relation to state–society relations in Africa, expressing the concern that these be developmental, democratic, and socially inclusive. The term has since been taken up by the international development business – in particular the World Bank – and used by them as a new label for aid conditionality, in particular structural adjustment in all its various manifestations.
  • This article examines the links between development and ‘security’, situating these concepts within their philosophical and political contexts, particularly in relation to contemporary wars, including the ‘war on terror’, and the so-called ‘securitisation’ of development. The security of states does not necessarily ensure the security of their citizens, and the very concept of security is both complex and contested. The author provides a succinct summary of various interpretations of security – of states, collectivities, and individuals – showing how each is double edged and ambivalent.
  • Since the 1990s, states that lack the capacity to discharge their normal functions and drive forward development have been referred to as ‘fragile states’. This article focuses on Africa, which not only has the largest concentration of prototypical fragile states, but has been the focus of attention for scholars, international development agencies, and practitioners. The author reviews competing analyses of the post-colonial African state and concludes that its characteristics of weak institutions, poverty, social inequalities, corruption, civil strife, armed conflicts, and civil war are not original conditions, but are rooted in specific historical contexts. It is essential to understand both the external and internal factors of fragility if such states are to get the assistance and empowerment they need – not only for the benefit of their impoverished citizens, but also for the sake of global peace, prosperity, and security. Ultimately, it is the citizens of the countries concerned who are responsible for determining when states are no longer fragile – not ‘benevolent’ donors and the international community, whose prime motivation for interventions supposedly to strengthen the state is to ensure that fragile states find their ‘rightful’ places in the hegemonic global order.
  • This article looks at ‘knowledge management’, using a case study of the World Bank’s research department, located in the Bank’s Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC). Despite the Bank's presentation of its research arm as conducting 'rigorous and objective’ work, the author finds that the Bank’s ‘knowledge management’ involves research that has tended to reinforce the dominant neo-liberal globalisation policy agenda. The article examines some of the mechanisms by which the Bank's research department comes to play a central role in what Robert Wade has termed 'paradigm maintenance', including incentives in hiring, promotion, and publishing, as well as selective enforcement of rules, discouragement of dissonant views, and manipulation of data. The author's analysis is based both on in-depth interviews with current and former World Bank professionals and on examination of the relevant literature.
  • This article presents some of the key findings of the Southern African Reconciliation Project (SARP). The SARP was a collaborative research project involving five Southern African NGOs in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It examined how the concept of reconciliation was understood in political and community contexts in Southern Africa and investigated the ways in which national government policies and civil-society participation in reconciliation initiatives have opened up and/or foreclosed on opportunities for reconciliation, transitional justice, and the promotion of a culture of human rights. The author summarises the historical context of reconciliation in Southern Africa, outlines the reconciliation initiatives in each country, and identifies emerging debates around and principles of reconciliation that have surfaced in the work of civil-society organisations (CSOs) in the region.
  • In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the concept of civil society in development and governance circles. Broadly understood as the space in society where collective citizen action takes place, civil society has, in fact, proved an extremely difficult concept to define and operationalise. This article proposes a framework and methodology for measuring and comparing the state of different civil societies around the world. It concludes with a discussion of outstanding questions and challenges, drawing on preliminary insights from current efforts to apply the approach in more than 50 countries.
  • In English only
  • This article proposes a theoretical framework, the Capacity-building Paradox, which defines individual relationship work as the basis for capacity building. It explains why capacity building has hitherto been largely unsuccessful. ‘Relationship work’ is central to the functions of practitioners. It consists of both ‘dependent work’ and ‘friendship work’, the latter synonymous with capacity building. To do relationship work, practitioners require power, in order to overcome environmental obstacles. Financial resources emerge as the predominant environmental influence, often prompting practitioners to use dependent work rather than friendship work. This results in a reduction in capacity and does not contribute to sustainable development. Most of the current literature provides organisational and institutional tools for capacity building. While there is an increasing recognition of the centrality of personal relationships in this work, there is as yet no theoretical framework within which to locate it. The article presents original research into people’s experiences of capacity-building work in a development context and proposes a conceptual model that may have important implications for capacity-building practice.
  • This article presents field-based insights into the application of the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique as a method to monitor social change resulting from a development intervention. Documentation of this innovative qualitative monitoring technique is slowly growing, but is mostly limited to grey literature. In particular, there is a lack of rigorous investigation to assess the complexities and challenges of applying the technique with integrity in the development context. The authors employ a conceptual model of monitoring and evaluation practicalities (the ‘M&E Data Cycle’) for a systematic examination of the challenges to, and key components of, successful application of the MSC technique. They provide a detailed analysis of how MSC was employed in two projects in Laos, extracting the lessons learned and insights generated. This practice-based information can inform future deployment of the MSC technique and contribute to its development.
  • This article draws preliminary lessons from the experience of engaging village elites in support of a BRAC programme for ultra-poor women in rural Bangladesh. It describes the origins, aims, and operation of this programme, which provides comprehensive livelihood support and productive assets to the extreme poor. Based on field research in the rural north-west, the article examines the conditions under which elites can support interventions for the ultra-poor, and the risks and benefits of such engagement. It describes the impact of committees mandated to support ultra-poor programme participants, and attempts to understand the somewhat paradoxical success of this intervention. Conclusions and lessons from the experience involve revisiting assumptions that dominate scholarship and programmes relating to the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.
  • Markets and businesses are undergoing major changes as globalisation deepens. Pressure from diverse social groups, both environmental and economic, is changing the operating environment. Many corporations are interested in devising social-responsibility strategies, both as a response to outside pressures and in their own interests. Against this background, this article considers the case of Inditex, a company based in Galicia, and the ‘harassment’ to which it was subjected by Setem, the Spanish chapter of the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC). Reviewing Setem’s claims leads to a better understanding of the repercussions for social systems that are now increasingly informed by external actors. The authors argue that both corporations and non-government organisations must account for the social impact of their activities.
  • Cambodia has embarked on a process of decentralisation and democratisation, including the establishment of elected Commune Councils in early 2002. Given the lack of a tradition of encouraging civic participation in public affairs, however, there was initially little general awareness of how to engage with these Councils. The authors describe a project supported by the Ministry of Rural Development and the German bilateral agency, GTZ, and undertaken with local no-government organisations, to identify and support active community groups and improve their capacity to interact with the Commune Councils, while at the same time seeking ways for the Commune Councils to support the different groups.
  • Rice banks are increasingly used in South-East Asia as a means of addressing seasonal food crises facing poor communities. Despite general agreement about the effectiveness of community-managed rice banks in improving food security, there has been almost no research into their effectiveness in reaching the poorest, or the prospects of sustainability linked to regular repayments of rice. Concern Laos sought to answer these questions through community mobilisation, forming rules and regulations to encourage the participation of the poorest, developing simple tools and procedures in line with existing community capacity, and building greater community capacity. Other challenges remain, such as changing the prevailing ‘relief’ mentality, ensuring women’s participation, and establishing regular savings schemes, in order to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of the rice banks.
  • This article describes Learning Platforms, a structured effort by the Dutch-based agency SNV to encourage its expert advisers to engage in reading and analysing academic research related to the context in which they work, and to undertake research of their own. Although the practitioners’ ability to apply their research to their daily practice, and the organisation’s ability to absorb the findings of the research as part of its ways of working, have been partial or limited, the approach has the potential to bring academic and practice-based endeavour together in ways that are mutually beneficial.
  • Results-based management (RBM) is well entrenched as a management tool for international development practice. Yet after a decade of its use, many development practitioners view RBM in a negative light, considering it to be a donor requirement that diverts time, energy, and resources away from actually doing development work. This article provides some broad reflections on RBM from a distinctive vantage point: the perspective of the project (or programme) evaluator. The article reflects on challenges associated with RBM and draws from these reflections a number of suggested strategies to improve its use. It concludes that development practitioners need to be more aggressive in implementing RBM.
  • The article identifies challenges and opportunities for the Ugandan robusta coffee industry in the context of the global coffee crisis. It presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of development strategies through which Uganda might promote its largest export commodity. It is suggested that Uganda would benefit from moderately increasing robusta production, while a further decline in output could undermine its current price premium in the market. There may also be important benefits associated with increasing the value of Ugandan robusta through improvements in quality.

  • Constrained largely by lack of resources – technical, financial, legal, and/or administrative – governments in developing countries often create multi-layered management structures to regulate and monitor protected resources. Such structures are created when non-government organisations are given authority to monitor and/or manage certain aspects of a protected natural or indigenous resource. Other aspects, often regulatory, remain under the management of government. Using case studies from Belize and Malaysia, the research reported here suggests that the multi-layered management structures created between NGOs and governments in developing countries often encourage chaotic monitoring, reactive policies, and conflicts over jurisdiction as well as a dependency on the technical, financial, and/or legal resources of NGOs.
  • This article is based on research that explored and analysed the potential role of diasporas in development aid in the Netherlands. The research adopted the hypothesis that development agencies could benefit from the knowledge, skills, and views of diasporas as ‘agents of development’ and thereby make aid more effective and sustainable. Data were derived from semi-structured interviews with representatives of diasporas residing in the Netherlands; Dutch NGOs selected by the Dutch government for their capacity-building programmes; official donors, namely the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken); and international organisations, such as the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Secondary data were derived from a literature review.
  • In English only
  • This article describes the exploratory and preparatory phase of a research project designed to use cooperative enquiry as a method for transformative and participatory action research into relations between donors and recipients in two developing countries, Bolivia and Bangladesh. It describes the origins of our idea, the conceptual challenges that we faced in seeking funding, and what we learnt from this first phase. We analyse why the researchers, as well as the potential subjects of the research, were uncomfortable with the proposed methodology, including the challenges arising from our own positions and the highly sensitive nature of the topic. We explain why we decided to abandon the project and reach some tentative conclusions concerning the options for participatory action learning and research in development practice.
  • Overcoming challenges to ecosystem health calls for breaking down disciplinary and professional barriers. Through reflection on a research and development project to address pesticide-related concerns in northern Ecuador, this paper presents challenges encountered and accommodations made, ranging from staff recruitment, through baseline assessments, community education activities, to mobilising for policy change. In so doing, it exposes underlying problems of paradigm and process inherent in bringing researchers and development practitioners together as well as the problematic role of advocacy that is associated with joint agriculture and health, research and development initiatives.
  • Natural chewing gum or chicle represents just 3.5 per cent of the total chewing-gum market, which is dominated by synthetic chewing gum made from hydrocarbons. However, recent interest in sustainable livelihood strategies has opened up opportunities for enlarging chicle commercialisation for what is still a small, niche market. The production of chicle can serve to strengthen forest conservation, and provide regular employment to those dependent on forest products, as part of a range of sustainable forest activities. However, the production and marketing of natural chewing gum has faced several serious problems: producers in Mexico have been organised in ways that enabled them to be exploited both by intermediaries and state institutions, and the processes of certification for organics and fair trade are unwieldy and expensive. This paper suggests a number of ways of addressing these problems.
  • Between 1994 and 2003, the TRIPS (Trade-Related Intellectual Property) Agreement of the WTO was refined to allow for flexibilities in the use of compulsory licences to import and export ‘generic’ varieties of pharmaceutical products, including ARV drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. After summarising this process, and assessing its implications in practice for developing countries, the paper briefly places the current regime in a longer-term context of the institutional protection of patents in Britain and Europe dating from the nineteenth century. It traces how that that pattern, which benefits major patent holders, continues to be present in TRIPS. The paper goes on to demonstrate the continuity of corporate influence over the state as expressed in the ‘TRIPS-plus’ conditions, which are appearing in bilateral free-trade agreements between the USA and either individual developing countries or regional groupings. This array of what amount to institutional obstacles to the sustained availability of cheap drugs, at present and in the future, presents serious problems for future operations of the supply chain for many imported medicines and, in the case of HIV/AIDS, with negative implications for the long-term clinical effectiveness of the most widely used drugs.
  • The paper reviews current methodologies for the design of development projects and identifies foundational reasons for conflict between design approaches and participatory methods. A number of alternative approaches to the design of interventions in social systems are examined, and the potential application of some of these new ideas within a visioning process that is based on communicative rationality is explored. We conclude that there are many problems to be overcome before describing a complete design methodology that moves away from the objectivist basis of existing design systems, and that the new approach will need to address power relationships and the consequent and interrelated problems of accountability and trust.
  • The accountability of international development NGOs (INGOs) has attracted a great deal of interest from academics and development practitioners. INGO accountability falls into two categories: practical accountability (for the use of inputs, the way activities are performed, and for outputs) and strategic accountability for how INGOs are performing in relation to their mission. This paper presents a conceptual framework for exploring INGO accountability. It is based on information collected through a literature review and semi-structured interviews with representatives from 20 UK-based INGOs. The research found that INGOs tend to use a number of quality-assurance mechanisms to achieve ‘practical’ accountability. However, it is suggested that this kind of accountability will not necessarily enable INGOs to achieve their missions to alleviate poverty and eliminate injustice. Furthermore, the predominant use of practical accountability has led to a number of gaps in INGO accountability. It is suggested that, like the term participation before it, accountability has been co-opted for its instrumental benefits to INGO project performance and management. It is argued that if INGOs are to achieve their missions, this will require more ‘strategic’ forms of accountability geared towards fundamentally changing those social, economic, and political structures that promote poverty.
  • Andries Du Toit (2004) argues that the concept of social exclusion has limited use in the field of development studies since chronic poverty is often the result of incorporation on particularly disadvantageous terms (adverse incorporation) rather than any process of exclusion. Du Toit therefore calls for going beyond seeing ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in binary terms and looking more closely at how different kinds of power are formed and maintained. This papers argues that thinking about social exclusion has already moved beyond a simple included /excluded dichotomy, and that use of Sen’s analytical framework assists researchers to tease out the complex, interconnected factors underlying chronic poverty, such as that experienced by agricultural workers in South Africa’s Western Cape district of Ceres.
  • In this brief Viewpoint, the author argues that the common understanding of average life expectancy in any given country is an inappropriate measure in relation to development, since among AIDS-affected populations it fails to differentiate between significantly different life-spans depending on whether or not a person contracts the disease.
  • International networks for social change are growing in number and influence. While they need to be able to assess the extent to which they achieve their purpose and determine ways in which to be more effective, conventional evaluation methods are not designed for such complex organisational forms, or for the diverse kinds of activity to which they are characteristically dedicated. Building on an earlier version of the paper, the authors present a set of principles and participatory approaches that are more appropriate to the task of evaluating such networks.
  • This article discusses the role of animals in small-scale crop/animal systems in Asia. It examines how the animals are generally multipurpose, rather than single or dual purpose, with security also being an important element. Farmers can be stimulated to produce more meat and milk when other forms of security such as banks are considered equally reliable. Multiculture is the predominant system of plant production in the region with leguminous crops complementing non-leguminous crops. This also has benefits for soils. Multiculture systems are labour intensive, but in a context in which labour is not a problem, labour-saving devices provide no solution. Animals in agroforestry are discussed in detail, with an emphasis placed on animals grazing under coconut and oil-palm plantations. Asian animal scientists should spend more time exploring the roles of multiculture and animals in agroforestry.
  • AIDS-related morbidity and mortality affects not only individuals and their families, but is rapidly undermining the struggling capacity to develop of African states. Stemming the impacts of the pandemic has therefore become a major concern. This calls for addressing the issues of care and support for those affected, and increasing the access of persons living with HIV/AIDS to effective treatment. Provision of such complex medication in resource-limited settings is a fairly recent phenomenon. In this context, the paper builds on emerging experiences from the field in identifying issues and challenges that need to be addressed in order to facilitate the scaling-up of HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa.
  • In this study the Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile was used to compare health-promoting behaviours in three groups of chronically ill people being treated as outpatients at clinics and hospitals in Fiji, Nauru, and Kiribati. Significant differences were found between males and females and among groups in relation to practices and attitudes toward health responsibility, physical activity, nutrition, and stress management. Health professionals and educators must develop ways to transmit the message of healthy lifestyles to populations that do not give much attention to conventional health education methods.
  • This report summarises a project of participatory action-research combining concepts from the field of development management with practice in international mental health. The research was conducted in Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, and Romania. The policy-as-process model is central to understandings of development management but is unfamiliar to organisations working in mental health, even those working from a community level, bottom-up perspective to influence mental-health policy. At the same time practice and learning from the field of mental health and radical user-empowerment models have received little attention from development managers. The research reported here found that the policy-as-process model was useful to mental-health activists and that it provided a competing framework to more traditional, top-down and prescriptive policy concepts, and made it possible to make sense of the multiple perspectives, value-based conflicts, and power dynamics that characterise understandings and practice in mental health. Among the recommendations is a call for closer links between mental-health activism and development management, and a transfer of knowledge, understanding, and experience between the two disciplines.
  • in English only
  • It is virtually undisputed that poverty is multi-dimensional. However, 'economic' or income/expenditure/monetary measures of poverty still maintain a higher status in key development indicators and policy: The number one Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is the dollar-a-day; the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Development Index (GDI) of UNDP both use weightings that very strongly favour GDP per capita; and the income poverty headcount is generally the main focus in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. This article is concerned with this apparent contradiction between the consensus over the meaning of poverty and the choice of methods with which to measure poverty in practice. A brief history of the meaning and measurement of poverty is given and it is argued that while 'economic' determinism has gradually retreated from centrality in the meaning of poverty it has continued to dominate the measurement of poverty. This is followed by a section that contrasts the relative merits of 'economic' and 'non-economic' measures of poverty. The question is posed: why do 'economic' measures of poverty still have a higher status than non-economic measures?
  • Gender inequality is now widely acknowledged as an important factor in the spread and entrenchment of poverty. This article examines the World Development Report 2000/01 as the World Bank’s blueprint for addressing poverty in the twenty-first century along with several more recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) with a view to analysing the manner in which gender is incorporated into the policy-making process and whether it constitutes a new approach to gender and poverty. It is argued that World Bank’s approach to poverty is unlikely to deliver gender justice because there remain large discrepancies between the economic and social policies it prescribes. More specifically, it is contended that the Bank employs an integrationist approach that encapsulates gender issues within existing development paradigms without attempting to transform an overall development agenda whose ultimate objective is economic growth as opposed to equity. Case studies from Cambodia and Vietnam are used to illustrate these arguments.
  • Poverty and the way in which it is researched are major preoccupations for many social scientists. This article presents different ways of researching urban poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on qualitative methods and the different ways in which these can be used to collect data. Examples are drawn from field research carried out in urban areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre) to illustrate the ways that different research methods and techniques are used in the field and how a researcher might organise data collection.
  • The concern driving current debate on agricultural extension is increasingly that of what can be done to help farmers learn how to deal with the complex world around them responsibly and profitably, in such a way that the extension worker is ancillary. This paper seeks to deconstruct and provide a more reasoned assessment of agricultural extension services through a reflection on development paradigms, adult education, individual empowerment, and institutional pluralism. By calling into question the underlying ethical dimensions of agricultural extension, it is possible to develop an alternative paradigm and thereby generate new insights into it. The article concludes that the raison d’être of agricultural extension today must be to create an ethical basis that ensures that extension practices are more inclusive and thus responsive to the needs of farmers and other rural populations, integrating individual expectations into the wider socio-economic, cultural, political, and geographical environment.
  • This paper reviews prevention strategies initiated and implemented by NGOs across the globe to address female sex trafficking. It sets out the conceptual bases for anti-trafficking measures in general and prevention measures in particular before presenting a representative cross-section of programmes and approaches currently underway. The authors identify some of the gaps apparent in these responses, and offer recommendations to improve the implementation of prevention strategies. The paper concludes that anti-trafficking prevention measures must be skilfully integrated into current community-development practices and that for this reason, local and global development planners must become more aware of this issue and the strategic actions necessary to address it.
  • It is frequently contended that NGOs and the wider context of development are intrinsically different from other organisational settings within which Human Resource Development (HRD) is believed to play an important role. In this paper, the author outlines the basic concepts underpinning human development within organisations, and organisational development, and sets out the arguments for greater investment in people. While this can raise ethical and practical issues in organisations that depend on external funds rather than generating their own income, the failure to develop the staff on whom a development organisation ultimately depends carries far greater risks. Management and specifically HRD are not desk-bound activities that can be pursued through the application of protocols and sanctions, but require vision, leadership, and hands-on engagement.
  • This article discusses the role NGOs play, not in their traditional role as service providers, but as employers in the Egyptian labour market. Over the last two decades, NGOs have been offering attractive job opportunities to middle-class professionals who are disillusioned with the private sector and no longer interested in joining the state bureaucracy. The working conditions of the growing number of NGO employees and how NGOs fare as employers has not been investigated in the substantial academic and policy literature on NGOs, which so far has been almost exclusively concerned with NGOs’ relationships with their ‘beneficiaries’ rather with than with their position as active players in a changing labour market.
  • This paper discusses the meaning of development from a post-development perspective, based on a case study of a goat-keeping project involving a small community of farmers from a rural town in northeast Brazil. The development project was fraught with conflicting views of development as it sought to impose an interventionist, ethnocentric, and modernist view of what was best for the community, even stipulating how the farmers should work together. The modernist interpretation has been criticised on various grounds, but nevertheless continues to condition how the ‘development industry’ defines its values and views its mission.
  • The political project of gender equality in Africa has gained momentum and made many achievements. However, these have been largely confined to the ‘big’ women working in the public and private bureaucratic contexts in which there is a greater commitment to gender equality. It is argued that in the context of Cameroon, until these ‘bigger’ women renew their commitment to their grassroots sisters, the experience of gender equality among will remain largely unequal. Only strong linkages between white-collar workers and less privileged women will span this chasm.
  • This paper argues that Africa’s developmental efforts can be greatly enhanced both by an improvement in its bargaining power and more a genuine demonstration of generosity by its trading partners, in particular the developed countries. This generosity entails putting no conditions or restrictions on Africa’s products, particularly agricultural exports, and eliminating farm subsidies in developed states. Unless this is done, concessions made to African countries will remain merely symbolic.
  • This paper offers a case study of a secondment of staff from a Northern NGO (Trócaire) to a Southern partner, the Catholic Development Commission (CADECOM) of Malawi, as a possible model for capacity building. The approach described was tried in the context of an emergency programme but could also be used in a development context. The paper analyses the appropriateness of the model in terms of its administrative structure, focus, and impact, and attempts to draw lessons for practitioners for its successful application.
  • Although not part of the national curriculum until 2004, HIV/AIDS education has been taught for some time in Ugandan secondary schools through a variety of extracurricular means, including the media, youth groups, drama, music, and Parent Teacher Associations. This paper identifies and evaluates the integration of HIV/AIDS information into the national curriculum in Ugandan secondary schools between 2002 and 2004, based on the viewpoints of administrators, teachers, and students from 76 schools. While most schools did not include HIV/AIDS as part of the formal national curriculum at this time, the information was disseminated through a range of alternative means. The paper identifies the most effective of these, discusses the perceived reactions of various stakeholders regarding HIV/AIDS being taught in secondary schools, and makes recommendations for curricular reform.
  • Harriet Matsaert, Zahir Ahmed, and Shah Abdus Salam This paper describes the experiences of a small Bangladeshi NGO in using actor-oriented tools to focus on key people and partnerships in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation. The approach has helped to identify interventions that are context-specific, building on key local actors and indigenous networks, and sensitive to the constraints experienced by the poorest. As a result, the NGO has away from an externally driven agenda and to become a more thoughtful and responsive organisation. In developing the approach, the NGO encountered some problems due to the political sensitivity concerning the representation of linkages. This underlines the importance of using these tools in a politically-aware, positive, and reflective way.
  • Floating-bed cultivation has proved a successful means to produce agricultural crops in different wetland areas of the world. In freshwater lakes and wetlands, vegetables, flowers and seedlings are grown in Bangladesh using this floating cultivation technique, without any additional irrigation or chemical fertiliser. No detailed study of this indigenous cultivation technique has been published to date, although the laboratory method, hydroponics, is well documented in the professional literature. Our study is focused on the nature and characteristics of the Bangladeshi system, where local farmers have demonstrated the potential for the sustainable use of such common property local water resources. We seek to establish a reference point for further research into this technique for its possible refinement and an assessment of its suitability for replication.
  • Based on the contemporary interest in developing new adult literacy learning programmes based on ‘literacy for livelihoods’, this paper examines some case studies from New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Egypt of literacy being used in livelihoods, and relates these to the kind of literacy being taught in many adult literacy programmes today. It points out that people often change their livelihoods and that each livelihood has literacy practices embedded within it. The paper suggests that the use of these literacy practices embedded within the livelihood activities might be a better starting point for adult literacy learning than a school-based textbook.
  • Part of New Zealand’s aid to Pacific Island nations is in the form of tertiary scholarships. Students awarded scholarships study at tertiary institutions throughout the Pacific, including New Zealand. But what is it like when they return home, fitting back in to their culture and family life and finding work? The research described in this article explored this question in relation to women graduates from Vanuatu when they returned after studying overseas for three or more years. Some slipped back in easily and found work quickly, others experienced profound culture shock on re-entry and took many months to find suitable work. If Vanuatu is to make the best possible use of these women’s tertiary qualifications, and if donors are to realise the goals of their scholarship scheme, necessary changes include more coordinated support and regular tracer studies.
  • This article provides an overview of issues relating to the use of knowledge by development organisations. It starts by exploring the various definitions of knowledge which exist in a world of many cultures and intellectual traditions and the role of language. It considers their relationship with each other and with the many and varied ‘informational developments’ – information-related changes in work, culture, organisations, and technology across the world. It argues that these issues pose a number of fundamental strategic challenges to the development sector. The second part looks at where, in practice, development organisations get their information and knowledge from and identifies problem areas with many of the channels used. Its conclusion is that most current practice consistently militates against the type of relationship and type of communication that are essential if development policy and practice is to be anything other than an imposition of external ideas, however well intentioned.
  • This article focuses on the development of African Studies, principally in post-1945 Europe and North America, and its counterpart in post-independence Africa. African Studies enjoys an increasingly close connection with bilateral and multilateral development cooperation, providing research and researchers (along with their own conceptual frameworks and concerns) to assist in defining and providing direction for aid and related policies. This is leading to unhealthy practices, whereby African research is ignored in the formulation of international policies towards the continent; while external Africanists assume the function of interpreting the world to Africa and vice versa. This dynamic reinforces existing asymmetries in capacity and influence, especially given the crisis of higher education in most African countries. It also undermines Africa’s research community, in particular the scope for cross-national and international exchange and the engagement in broader development debates, with the result that those social scientists who have not succumbed to the consultancy market or sought career opportunities elsewhere, are encouraged to focus on narrow empirical studies. This political division of intellectual labour needs to be replaced with one that allows for the free expression and exchange of ideas not only by Africans on Africa, but with the wider international community who share the same broad thematic and/or theoretical preoccupations as the African scholars with whom they are in contact.
  • Using autobiographical experience with reference to woodfuel research in two locations in West Africa, this paper illustrates how knowledge processes influence what can be produced as knowledge; how such knowledge is actually produced; and what is eventually produced as knowledge. However, although it explores the various roles which knowledge plays in the social relations at particular historical moments in the personal and professional development of a single individual, the questions this subjective experience raises are of wider import: whose knowledge matters? how do certain knowledges get suppressed or are denied, while others are privileged? In turn, this raises additional questions concerning the ways in which research and practice are mediated through local research, policy, and development prisms. In a general sense, the paper is about the way in which woodfuel philosophies, methodologies, and practices are constructed, modified, and maintained in existence as knowledge; and a reminder that such knowledge processes cannot truly be understood in isolation, but need to be situated within complex, diversified contexts of individual agendas, group strategies, etc, as well as in multiple sites of production.
  • This paper argues that those keen to characterise and harness the empowering potential of Information and Communications Technology [ICT] for development projects have to understand that the very existence of this technology opens up alternative models of cooperation and collaboration. These models themselves necessitate breaking away from ‘traditional’ command-and-control models of management. One alternative is to persuade participants, or potential participants, to coordinate their efforts along the lines exemplified by the open-source software movement and the contributors to Wikipedia: models of coordination that ought not to work, but appear to do so. The paper offers an outline of this argument, and then suggests ways in which NGOs in particular might try to incorporate these insights into their strategies. This is particularly critical for organisations with a reliance on increasingly pressurised funding opportunities, and which also seek to develop and engender participation and determination from within and among specific target groupings.
  • The paper examines whether the concept of social capital can facilitate our understanding of online networks in development. Much of the knowledge generation and social learning in development takes place in networks, which are increasingly online. Although these networks are assumed to be a positive force in development, there are many unknowns about them, partly because they are in their infancy. The concept of social capital has traditionally been applied to examine the functioning of groups and societies. More recently, it has also been applied to development and to online networks outside development. Three non-development approaches to examining social capital in online networks and communities are reviewed in the article. Elements of these approaches, combined with development-related aspects, are used to produce a framework to facilitate the analysis of social capital in online networks in a development context.
  • In this article, the authors reflect on the establishment and rapid evolution of an African electronic newsletter, Pambazuka News, an initiative that is rooted in the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the one hand, and the struggle against impoverishment and injustices, on the other. Among the main learning points are that electronic publishing is a long-term commitment because of the trust established between the organisation providing the service and those using it. The immediacy of the medium enables information to move around in a range of different ways, and exerts new forms of mutual accountability. There remains, however, the critical issue of how to guarantee the resources to maintain such a service without compromising the content or diluting the purpose.
  • Knowledge in development has been perceived as a one-way commodity that developed nations could bring ‘down to’ the level of ‘developing countries’. Sharing knowledge is generally seen as a North–South operation. This vertical approach to knowledge in development echoes the vertical approach to development in general, wherebyt knowledge is perceived as an ingredient of the technical assistance given by those who have it to those who do not. However, no organisation can offer social transformation or knowledge sharing if it is not itself engaged in an internal learning process that systematically questions certainties, authorities, and decision making. Learning is a complex process of acquiring knowledge both within the organisation that facilitates social change and among the subjects of and partners in social change.
  • This article explores the motivation for, traces the development of, and details the distinctive strategy shaping The Communication Initiative (The CI), a network of those using communication to foster economic and social change in communities around the world. Network members access information and collaborate with each other through any of three knowledge websites - one with a worldwide overview and focus, one with a worldwide overview and focus on Latin America, and one with a focus on Africa - and their associated electronic newsletters. These online spaces are components in a broader process that the author terms ‘horizontal communication’, which is central to providing a non-judgmental, level platform for accessing the information and interactions that are important to those actually practising communication for development. Drawing on this approach, The CI has engaged 50,000-plus people from 184 countries over the past seven years; the author outlines the elements that have been central to this success.
  • Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have created new economic and social opportunities the world over. Their use, however, continues to be governed by existing power relations where women frequently experience relative disadvantage. Amidst this inequality are individuals and organisations that are working to use ICTs to further gender equality. These are the issues addressed by the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and ICTs. This section consists of extracts from the Overview Report part of the Pack. The first, most of the section ‘ICTs as tools to challenge gender inequality and promote women’s empowerment’ (a section on women and e-government has been omitted), describes ways in which women have been able to use ICTs to support new forms of information exchange, organisation, and empowerment. The second, taken from the textbox ‘Telecentres: Some Myths’ describes three assertions which frequently lead to problems in all forms of investment in development-related information exchanges with poor or less powerful groups, not only those relating to telecentres and women.
  • We suggest that PhD and post-doctoral researchers are a strong, untapped resource with the potential to make a real contribution to global health research (GHR). However, we raise some ethical, institutional, and funding issues that either discourage new researchers from entering the field or diminish their capacity to contribute. We offer a number of recommendations to Canadian academic and non-academic institutions and funders, and aim to generate discussion among them about how to overcome these constraints. We need changes in the way graduate research is organised and funded, so there are opportunities to work collaboratively within established low- and middle-income countries (LMIC)/Canadian research partnerships. We urge changes in the way institutions fund, recognise, value, and support GHR, so established researchers are encouraged to develop long-term LMIC relationships and mentor new Canadian/LMIC researchers. We ask funders to reconsider additional GHR activities for support, including strategic training initiatives and dissemination of research results. We also encourage the development of alternative institutions that can provide training and mentoring opportunities. GHR per se faces many challenges. If we address those that reduce our potential to contribute, we can become real partners in GHR, working towards equitable global health and solutions to priority health issues.
  • This brief paper outlines a range of facilities and new developments in web-based and Internet services. While many of the applications are being used for publishing, dialogue, research, and feedback in development, the question remains of how profoundly the development of communications and in particular the Internet, is changing the international development community and the way it works.
  • This review essay surveys the theoretical insights emerging from within the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement, also known as the Anti-Globalisation Movement, or the Movement of the Movements, and also reviews the literature focused on this phenomenon from those closely involved as well as from other observers. The central concern is to understand the nature and significance of the movement of the movements as it operates across local, national, and global boundaries, and to consider its capacity to represent and mobilise the many millions worldwide who stand to gain little or nothing, but may lose a great deal, from neo-liberal globalisation.
  • This article is concerned with some initial reflections on the distinctive features of Development Studies (DS). The aim is to trigger more debate rather than attempt ‘closure’. Discussion of the nature of DS is timely because of the expansion of taught courses at various levels over the last decade or so; because of sustained critiques of DS in recent years; and because DS has entered a period of ‘soul-searching’ - illustrated by several journal special issues and events - to identify its defining characteristics. The article argues that DS is a worthwhile endeavour (how could a concern with reducing global poverty not be?) but the field of enquiry needs to think about how it addresses heterogeneity in the ‘Third World(s)’ and opens space for alternative ‘voices’.
  • In English only
  • This article examines the capacity-building experiences of two research teams in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces in southwest China who used participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) to strengthen their development research actions, particularly in the area of natural resource management (NRM). The authors describe their efforts to incorporate PM&E practices in their work. The process proved challenging despite political and economic changes in China that aim to allow more space for local voice and decision-making power in the management of natural resources and other village affairs. Institutionalising PM&E has still a long way to go and will require more field practice, greater integration in the processes of organisational development, and stronger connections with agendas of political change.
  • The central argument of this paper is that many of the tools developed to strengthen for-profit businesses can be applied to NGOs to make them more effective and accountable. The paper addresses a gap in the development literature by defining and describing how business tools can be effectively transferred to NGOs. It examines the implementation of ISO 9000 Quality Standard by one NGO, the Cambodia Trust. The experiences of the Cambodia Trust demonstrate that business tools have a place in NGO management. The paper also questions the extent to which the Cambodian experience can be seen as best practice for NGOs.
  • Business Development Services (BDS) programmes have become big business for international donors and NGOs. Focusing on small enterprises in developing countries, the current BDS approach revolves around the idea that the development of commercial markets is the key to success. Yet many of these programmes continue to have a limited impact. A review of modern theories of innovation and services marketing management, suggests this may be because current BDS support practice reflects a rather limited understanding of how new markets actually develop. Drawing on the insights these theories offer, the authors suggest that BDS practice should develop a more evolutionary approach, recognising that service innovations develop through active, ongoing interaction between suppliers and customers. The article concludes with practical policy guidelines and a discussion about tools that could help BDS to adopt this more successful approach.
  • Fair-trade activities in the South have tended to be studied in relation to the internal aims of the fair-trade organisations themselves. This paper argues that it is also critical to consider the wider fair-trade ‘arena’ or set of interactions. The authors focus on the fair-trade coffee ‘arenas’ of Tanzania and Nicaragua and study the role of four key actors - small-scale producers, cooperatives, development partners, and public authorities. Using comparative data from field studies conducted in 2002-2003, the paper draws out key national and international issues affecting local producers. Illustrating how fair trade evolves differently according to context, the paper examines how the cooperative movement in Nicaragua has been strengthened by fair-trade production, in contrast to the situation in Tanzania. It concludes by looking at some of the challenges faced by fair trade, including how to reconcile the demands of the market with building solidarity.
  • This paper highlights some key factors shaping the micro enterprise sector in urban French West Africa. Drawing on interviews with micro entrepreneurs and microfinance practitioners in Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Togo, this study explores the needs, characteristics, motivations, and success factors for micro entrepreneurship in the region along with some of the impediments to the growth and success of micro enterprise ventures. It was found that those operating micro enterprises in the informal economy are entrepreneurs principally by necessity and that their most basic needs tend to drive their business activities and behaviours. It was also observed that their success was constrained by a number of barriers, including poor access to capital, poor training, and general aversion to risk. As a result, the development of the micro enterprise sector in urban French West Africa has been sub-optimal and the paper concludes that this situation may persist unless broader economic and social barriers are addressed.
  • The interchangeable use of the terms microcredit and microfinance creates serious confusions and misunderstandings in both academic and policy discourses. Microcredit programmes provide mainly one kind of service, namely loan distribution and collection, while microfinance programmes provide several financial and organisational services including credit, savings, insurance, and community development. From the functional perspective, differences appear more semantic than substantive. However, the conceptual differences are fundamental because they involve both the underlying motives and the ways in which the two types of venture operate in practice. Microcredit is essentially a non-profit approach to development and depends on external support, while microfinance programmes seek to return enough profit to be self-financing. Thus, the two programs need to be treated separately in relation to their role in the alleviation of Third World poverty.
  • Ministries of Finance (MoF) cannot ignore the major challenge to development posed by HIV/AIDS. To tackle the epidemic a new comprehensive and consistent approach is required: HIV/AIDS must be mainstreamed. This paper investigates the instruments MoF do, can, and should employ in order to be proactive and effective in mainstreaming HIV/AIDS through supporting the implementation of the ‘three ones’, promoted by UNAIDS and other partners – One strategic framework, One Authority, and One Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) System. It suggests strategic paths as well as specific initiatives to exploit the comparative advantages of MoF in ensuring the implementation of national strategic plans, repositioning national authorities, and providing the basis for a strong M&E system.
  • Through an analysis of practical examples and key literature, this article considers what will enhance learning in and between NGOs and other development partners. The authors explore how the types and qualities of relationship currently evolving in the development sector affect learning, drawing predominantly on experiences of relationships between Northern and Southern NGOs. The article identifies those aspects of relationships that foster learning and those that inhibit it, and offers recommendations to strengthen learning. The authors highlight the relevance of, the challenges posed by, and the potential of partnership work, as well as the impact of accountability demands, procedures, and processes, on organisational relationships and on learning.
  • Processed by rural West African women and desired by wealthy Northern consumers of natural beauty products, shea butter seems a prime candidate for fair trade, yet to date there has been little study of the industry. This article analyses the opportunities and constraints of the development of fair-trade exports of shea butter from Burkina Faso, taking into account the context in which shea is produced and sold locally and internationally, the concept of fair trade, and the impact of gender relations on shea production. Although a definitive positive or negative determination cannot be made, given the complex and divergent factors affecting the potential international market and the production process, the author finds that the development of the fair-trade shea butter industry in Burkina Faso has great potential. However, such development must occur with restraint and consideration of possible challenges and limitations, in order to remain sustainable and viable for rural female producers
  • Summary: Microcredit is a means of providing financial services to people who lack access to conventional credit sources. New programmes in the North are endeavour to emulate successful experiences in the South. But such programmes have their own characteristics that differentiate them from those in the South, as illustrated in a case study of experience in Spain.
  • Thanks to the range of natural resources and the wealth of human capital, Vietnam is well placed to develop its aquaculture sector. Although it is one of the world’s largest producers of seafoods, Vietnam faces environmental and food security problems, and adequate planning is therefore a critical issue if acquaculture is to be developed in a sustainable fashion. In Vietnam, efforts are being redoubled in order to improve the physical conditions in which acquaculture is conducted as well as providing technical, organisational, financial, and training levels of those dependent on such activities, and to promote the development of the sector overall.
  • Reporting on AccountAbility’s 2005 Annual Conference, Hyatt observes that the Northern-driven ‘accountability industry’ is more concerned about predicting outcomes and controlling resources, and is thus largely missing the moral, political nature of accountability in terms of promoting equity and integrity, and is little concerned with the failure to learn and to encourage learning.
  • In English only
  • This article discusses humanitarian advocacy in the contemporary world within the wider crisis of political vision. Humanitarian advocacy over the last 15 years has drawn attention to how crises have been precipitated by state policies and has sought international intervention to protect people. It has consequently become associated with challenging the national sovereignty of the developing state. This article contends that the weak state is the problem, and suggests that the existing paradigm of humanitarian advocacy helps to legitimise the erosion of equality among sovereign states and the reassertion of international inequalities.
  • Colombia’s chronic war is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Amid armed actors, pervasive violence, and increasing militarisation, many citizens experience hostility from all sides. This violence continues the historical marginalisation of Afro-descendent, indigenous, and campesino communities and is intensified by the Global War on Terror. In this context, aid agencies are challenged in their call to respond to the needs of those who suffer. But some ‘peace’ communities are rejecting violence and seeking ways to survive within war—becoming protagonists in their own protection. This is risky; it draws accusations, threats, and attacks. Over time, the lack of sustainable livelihoods, weak internal cohesion, and antagonistic external dynamics test peace communities’ determination. This article examines four such communities and explores factors that generate and sustain grassroots protagonism, leading to suggestions for how development organisations can enhance community-level protection and reinforce local peace processes to contribute to broader peacebuilding.
  • This paper underlines the importance of grounding the analysis of humanitarian aid in an understanding of everyday practice by presenting and discussing ethnographic vignettes about three aspects of aid response in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Tsunami. The first deals with the nature of humanitarian actors, the second explores how different kinds of politics intertwine, and the third discusses the issue of humanitarian partnerships. Each vignette points to the need for detailed analysis of everyday practice as the starting point for understanding humanitarian aid. This would require a shift in current academic approaches, where discussions on humanitarian aid usually start from the level of principles rather than practice. It is argued that accounts of the everyday practices and dilemmas faced by NGOs help to counterbalance blind expectations, expose uncritical admiration, and put unrealistic critiques into perspective.
  • Why has the humanitarian world already forgotten the people of Rwanda? And why do the survivors of the Rwandan genocide continue to be sidelined, particularly those women who were raped and deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS in a campaign of systematic sexual violence? The focus of humanitarian organisations shifted from Rwanda after 1994, and these women – most of whom have to maintain their households alone – are needlessly dying because they have no access to treatment. Humanitarian and development efforts will not achieve lasting benefits without better coordination, and the ability to act on lessons learned.
  • As Tony Vaux points out in his Guest Editorial in this issue, the concept of humanitarianism applies to both war and general disaster, and is based on the principle that ‘in extreme cases of human suffering external agents may offer assistance to people in need, and in doing so should be accorded respect and even “rights” in carrying out their functions’. However, policy makers in humanitarian agencies, and aid workers on the ground, face a bewilderingly complex set of challenges in determining such ‘rights’. Gone are any comfortable certainties about what in the commercial sector is known as ‘the licence to operate’, and claims to the moral high ground of ‘neutrality’ have an increasingly hollow ring. Perhaps more to the point, such assumptions are of little practical use to frontline workers who may risk ambush, abduction, deportation, or even their lives as the result of their professional activities. Nor do outdated road maps help relief agencies to orient their decisions on whether to withdraw or continue providing material assistance in the knowledge that a proportion of it is fuelling the violence or lining the pockets of conflict profiteers. There are no standard ‘off-the-peg’ answers, because each situation must be considered on its own merits. And of course no aid agencies share an identical mandate, or have precisely the same expertise or history of involvement with the affected population – all factors that must be weighed up in deciding what is the appropriate course of action. For reasons of space, we have not sought to cover the areas of early warning, prevention, and mitigation associated with ‘natural’ disasters, although of course the two are always linked, as became very clear in wake of the Asian tsunami in Aceh and Sri Lanka. It has long been recognised that since catastrophic events disproportionately affect the poor and marginalised, they expose and may intensify existing social divides and structural injustice. For instance, in his seminal work on the 1943 Bengal famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (OUP, 1984) Amartya K Sen argued that such food shortages do not occur in functioning democracies. Similarly, Roger Plant's, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster (Latin America Bureau, 1978) showed how the 1974 earthquake triggered an intensification in state violence that was to result in the death or disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans and create ‘a nation of widows and orphans’. In accordance with the focus of this issue, we have given priority to publications and organisations that reflect on some direct involvement in humanitarian endeavour, rather than giving priority to more policy-oriented or scholarly works or academic institutions. We have included literature on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, since this was such a defining event for humanitarianism; and some recent publications concerning the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 (‘Operation Enduring Freedom’) and Iraq in March 2003 (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), since these have significantly redefined the global landscape of policy and practice within which humanitarian agencies operate. Inevitably we can offer only a glimpse of the growing literature in these fields, but we hope in so doing that readers, and particularly those directly involved in humanitarian endeavours, will be encouraged to explore the issues further.
  • One could be forgiven for concluding from the current debate that the ‘protection of civilians’ is something ‘done to’ the passive recipients of international largesse. Whether the macro-level interventions of the UN Security Council or micro-level attempts to reduce the negative side effects of relief action, those in need of protection are rarely seen as key players in their own futures. Although this type of external intervention can be valuable, it is a far from complete picture of how people manage to survive the effects of conflicts. This vision of protection seriously underestimates the resourcefulness of people who have no choice and in so doing misses opportunities to help communities as they are forced to adapt to their new realities. Effective humanitarian action will thus not only focus on the actions of those with a responsibility to protect, but will also support and strengthen the rational decisions that people themselves take to be ‘safe’ in conflict.
  • The paper documents lessons learnt from a study on aid partnerships in post-conflict development and peace building in Bougainville. The paper examines how donor agencies, in this case the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) through the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) contributed to the successes and failures of the Leitana Nehan Women’s Development Agency (LNWDA). While the donors contributed to the organisational development and capacity of the LNWDA, the balance of power remains skewed. Furthermore, the deployment of an intermediary body in the partnership exerts considerable pressure on the LNWDA as it has to deal with multiple accountabilities, thus affecting the impact of its own work on the ground. It is argued that in order to enhance the impact of their assistance, donor agencies need to develop a framework in which partnerships are sustained through mutual and less demanding accountabilities.
  • Humanitarianism and politics are more often than not considered distinct despite the increasing complexity of contemporary conflict. In some cases the separation is pushed too far and leads to unintended consequences. This article highlights the specifics of the flight of one renegade soldier and some 300 of his men to Rwanda, while the international community was plotting the road map for an ideal solution that everybody could have signed up to. This did not happen, and the article studies what caused the relevant parties to forfeit such a solution and makes recommendations for how to improve coordination and complementarity in international operations involving a range of actors.
  • This review essay explores the need to make the roles of women and of men visible in order to understand the different ways in which they are involved in, and affected by, armed conflict; and also to examine the ways in which gender roles, the relations between women and men, are changed during and as a result of such conflict. The author reviews current literature on the political economy of conflict, and feminist writing on women in conflict, noting that the former tends to be gender-blind while the latter generally fails to take an understanding of the wider Realpolitik into account. The author focuses on five recent feminist works that have attempted to do this, and hence contributed to moving the debate forward.
  • The humanitarian aid sector faces a growing skills shortage, at a time when it aspires to expand the scale, quality, and impact of its response to humanitarian needs. Rapid staff turnover has been pinpointed as one of the major constraints on both staff capacity building and organisational learning. A study undertaken for Oxfam GB (OGB) supports previous findings that traditional human resource practices in the humanitarian field, with many staff employed on short-term contracts, have inhibited skills development as well as programme and organisational learning.
  • Decentralisation, or the transfer of decision-making power and funds from central to local governments, is one of the most important reform movements in Latin America. Recent constitutional changes in Ecuador have contributed to the democratisation and empowerment of municipal governments. Case studies of three municipalities in highland Ecuador examine new opportunities for NGO-municipal government collaboration. NGOs have considerable experience of working locally and can help municipalities with planning and capacity building. Municipalities offer NGOs the legitimacy and local accountability they may lack, as well as the means both to extend project activities beyond isolated communities and to maintain the results once NGO assistance ends.
  • Scaling-up local innovations in natural resource management (NRM) involves learning that is centred around three themes: promoting local-level innovation, understanding why local innovations work in specific contexts, and reflecting on their relevance in other geographical and social contexts. Successful scalin- up depends in part upon the relationships among multiple stakeholders at different levels around this learning. The experiences of researchers supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) provide insights into four questions: What is scaling-up? Why scale-up? What to scale-up? and How to scale-up? The authors propose that scaling-up is a multi-stakeholder process consisting of five components including: framing the context, promoting participation, fostering learning, strengthening institutions, and disseminating successful experiences. Key bottlenecks to scaling-up are the absence of open communication and the mutual recognition among stakeholders of each other’s rights, responsibilities, and roles.
  • Epidemiological combined with experiential evidence from communities can produce important and sometimes surprising insights into gender relations, to inform policies that address changing needs. CIET has standardised a community-based cross-design for the gender-sensitive collection and analysis of three types of evidence: impact, coverage, and costs. Five steps help to ensure that women’s voices are heard in planning. Gender-stratified analysis of existing data is a starting point. Stratification of all responses by sex of the respondent prevents a numerical bias in favour of men translating into a gender bias in the analysis. Female focus groups inform survey design, interpretation, and appropriate strategies for change. Gender is a factor in risk and resilience analysis. Finally, gender-sensitive logistics ensure women’s equal participation. First-order outputs include actionable gender data to advocate in favour of women. Second-order outputs include an enabling environment for equitable development, challenging the gendered patterns of economic marginalisation.

  • Fair Trade has become a dynamic and successful dimension of an emerging counter-tendency to the neo-liberal globalisation regime. This study explores some of the dilemmas facing the Fair Trade movement as it seeks to broaden and deepen its impact among the rural poor of Latin America’s coffee sector. We argue that the efforts to broaden Fair Trade’s economic impact among poor, small-scale producers are creating challenges for deepening the political impact of a movement that is based on social justice and environmental sustainability. The study is based on two years’ research and seven case studies of Mexican and Central American small-scale farmer cooperatives producing coffee for the Fair Trade market.
  • This paper describes the research methodology followed in the ‘Livelihoods of the Extreme Poor Project’, a collaborative research project in Bangladesh between PROSHIKA (a large national NGO) and DFID (the UK government department for international development). The dual purpose of this project was to learn about poor people’s livelihoods and train the PROSHIKA research team in the use of qualitative research methods. The research findings were to be fed directly into policy formulation and the planning of new development interventions for the poorest people in Bangladesh. The paper provides an assessment of what the approach used achieved both in terms of building staff capacity and in policy influence, concluding that it has been largely successful in achieving its purpose.
  • Following the Renamo/Frelimo conflict and the 1992 Rome Accord ending hostilities, the Christian Council of Mozambique undertook to remove arms from the civilian population by trading them for development tools. The weapons were given to artists associated with a collective in the capital, Maputo. The weapons were cut into pieces and converted to sculptures that subsequently focused international attention on the Tools for Arms project, or TAE (Transformação de Armas em Enxadas). While succeeding in drawing attention to the proliferation of arms among civilians, and collecting a considerable number of arms and munitions, the project encountered difficulties in relating the production of art to the overall initiative. This paper examines the aspect of the project that produced art from weapons, with insights and observations based on fieldwork conducted for CUSO and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
  • This paper critiques the ‘freedom-centred’ view of development by arguing that while development must be about expanding peoples’ freedoms, the dynamics of power between ‘developers’ and ‘developees’ must not be ignored. There is little analysis of the implications of multi-party political system (seemingly equated with democracy) in facilitating development and freedom. Using Malawi as an illustration, it is argued that freedom and development are inextricably linked such that one cannot function without the other. Access to basic social services, the right of democratic participation for all citizens, and the right to act as free economic actors cannot be achieved unless these freedoms are buttressed by genuine decentralised governance structures, strong partnerships among government, opposition political parties, and civil society organisations, and good governance backed by good civic education programmes on the two themes.
  • Gender mainstreaming was established in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action as a major strategy for the promotion of gender equality. As a development strategy, gender mainstreaming requires attention to gender perspectives, making them visible and showing the links between gender equality and the achievement of development goals. To evaluate gender mainstreaming in development projects and programmes requires a squaring of evaluation criteria such as relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability, with gender mainstreaming indicators at both project and programme level. This paper suggests a framework for evaluating development interventions from a gender-mainstreaming perspective, with a view to integrating gender perspectives in every phase of the project cycle.
  • The extractive industrial sector, increasingly breaking new grounds in developing countries, is increasingly aware of the environmental and community issues involved in mining, including questions relating to gender. However, the main focus is on the impacts of mining on ‘women’ in the community, leaving aside practical issues related to the processes of mainstreaming gender within the company, in the workplace itself. What tools and approaches would be useful for those addressing gender issues in the mining sector, a sector that is still perceived as a masculine area of work? This short paper reports on a practical study undertaken in a privately run colliery in Indonesia. Through this example, it suggests ways in which to take a first step towards gender mainstreaming in the mining sector.
  • In English only
  • While development cooperation can cause or exacerbate conflicts, withholding aid is not the solution. The issue is how to provide aid in a manner that prevents conflict, so as to achieve sustainable peace. This Practical Note examines how NGOs have prevented and managed conflicts arising from water projects in Ethiopia. The legal framework and institutional settings in that country leave little room for manoeuvre for NGOs, so their scope for adopting a conflict-preventive approach lies mainly in being more sensitive and being non-confrontational yet firm in their style of communication. Different funding conditions, and a more conducive legal framework, are fundamental to increasing NGOs’ effectiveness in preventing conflict.
  • A visit to Ghana, with the hosts interested in developing leaders and the guest interested in developing countries, led to a questioning of both. Three approaches to development were discussed. The top-down government planning approach, discredited with the fall of communism, has been replaced by an outside-in ‘globalisation’ approach, which is now promoted as the way to develop an economy. But has any nation ever developed by throwing itself open to foreign companies, capital, experts, and beliefs? The notable success stories, including the USA, point to a third approach, inside-up indigenous development, which has worked in concert with state intervention. Globalisation thus denies developing countries the very basis by which other countries developed. This argument is woven together with a corresponding one about the development of leaders, which must also happen indigenously, from the life experiences of individuals, not programmes that purport to create leaders. We have had enough of hubris in the name of heroic leadership much as we have had enough of foreign experts pretending to develop the ‘developing’ countries.
  • Collaboration has become a watchword for development practitioners and theorists. Yet collaboration or partnerships between academics and community-based researchers and activists have often proved difficult. This is particularly true for partnerships with smaller, grassroots community researchers, who are generally less resourced than their academic partners. This paper focuses on such partnerships in gender research, with the aim of reflecting on past problems as well as successes in order to develop strategies for making such projects more truly collaborative, rather than a minefield of broken promises and unspoken (and sometimes spoken) resentments.
  • This article looks at lessons that emerge from one specific approach to bridging activism and scholarship – the collaborative research partnership between scholars and activists. What these lessons share is a focus on recognising difference in order to bring people together.
  • Decades of development practice suggest the fundamental importance of improving aid-delivery systems and stakeholder competence in order to improve the well-being of poor people. However, it is questionable whether the aid system is able to change its attitudes and values through such partnerships in a way that will do this. This paper suggests that for this change to be possible, processes of individual, organisational, and inter-organisational learning have to be encouraged, in ways that do not sacrifice the knowledge obtained by aid workers in the processes of global management. The paper explores procedures of bilaterally funded community education projects in Ghana, in order to give insights into the working of partnership arrangements as a means to contribute to the alleviation of global poverty. Critical instances from the case study projects reveal the ways in which learning is facilitated, used, ignored, and hindered as the organisational relations develop.
  • This paper considers the role of urban agriculture in addressing the practical and strategic needs of African women, and assesses the gender implications of embracing urban agriculture as a development intervention strategy. Empirical evidence from Botswana and Zimbabwe points to the multi-faceted role of urban agriculture whereby some women use this activity to support their households on a daily basis, and others use it as an avenue for social and economic empowerment over the longer term. In order to benefit rather than burden women, the promotion and support of urban agriculture must take on an emancipatory agenda, which supports individual practical and strategic goals, and ultimately challenges the structural conditions that give rise to women’s involvement in the activity in the first place.
  • There are a number of serious ethical challenges and problems posed in conducting development research in a poor country. It is argued here that the best way to ensure that research is ethical is to apply three foundation principles. By focusing on self-determinism, non-malfeasance, and justice and beneficence, it is possible to avoid the risks of an unethical, pro-forma approach. This paper discusses the particular challenges of applying standard university guidelines on ethical research to conducting social research in Uzbekistan, where to fulfil all these guidelines would prevent the research from taking place. However, by applying the most basic ethical principles, it was possible to design an ethical research project.
  • This article examines different uses of forest-based incomes by local communities in Cameroon. Following, the 1994 forestry legislation, local communities have had the opportunity to derive income from forests in the form of annual fees from logging companies, and through the creation of community forests. Currently, several village communities are benefiting from these financial mechanisms, which should allow them to reduce their chronic poverty and to develop. However, this study – undertaken in the village of Kongo – indicates how these incomes are generally poorly managed and diverted by local elites. This finding runs contrary to the poverty-reduction objective underlying the development of community forests and the allocation of a proportion of forest taxation to local populations. A profound change in direction is required, through instituting democratic local governance.
  • This Research Roundup reports on the pilot phase of BRAC’s ‘Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction/Targeting the Ultra Poor Programme’ (CFPR/TUP), which was initiated in three of the poorest districts of northern Bangladesh (Nilphamari, Rangpur, and Kurigram) in January 2002. The authors find a close link between the initial conditions of the programme participants and the degree of change they have experienced in their lives since its inception, with the most vulnerable reporting the least change. Some modifications to the CFPR/TUP are recommended.
  • Better use of research-based evidence in development policy and practice can help save lives, reduce poverty, and improve the quality of life. But for this to happen more effectively researchers need to do three things. First, they need to develop a detailed understanding of (a) the policy-making process – what are the key influencing factors, and how do they relate to each other?; (b) the nature of the evidence they have, or hope to get – is it credible, practical, and operationally useful?; and (c) all the other stakeholders involved in the policy area – who else can help to get the message across? Second, they need to develop an overall strategy for their work – identify political supporters and opponents; keep an eye out for, and be able to react to, policy windows; ensure the evidence is credible and practically useful; and build coalitions with like-minded groups. Third, they need to be entrepreneurial – get to know, and work with the policy makers, build long-term programmes of credible research, communicate effectively, use participatory approaches, identify key networkers and salespeople, and use shadow networks. Based on over five years of theoretical and case-study research, ODI’s Research and Policy in Development programme has developed a simple analytical framework and practical tools that can help researchers to do this.
  • This Practical Note examines the design and implementation of Community-Driven Development (CDD) programmes, using the Kecamatan Development Programme (KDP) and the Urban Poverty Programme (UPP) in Indonesia as case studies. Launched in 1998, both have been praised as successful twin CDD pilots, allowing community groups to gain control over financial resources and decision-making processes. Despite similarities, the paper finds that different CDD approaches have been adopted, for various reasons. By exploring the rationales and trade-offs of these different approaches, the paper offers deeper insights into how CDD principles can be translated into local practices.
  • This paper describes a technique used to evaluate an NGO support and development project in Nepal. The project has been operating since 2000 or before in five Districts of Nepal and has the primary objective of assisting NGOs to work more closely with the poorest and most disadvantaged people in their catchment areas. The impact evaluation methodology used is both participatory and qualitative, but does arrive at quantified ranking estimates of project value-added in terms of stages of empowerment. The results suggest the project has been successful in developing the internal capacities of the NGOs and improving relationships with poor and disadvantaged people, but that the impact on their livelihoods is more limited even after three or more years of intensive inputs.

  • Aid agencies provide significant funding for research that is directed at socio-economic development. These agencies typically require out-of-country (OC) researchers to work with in-country (IC) researchers on such projects. Moreover, building the research capacity of IC researchers is often an important objective. This paper is written from the perspective of an OC researcher engaged in building the research capacity of IC researchers.
  • In English only
  • This article argues for a combination of long-term engagement in providing security, culminating in training and mentoring of new security forces; a comprehensive approach to reintegrating ex-combatants that also benefits civilian host communities and helps to ensure that agricultural livelihoods are made viable; and the opening of a space for discussion of governance issues and revenue distribution that is supported by a revenue-collection trusteeship that takes some of the key areas of economic pillage out of the purview of the state and deposits state revenues transparently into the state's coffers, leaving it to a new breed of Liberian politicians to emerge.
  • Since the early 1990s, the international community has become increasingly involved in efforts to (re-)build states that have been torn by war and violent conflict. Today, the United Nations alone is engaged in more than ten political and peace-building missions around the world. Roland Paris's most recent work, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (2004) examines 14 of the major UN peace-building missions launched between 1989 and 1999. In particular, Paris questions whether the predominant models of peacekeeping, with their emphasis on rapid democratisation and market liberalisation, are appropriate in fragile post-conflict contexts. In this interview, Roland Paris shares what can learned from the peace-building record about its effectiveness as a means of preventing the recurrence of violence in post-conflict situations.
  • A critical review of five contrasting publications on peace building, including the 2004 UN report A More Secure World.
  • This annotated list highlights some 70 recent publications and organisations that focus primarily on what happens after rather than before or during armed conflict. Issues covered include the political, economic, and social aspects of post-war reconstruction, and questions related to transitional justice and post-conflict reconciliation, and we have sought to offer a sample of the growing theoretical and empirical literature analysing the contemporary challenges involved in peace building and post-war reconstruction.
  • The overarching challenge facing the growing number of international peace-building interventions is to achieve sustainable peace. This paper illustrates this proposition through a brief investigation of the situation in East Timor as the UN mission withdraws at the five-year state-building mark, and in Haiti as a ninth UN mission is established. Adopting the view that participatory democratic governance will best ensure long-term peace, the paper maintains that to build sustainable peace requires transformation on three inter-related fronts: (a) transformation of the society from one that resorts to violence to one that resorts to political means to resolve conflict, requiring that the elite negotiate and that there should be widespread social dialogue and reconciliation; (b) reform of the governance framework to seek to ensure both that a negotiated governance arrangement between parties prevents future conflict and the adoption of basic democratic governance; and (c) the creation of meaningful institutions that will be sustainable after the mission leaves. These institutions cannot be imposed from outside, but must be bodies that are able to perform their core function and are committed to doing so.
  • A recent report by the World Bank reiterates the widely-held view that donor agencies commit large amounts of funding in the immediate post-conflict phase, only for this to taper off to more `normal' levels once the crisis is over. The World Bank criticises this phenomenon, referred to as `frontloading', claiming that damages the prospects of economic growth, which in turn undermines the peace. This article argues that the Bank's analysis is flawed because it does not distinguish between commitments and disbursements, or take sufficient account of other factors influencing aid patterns over time and in different settings. Moreover, the link between official aid and post-war economic performance is of only marginal significance. Any critique of aid policies needs to be based on a detailed analysis of what is delivered rather than what is promised, and of the impact of donors' assistance on the ground.
  • In English only
  • This article explores three main themes in comparing the transitional processes in Afghanistan and Iraq: (i) the clarity of the transitional frameworks and the need to separate discussions on such frameworks from debates on new constitutional arrangements; (ii) the degree of representation in the transitional institutions and the availability of channels for political consultation in the transitional processes; and third, the participation of civil society and the public at large in the transition processes.
  • This article focuses on the debate about the developmental impact of migration on the sending countries. Throughout the post-World War II period, temporary labour migration has been promoted as a path to development. Remittances have grown to rival or surpass official development assistance and have increased living standards in the sending countries. However, the evidence over time is that the remittances do not lead to development or even to higher incomes that are sustainable without further migration. Some determinedly temporary labour migration schemes offer promise. But where the pattern of migration and remittances locks into a semi-permanent arrangement (the standard line is `There's nothing more permanent than "temporary" migration'), then this may be a developmental trap for the South whereby, in a semi-permanent `3 D's Deal', the South foregoes self-development in favour of being a long-range bedroom community to supply the labour for dirty, dangerous, and difficult jobs in the North.
  • This Research Round-up summarises the findings of the 2004 Control Arms Report: Guns or Growth? Assessing the Impact of Arms Sales on Sustainable Development, published by Amnesty International, IANSA, and Oxfam International, in association with Ploughshares and Saferworld.
  • This paper reports on a collaborative research project that shows how participatory social research can be used as a strategy for combating social exclusion. The Crime Prevention Partnership Project brought together dominant and disempowered groups to explore social issues of mutual concern and identify potential solutions. Indigenous Australian undergraduate students played a central role in this project, working with the police as customer service trainees and with the university as members of a project research group. This project became an opportunity to train and empower new researchers who, as people from disadvantaged groups, brought their own knowledge, concerns, and worldviews to a research process that they helped design and carry out themselves. The result was a learning process for all involved, referred to here as multidirectional empowerment. It led to tangible bridge building between mainstream, powerful institutions and a disadvantaged community. The project process offers a model for using participatory research as a framework in which to address development issues.
  • As a tool both for research and for structuring community- level interaction, PRA is now well embedded in development practice. This paper, however, argues that in order to play an enabling role towards community action, facilitators need to offer much more than the traditional PRA approach. Based on work with groups of women and of men in North Bengal, the paper describes how local politics and facilitators' strategies interact and complicate the use of PRA-like planning approaches. The article stresses the need for effective and long-term facilitation strategies that take into account organisational, methodological, and contextual considerations, and argues that organisations need to invest far more in ensuring the quality of facilitators than is generally the case.
  • Kenya is not yet a major emigration country, but emigration of Kenyan professionals and technicians is increasing in importance. Kenyans and those with links to Kenya living abroad are a potentially important resource for national development. It is thus useful to examine the various ways in which this potential can be more effectively realised. The paper first discusses the patterns and impact of emigration before exploring the different ways in which the contribution of Kenyans abroad can be enhanced. It then puts forward proposals for priority action to implement the suggested initiatives.
  • The World Bank and world religions are two of the most powerful forces in the developing world. The Bank has access to vast financial resources, while faiths have vast social access and credibility. Partnership between the Bank and religious groups could have a significant impact on development efforts, but dialogue between them appears impotent. That appearance is deceptive. The dialogue stems from the Bank's long-term shift towards poverty alleviation and popular participation. As long as the Bank continues to address these issues, its actions will bring it into contact with faith groups. Despite its limitations, the Bank - faith dialogue, has fostered a greater openness to faiths among Bank staff, which in turn has resulted in specific roles being given to faiths in several major Bank programmes and opened the door to future partnerships.
  • Global workers' remittances have grown noticeably in recent years. Remittances are now a key macroeconomic factor in many developing countries, representing an increasingly large percentage of total monetary inflows. For many developing countries, remittances are comparable to or greater than total export earnings, official development assistance (ODA), and foreign direct investment (FDI). Remittance flows are also more progressive than these other international flows as they more equally distributed. The relative volume of this resource and its sharp increase over the past decade makes remittances increasingly significant in terms of development. Focusing in Nicaragua, this paper reviews the increasing importance of remittances and examines their potential to bring positive development outcomes to developing countries.
  • Based on primary research on the applicability of social exclusion frameworks to the experiences of people with leprosy in Bangladesh, this article compares two means of intervention: health education of society, and socio-economic rehabilitation of individual patients. These interventions commonly remain distinct, but it is concluded that only by integrating the two approaches can deep-seated prejudices be removed, facilitating early detection and elimination of leprosy. Processes of inclusion are more effective when they involve the same actors that promoted exclusion, and when they create bridges across the rigid divides separating the excluded from the excluding society or group.
  • Total remittances from migrant workers (US$80bn in 2003) significantly outstrip the total amount of overseas development assistance (US$55bn in the same year). Many conclude that such remittances make a positive contribution to development in the global South. However, the experiences of women health-care workers and migrants contradict easy and hopeful assumptions about the positive effects of migration. Further, the more economistic analyses of the benefits of migration do not subtract its gendered and social costs when calculating labour savings in the North or income from remittances in the South.
  • In English only
  • Non-formal education often represents a last chance for adolescent girls who do not attend school to receive some education to improve their health before they become mothers. This paper describes the development of a literacy and health education curriculum for adolescent girls in southern Malawi who will never enter formal schooling. The curriculum was redefined in the light of participants’ feedback and providers’ observations. The health messages could effect change but would have had limited impact on girls’ health practices without the participation of the wider community. The curriculum’s innate visibility ‘under the trees’ was a key factor in facilitating villagers’ involvement and exponential learning.
  • Few issues in the development process raise as much heat as the role of the international private sector in the form of transnational corporations (TNCs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). This article reviews the most recent research on the impact of FDI on economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. A brief history of FDI is given. This is followed by discussion of the conceptual transmission mechanisms linking FDI, growth, and poverty. The available empirical evidence is then discussed. It is argued that it is not a question of whether FDI is good or bad for social and economic development, but that its impact is determined by the terms upon which FDI is accepted. Although overall the evidence on FDI, growth, and poverty is not conclusive, research has had a tendency to suggest the benefits of FDI are linked to the FDI policy regime; and that the current orthodoxy of maintaining a highly liberal FDI policy regime leads to a situation whereby developing countries have a precarious trade-off to make between attracting FDI and maintaining policy instruments to extract the benefits of any inflows.
  • This paper investigates how, why, and when community-based strategies are effective in promoting corporate accountability (CA) to the poor. It argues that mainstream approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) underestimate the importance of power in the relationship between corporations and the communities in which they invest, which limits their applicability to many developing country contexts in particular. In addressing this neglect, the article draws on literatures on power, accountability, and citizen participation in order to analyse 46 cases where communities have attempted to hold corporations to account for their social and environmental responsibilities. The paper argues that more attention should be paid to a number of state-, corporation-, and community-related factors, which are found to be key to the effectiveness of strategies aimed at enhancing CA to the poor.
  • Although the concept that corporations are responsible not only to their shareholders but also for the social and environmental impacts of their activities has now entered the mainstream, pressure is still required to ensure that companies honour their public commitments. This article describes the work of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility in harnessing the power of individual shareholders and ethical investors in order to hold companies to account, with particular reference to the activities of Shell in Nigeria and the Republic of Ireland. It is argued that companies do not exist to carry out community development, and so should be judged not on these grounds, but rather on the impact of how they conduct their core business.
  • Economic issues associated with poverty are complex and require holistic responses in order to realise the goals of sustainable development. While business alone may have significant economic impacts, the link between business-level behaviour and macro-level development aspirations is unclear. By developing a sound grasp of how companies understand and manage these impacts, we are better placed to understand how corporate responsibility clusters, or partnerships with other companies, civil society organisations, and governments, can harness corporate impacts to deliver qualitatively better sustainable development outcomes at the macro level.
  • As corporate social responsibility (CSR) increases in large corporate organisations, a genuine approach to sustainable development is often best achieved through the supply chain. This is directly applicable to North-South supply chain interactions (private sector organisations, NGOs, and donors). CSR has adopted techniques from their `development' usage, yet a reverse flow is not observed back to the `development' sector. This is unfortunate. Private sector organisations and NGOs (especially the larger ones) are well placed to take advantage of the increase in CSR relating to developing countries. More importantly, donors of all types would have increased influence if they took up CSR principles. Opportunity costs are not high and the advocacy potential is huge. This paper reviews CSR techniques and argues for donors to accept the challenge of incorporating them into their operations to influence more efficiently the process they seek to change.
  • A corporation has only limited ability to create social capital through philanthropic activity, and in the context of a decline in official aid, the corporate sector is increasingly assuming a de facto developmental role. The presence of social capital assists communities in moving towards sustainable development and may contribute to the business case for corporate- community partnerships. While it is not the role of corporations to deliver social services, their ability to enhance social capital by partnering with community organisations can both contribute to development and work to their own commercial advantage. Such partnerships, whether philanthropic or commercial, will be more effective if delivered through balanced and transparent relationships with community organisations that help to create social capacity at the local level.
  • Current mainstream development thinking, with the exception of a few areas like microcredit, tends to favour size over substance. This article aims to challenge the belief that large-scale companies, markets, and institutions are the most effective means of `delivering development'. We argue that, by designing institutions to meet different needs at different scales, long-term sustainable development outcomes are more likely. Through an analysis of `new economics' thinking, we look specifically at how the concept of subsidiarity could be applied to development thinking at the community and business levels, and we draw on some examples of where the concept is already manifest in practice, such as energy and commodity production.
  • In the corporate world, design has received increasing attention over the last 50 years and is now firmly embedded within almost all aspects of corporate activity. This article explores the role of design in development. Design is widely used and understood, within capitalist economies, to denote a diverse set of tools, used to maximise market share, sales, and profits, and support market differentiation and brand identity of products. The progress of two convergent design-related threads is briefly charted: the growth, since 1950, of a view that design has a real contribution to make to social responsibility and sustainability; and the increasing evidence of design-like skills being used in development contexts. The article reviews several alternative models that are being developed and concludes with a number of short case studies, which illustrate these models and highlight the potential of their largely process-based methodologies for private sector activity in a development context.
  • Many governments and aid agencies believe that small businesses can contribute to promoting more equitable development, as well as enhancing the competitiveness of local industries within a global economy. While small, micro, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may have a role to play in creating jobs, and generating and redistributing wealth, they need to overcome many obstacles. This article stresses the importance of understanding the specific context, establishing priorities among competing policy goals, and distinguishing between the actual and potential roles of different kinds of enterprises (by sector, size, and geographical location). Only on such a basis is it possible to identify the resources and policies most appropriate for each goal and each type of enterprise. These arguments are illustrated with reference to South Africa, whose government has sought simultaneously to promote SME-development, Black Economic Empowerment, and global competitiveness.
  • Since the mid-1980s, aid agencies have endorsed the need to support the development of private enterprise in low-income countries as an instrument for overall economic development and poverty reduction. Facilitated collaboration between firms in industrialised and developing countries has become one of the most popular forms of assistance in this endeavour. Although such collaborations vary in design, they all involve third-party organisations that identify partners and sponsor the first steps in the establishment of a business platform for the cooperation. This paper discusses the mechanisms involved in such facilitation and assesses the effectiveness of the catalyst institutions in nurturing collaboration between companies in industrialised and developing countries. The discussion is illustrated with case studies drawn from Ghana.
  • Microcredit, defined as small loans to people who have no regular access to credit, is an innovative strategy in the fight against poverty. Microcredit institutions can obtain funding from Private Institutional Investors (PIIs) that channel funds from donors, private lenders, and socially-responsible investors. Private financing of development aid is likely to become more important and microcredit presents an investment opportunity within this context. Microcredit institutions (MCIs) need to become more transparent, however, and require more incentive to seek commercial funding rather than relying on subsidies. With better information about MCIs, PIIs could achieve more impact with their investment.
  • Since the 1990s, development agencies and international institutions have promoted private-sector involvement in infrastructure, assuming that this would inject both investment and efficiency into the under-performing public sector. In the water and energy sectors, these expectations have not been fulfilled. Private-sector investment in developing countries is falling, multinational companies have failed to make sustainable returns on their investments, and the process of privatisation in water and energy has proved widely unpopular and encountered strong political opposition. This paper examines the role of this opposition in delaying, cancelling, or reversing the privatisation of water and energy. Local civil society has successfully mobilised highly effective political activity, its opposition being based on the perceived conflicts between privatisation and equity, and over the role of the state and community in these sectors. Such opposition has involved dynamic interactions with existing political parties and structures, including the use of existing electoral and judicial mechanisms. Its success poses challenges for the multilateral and donor community, NGOs, the opposition campaigns themselves, and the future of national systems of electricity and water.
  • Post-conflict recovery and development is the subject of current attention and a major challenge is that of post-conflict economic development, which is central to reducing poverty and improving local livelihoods. In this regard, many post-conflict development plans place a high priority on private sector development. This paper examines the role of the private sector in post-conflict situations and discusses possible interventions for economic recovery based on a review of the literature and fieldwork in Timor-Leste. The paper identifies key factors critical to pro-poor private sector development in post-conflict situations, with particular reference to Timor-Leste, considers some of the major obstacles, and suggests public policies to identify promising export products and to strengthen small and micro enterprises that might help the country to achieve pro-poor economic recovery and growth.
  • This article is concerned with the question of whether participation in the global economy leads to sustainable income growth. It examines the furniture industry of Central Java, which has grown rapidly since the financial crisis in 1997. The article shows that the exporting small and medium-sized enterprises generated substantial employment and income growth. However, this growth is not sustainable because the viability of exports has become dependent on wood which is logged illegally and risks depletion. Government and donor projects aimed at small enterprises risk driving these enterprises deeper into the race to the bottom. The article then discusses ways to avoid this, stressing the need for a coalition of public and private actors along the local-global axis.
  • The World Bank's Community Empowerment and Local Governance Project (CEP) was the key donor programme to assist with community reconstruction in a newly independent Timor-Leste. Commencing in 2000, the US$18 million project provided funds to over 400 local development councils that had been newly created to meet their community's development needs. Rather than creating genuine participatory structures, tight deadlines to disburse project funds and bureaucratic project rules reduced the councils to little more than transmission lines to Bank-controlled dollars. By bypassing existing governance structures, including that of the fledging government, the councils also bypassed sources of local legitimacy and technical knowledge, which resulted in community conflict, indifference, and poor project sustainability. The CEP's poorly administered micro-credit scheme led to a proliferation of unviable kiosks - underlining the folly of hastily attempting to construct a market economy on a deeply scarred subsistence economy.
  • In the last two decades, the private sector has been placed under intensifying pressure to ensure it operates in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. Companies have moved through various phases of response, starting with a `deny and defend' position, moving to `paying penance' through donations and philanthropy, and currently settling on risk management through mitigating the negative impacts of their business operations. Drawing on research undertaken by Oxfam International mainly in the retail sector, as well as in the coffee and pharmaceutical sector, this article argues that the current approach is, as yet, inadequate. Simply mitigating negative impacts through castigating intermediaries or suppliers does not contribute to sustainable solutions. For the private sector to meet corporate social responsibility pledges, companies need to pursue alternative business models that forge connectivity, coherence, and interdependence between their core business operations and their ethical and environmental commitments.
  • As retailers in the North increasingly adopt codes of practice containing social and/or environmental provisions in global supply chains, there is a need for rigorous assessment of their social impact. Moving beyond the rhetoric, it is important to establish the actual impact of such codes on poorer workers, their families, and other local stakeholders. This paper sets out the key methodological and conceptual issues arising in such an assessment as identified by a three-year study on the South African wine. It reviews the different motivations and approaches employed by code bodies, donors, academics, and practitioners, and highlights the lack of workers' voices in the debate on corporate responsibility as well as some of the early research findings. Finally, it explains how the inherent power inequalities in global supply chains make it more difficult to adopt a truly empowering approach to assessing the impact of codes.
  • The debate among NGO and union activists about how to improve working conditions and labour rights has been dominated by proponents of specific approaches, arguing variously that the best route is through company codes, legislation, organisation of workers, or sweatshop-style campaigning. This article describes a campaign by NGOs and trade unions that integrates these approaches to improve the labour rights and conditions of UK homeworkers. Its `change model' is to seek changes in company behaviour as part of a strategy to strengthen legislation while also exploring the opportunities and mechanisms for leveraging change in (company) practices and (government) policies: the susceptibility of brand-name companies to campaigning creates an opportunity to leverage changes in their practices; campaigning (threatened or actual) invigorates, and should underpin, engagement with retailers and brand-name companies on the implementation of voluntary codes; and the establishment of a `level playing-field' dynamic means that companies meeting higher standards can become allies in advocating better corporate practices and labour legislation. International development NGOs, with their ability to campaign, engage with brand-name companies, and work alongside unions and workers' organisations across the North-South divide, are uniquely placed to facilitate such integrated strategies.
  • Ethical trade, through codes of practice, forms an important part of the value chains for horticultural products sourced from Africa by major European buyers. This paper explores the relationship between value chains in the horticultural sector, the employment patterns of African producers, and the process of code implementation from a gender perspective. It asks whether, in the context of the gendered economy, codes alone can improve working conditions for all workers. Using case studies of Kenyan flowers, South African fruit, and Zambian flowers and vegetables, the article highlights the implications of flexible employment strategies for workers, and shows that social codes have not necessarily achieved better outcomes for women and informal workers, owing to the gendered economy. Ultimately, it is only by addressing the local gendered economy that the employment conditions of all workers, including those of marginal workers and women, are likely to improve.
  • The global garment-manufacturing industry will confront significant changes from 2005, when the system of quotas established under the Multi-Fibre Agreement comes to an end. These changes pose serious threats to jobs in the Central American assembly plants, or maquila industry. One possibility, however, is that `politically correct' consumption could provide a niche market for firms that are committed to corporate social responsibility and the respect for human rights, and that this might even be a way to improve working conditions in the region. In this sense, notwithstanding the grave risks it represents for the very poorest, the market could serve to bring about changes favourable to working people.
  • Fair trade represents an innovative approach to make the rules of global trade work for disadvantaged producers in the South and for sustainable development. But who are the real beneficiaries of fair trade? Has fair trade resulted in any discernible improvements in the lives of small coffee producers and their communities? This paper examines the effectiveness of fair trade as a development tool and the extent of its contribution to the alleviation of poverty in coffee-producing regions of Nicaragua. The paper argues that it is crucial to analyse the experiences and problems of small coffee producers and producer organisations involved in the fair trade market to ensure that the objectives and claims of fair trade are achieved in practice. The study concludes that there are limits to the extent to which fair trade can significantly raise the standard of living of small coffee producers because of factors such as the debt problems faced by cooperatives, lack of government support, and volatile international coffee prices.
  • The movement to promote sustainably produced coffee is one of many efforts aimed at linking social responsibility and market capitalism. In the wake of a worldwide coffee crisis in which prices have fallen to levels that do not support small-scale production or living wages for plantation workers, non-profit certifying and labelling organisations are working to develop a market that is sustainable for workers and the environment. They seek to influence cultural and political values in such a way that consumers and corporations in the North will have to respond to them by incorporating the welfare of Southern workers and ecosystems into their purchasing decisions. This paper discusses and evaluates current strategies to link producers and consumers within this movement, all of which involve a great deal of education. It argues that partnerships between businesses and NGOs are essential for broadening the corporate base of the market for fairly traded coffee and promoting norm change among consumers, and discusses the challenges and opportunities that such partnerships create.
  • This article discusses the privatisation of public services in Argentina in light of the severe crisis that afflicted the country between 1999 and 2002. An inadequate regulatory framework and the absence of effective regulatory agencies resulted in the exercise of monopolistic power over public-service fees. The emergence of a series of external shocks, starting in 1997 with the SE Asia crisis, weakened the country's external accounts. In the context of a strict fixed exchange-rate regime, rising public-service fees and overseas obligations contracted by the privatised firms placed growing pressure on the balance of payments. Although privatised firms were not directly responsible for the four-year recession or the balance of payments crisis, their actions contributed to the onset and prolongation of the difficulties faced by Argentina.

  • This paper addresses the introduction of a public-private partnership (PPP) for water provision in urban Congo. It describes the organisational context before and after PPP and discusses the various outcomes of the partnership, both positive and negative. Despite some promising early results, the PPP arrangements did not develop as planned and the private enterprises ran into financial problems. The role of the political environment in compromising the potential benefits of PPP was important, and the article closes with some policy recommendations in light of Congo's ongoing negotiations with the international financial institutions to secure their assistance for new economic reforms.
  • This article evaluates potential mechanisms for facilitating increased private sector engagement in agricultural research for development and technology transfer (ARDTT), with particular emphasis on Bolivia. It reviews the mixed results of efforts, in developed and developing countries alike, to decentralise ARDTT and to encourage private sector investment. Potential mechanisms for Bolivia are considered within three broad categories: taxation schemes; co-funding arrangements; and output-based approaches. The constraints to participation in ARDTT by the private sector that arise from concerns over high transaction costs, intellectual property rights, and the legal and regulatory environment are also assessed. The article concludes that a compliance, or a hybrid of a compliance and competitive co-funding scheme, is most suited to Bolivia's needs. A flexible approach to intellectual property rights systems is required, although it remains a challenge to identify appropriate taxation regimes.
  • Radical approaches to introduce public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure provision in South Asia have been largely unsuccessful. Yet the region is home to a thriving informal private sector and several regional NGOs have become engaged in efforts to involve communities in improved infrastructure provision. Many line agencies and local authorities have devolved some responsibilities for service delivery to the private sector through small-scale service and management contracts. This paper explores the possibilities for expanding and building on these activities, bearing in mind institutional factors, including both organisational structures and the attitudes and assumptions of the various stakeholders. Particular attention is paid to the options for regulating the private sector and the balance to be struck between encouraging competition and promoting improved stakeholder cooperation. Options for moving to `higher' forms of PPP are considered, and brief concluding remarks summarise key findings and suggest some possible directions for the future.
  • Since Vietnam introduced its Doi Moi reform policy in 1986, the development of the private sector has been a main policy concern for the government and the ruling Communist Party. The main development challenge for Vietnam is how to sustain economic growth and reduce poverty as the labour force continues to expand. It is envisaged that the private sector will play a major role in that respect. This article looks into the issue of whether the private sector can live up to widespread expectations. High and stable economic growth indicates that reforms have been consistent but also that private sector initiatives have moved ahead of formal institutional changes. Private sector development is new in Vietnam and starts from a low level. The public and foreign investment sectors are major players compared to the domestic private sector, which comprises many small firms. Poverty reduction has been impressive but it is only now that private sector development is becoming an important contributor. Stemming the growth in inequality remains a challenge where the private sector's contribution to increasing public revenue has yet to materialise.
  • Stakeholder dialogue, participation, and partnership have become mainstream concepts in international development policy, in particular in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, the accountability of multi-stakeholder initiatives on CSR to their intended beneficiaries in the global South is increasingly questioned. This paper looks at how the agendas of some initiatives in the areas of ethical trade and sustainability reporting are driven by what Western NGOs push for, what large companies consider feasible, and what consultants and accountants seek to provide. It describes how the resulting practices and discourse restrict change and marginalise alternative approaches developed by Southern stakeholders. It is argued that enthusiasm for stakeholder dialogue, participation, and partnership in CSR matters, and beyond, needs to be reconceived with democratic principles in mind. `Stakeholder democracy' is offered as a conceptual framework for this endeavour, and some recommendations are made for NGOs, companies, and governments.
  • The corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda has taken off since the 1980s, with both civil society and business actors involved in mobilising around it. This paper examines the reasons for civil society mobilisation on CSR issues, the types of organisations involved, and their different forms of activism and relations with business. It then identifies the ways in which big business is engaging with and shaping the CSR agenda, but questions whether this agenda can effectively contribute to development. The paper argues that the CSR agenda can deal with some of the worst symptoms of maldevelopment, such as poor working conditions, pollution, and poor factory-community relations, but that it does not deal with the key political and economic mechanisms through which transnational companies undermine the development prospects of poor countries. A final section considers how this agenda may evolve on the basis of recent developments in CSR activism and regulation.
  • In English and French Only
  • In English only
  • This article identifies the need for an appropriate methodology for evaluating Fair Trade, given that most evaluations to date have been in-house or commissioned reviews and hence not followed a consistent approach. Focusing on the development aspects of Fair Trade, the article reviews a range of impact evaluation methods and presents a detailed methodology for analysing Fair Trade that incorporates standard project evaluation criteria and is based on a wide range of proven methods for collecting and analysing data, principally qualitative but also quantitative. This framework is a modular package from which practitioners may select according to their needs and means, while still retaining an overarching logic. The article illustrates its use by reference to evaluations undertaken in Costa Rica, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Tanzania. The approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of Fair Trade programmes and enables these to be compared with conventional development projects.
  • This article discusses the burgeoning field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), with a particular focus on the opportunities for its application as part of the international women and development agenda. We discuss recent theoretical developments in critical GIS and feminist theory which have created this opportunity, as well as the problems inherent in using GIS for gendered research. We focus on the obstacles created by inadequate gendered data sources and the ability of GIS to represent women's issues.

  • The article discusses the methodology and application of the Key Informant Monitoring (KIM) tool as used by the Nepal Safer Motherhood Project (NSMP). NSMP aims to achieve sustained increase in the uptake of midwifery and essential obstetric care services by addressing, among other things, constraints on access to such services. Data collected by community-based Key Informant Researchers (KIRs), are synthesised and used by NSMP and key project partners for monitoring and planning purposes. NSMP has used KIM findings to modify its main interventions at the local level. International and Nepali NGOs have adopted KIM in their safe motherhood and other development programmes. Village Development Committees, with support from NGOs and NSMP, have responded to issues raised by KIM by running maternal health awareness-raising campaigns, working with traditional healers, improving the quality of care, and facilitating local emergency transport and funding schemes. KIRs have proved effective as sources of information and as change agents, spreading safe motherhood messages to promote behaviour change.
  • Andean farmers have traditionally adapted and selected varieties of quinoa and potatoes to reduce their vulnerability to a range of environmental risks. Data suggest that this strategy is being undermined. Market pressures, particularly the requirements for consistency and quantity along with the import of subsidised wheat products, are leading to the displacement of quinoa and indigenous potato varieties. This paper explores the feasibility of maintaining crop diversity while ensuring that farmers benefit from market opportunities. For potato, the most promising approach is one of `conservation through use' whereby development practitioners identify market niches for local rather than cosmopolitan varieties. Meanwhile, quinoa production and consumption has been enhanced by government-sponsored initiatives that use quinoa in food- support programmes. The success of these efforts to enhance livelihood security requires an enabling policy environment that encourages extension approaches, where the emphasis is on farmers' active participation, and supports public and private interventions in remote rural areas.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis With the inability of international economic integration to create opportunities for important segments of society, many Mexicans are searching for ways to forge their own alternatives. These strategies are the concrete manifestations of the realisation that the `mainstream' path of the search for proletarian employment is no longer viable and that a return to traditional forms of cooperation, organised around mechanisms for ecosystem management, might offer greater security and a better quality of life. People are finding ways to strengthen their communities, to ensure that their families can remain in the rural areas as part of dynamic communities searching for a new relationship to their regions, and to the nation of which they wish to continue to be a part. The article illustrates this process with an analysis of a project that focuses on creating a new product -low-fat pork- that can command a premium price in the market and in the process contribute to strengthening a community, providing new opportunities for women, and improving environmental management.

  • HIV/AIDS is having profound impacts on livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. These include the deaths of working-age adults, the diversion of resources to caring, and the rupture of traditional chains of knowledge transmission. NGOs are responding by providing assistance to communities affected by the epidemic in the fields of agriculture, skills training, and microfinance, as well as by offering home care and support. A key feature of such initiatives is the focus on previously neglected groups such as women, school dropouts, and orphans. Factors of success include the use of participatory processes to identify target groups, and the involvement of local political leaders and adults trusted by young people in project activities. Challenges include the improvement of monitoring systems, effective dissemination of lessons learnt, and persuading donors, whose responses to the epidemic are currently focused on preventive and curative health services, to support livelihoods interventions as a matter of urgency.
  • Ever more NGOs are dedicated to the eradication of poverty, while various government bodies are also committed to the moral and material progress of the so-called `human family'. However, the record is bleak. The arms trade constitutes a crime against humanity against which NGOs can make little headway. On the contrary, single-issue campaigns, for example on landmines, may in fact distract them from the wider issues. Similarly, through their involvement in humanitarian missions, often mounted mainly to appease the consciences of citizens in the rich world, NGOs may unwittingly be helping to maintain the deeply unjust world order. We need to reflect upon what NGOs actually do, rather than on ways to increase their efficiency, given that NGO actions alone cannot secure human rights. If NGOs do not engage in self-critical reflection, the poor will be always with us, so will NGOs, and the system will not change for the better.
  • Based on reflections undertaken with members of a partnership between an NGO and Adivasi (original dweller) communities in the Indian state of Orissa, this paper examines various linkages among NGOs (international, state, district, or local), and grassroots organisations in terms of their prospects for advancing Adivasi activism for social change. International NGOs seldom work directly with village- level networks of NGOs and grassroots organisations, but assuming that people's participation, agency, and activism transcend their rhetorical significance for some NGOs, such involvement would bring international NGOs into direct contact with vested interests (often the cause of the Adivasis' impoverishment) and potentially lead to power being handled in a more democratic fashion.
  • The Royal Kingdom of Bhutan has not only a unique national environment but provides researchers with an opportunity to observe effective development in a relatively uncomplicated and controlled system that is government-led rather than donor-driven. This paper reviews recent progress in Bhutan's development and sees two inhibitors to this seemingly `ideal' situation: first, internal tensions between Drukpa and Nepali ethnic groups; and second, the impact of Bhutan's opening itself up to external influence through media and the Internet, supported by a willing donor community. Future developments in Bhutan could act as a useful barometer for global events.
  • Appreciative Inquiry (AI) has long been used as a methodology for understanding organisational learning and change. This paper discusses its applications to interview-based field research within the development context. While AI begins by looking at the best of an organisation or individual's experience, it can help researchers to gain a textured and detailed understanding of both their subjects' greatest successes and their most serious obstacles. Based on research conducted with directors of NGOs across Africa, the paper provides anecdotal evidence that using AI in interviews creates a comfortable and stimulating environment for interviewees that can yield an exceptional quality of information.
  • In English only
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. The reconstruction of the health system in Afghanistan is in its early stages, and donors have proposed Performance-based Partnership Agreements (PPA) through which to subcontract the delivery of health services to private organisations, both for-profit and non-profit. Beyond ideological debates, this article sets out to explain the model underlying the PPA initiative and shed light on empirical data concerning the assumed benefits of such an approach. The article studies privatisation and the contracting-out of health services, though there is as yet no information that can demonstrate the superiority of private provision over publicly provided. Similarly, the appropriateness of subcontracting remains unproved and such arrangements raise several ethical issues. Where PPAs are to be attempted, it is important to remain cautious and to ensure that operations are organised in such a way as to permit proper comparison. The paper concludes with recommendations to organisations involved in or considering the merits of PPAs.
  • Legal reforms are increasingly seen as essential in combating various constraints women face in relation to property and inheritance. These efforts are reinforced by commitments countries have made by adopting such treaties as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and by the incorporation into their constitutions of various Bills of Rights that recognise women's rights. It is expected that such commitments will reduce discriminatory practices and promote the upholding of women's rights. Based on findings of a study on women's property and inheritance rights in Malawi, this paper discusses the role of District Assemblies in the administration and adjudication of women's inheritance claims. It shows that the whole system is a fertile ground for opportunism and contributes significantly to undermining such rights. The paper illustrates that while human rights legislation plays an important role in the upholding of women's rights, the realisation of these entitlements requires that critical attention be paid to the institutions and administrative systems that are responsible for implementation. It is through these operations of the state that people experience law as practice.
  • While it is recognised that women play fundamental roles in the socio-economic development of their communities, they are often excluded from local decision-making processes because their views are not solicited and their interests are not taken into consideration in the formulation of local development programmes. Drawing on case studies from Ghana, this article identifies the benefits to the communities of involving women more in decision making, and assesses the constraints upon and opportunities available to women who seek to assume community leadership functions. Strategies for promoting a more `constructive engagement' with women in the decision-making processes of rural communities are discussed.
  • The article shares some ideas about community-based natural resource management programmes (CBNRM), which focus on three areas: rural development, nature conservation, and strengthening of local governance. Arguing that the prerequisites of a successful CBNRM programme are a favourable legislative context, a self-defined community, and the absence of basic felt needs, the article discusses the initial experiences of such a programme in Mozambique. It shows the rather slow response of an inland community that has some forest resources, but which is focusing on economic gains with minimum engagement of its own. By contrast, a fishing community was immediately inspired by the programme, organising itself into co-management committees and starting to use its already over-fished resources sustainably. The two cases show that CBNRM programmes are not universal blueprints but have to be adapted to each specific situation.
  • This paper analyses the trends and major themes in the fields of home economics (HE) and gender and development (GAD) focusing on different regions of the world and on change over the course of recent history. The interface of these two fields of education and practice are encompassed by the work of an NGO, the International Federation for Home Economics (IFHE). IFHE can facilitate the renewal of stagnate relationships, challenge stereotypes, and build new partnerships to empower women and improve the quality of life. The authors suggest implications for education, practice, and research.

  • Since March 2000, in partnership with the Women's Centre of Montreal and other units at Montreal universities, McGill's Centre for Developing-Area Studies has carried out an action-research programme on gender and human security issues in the context of war and reconstruction. Our interdisciplinary team of researchers and activists has been working locally with women refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants from various countries experiencing armed conflict, and internationally with women's organisations primarily in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Combining human security - the protection of civilians across borders - and gender - the different ways in which women and men are affected -- allows us to analyse the impact of gender inequality on the continued insecurity in war-torn societies. Our action-research in a community - university alliance addresses the personal needs (especially untreated trauma) and rights of women while also examining the socio-economic and political context of violent conflicts.
  • Civil society is increasingly seen as a necessary element of sustainable human development. Some Northern NGOs hope to contribute to the development of civil society by partnering with Southern NGOs. Recent scholarship, however, shows that partnerships are frequently dominated by the Northern NGO, thus inhibiting the establishment of vibrant, locally owned and managed civil society organisations. This paper explores some of the practical reasons for this failure and suggests strategies for working within what Alan Fowler calls `authentic partnerships'. Such partnerships keep Northern NGOs from dominating and thus help foster a climate more amenable to the growth of civil society. Suggested strategies for promoting authentic partnerships address funding, working relationships, phase-out, advocacy, and evaluation of the partnership itself. The paper draws on a case study of the partnership work of the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC), a North American faith-based NGO.
  • This article examines the role of state in the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme in the northern province of Haryana in India. In the past two decades, significant developments pertaining to institutional reforms in promoting community - state partnerships in protecting and managing forests have been undertaken in the province. By reviewing the experiences in management of water- harvesting structures and lease of forest area to local communities, the article demonstrates that the adoption of `joint management' rhetoric does not guarantee successful partnerships at the field level. The implementation of the programme calls for a radical re-definition of the role of the state in order to establish credible commitments to the local communities in terms of both policy and practice.
  • Pastoralists are marginalised in the Horn of Africa and receive inadequate veterinary services. Under economic structural adjustment programmes, public veterinary services became increasingly ineffective and, in response, community-based NGO programmes were established in some pastoral areas. While these programmes were often considered to be effective, with few exceptions they were small scale, isolated from central government, and based on subsidised systems of drug distribution. Consequently, their sustainability was questionable. Governments now have incentives to improve veterinary services to pastoralists because of new possibilities for increasing livestock exports alongside new concerns about protecting consumers from livestock-related diseases. Current policy and institutional reform is encouraging a greater role for the private sector in service delivery but this is developing slowly, particularly in pastoral areas where future provision is likely to involve public - private partnerships.
  • This article explores the implementation of Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in the mining sector in Burkina Faso. It highlights key lessons from a project funded by DFID and Save the Children UK and implemented by COBUFADE, a Burkinabe NGO. Children were found to be important and capable actors in the fight against child labour, notably in research and lobbying, and the article explores the role that civil society can play in taking local voices to national policy makers and in linking the different actors implicated in Convention 182.
  • The British government has increasingly assumed the role of international arbiter and peacekeeper, both with and without a UN mandate. The hijacking of the moral high ground and recurrent assertion of global consensus - even in the presence of overwhelming opposition - reveals a disregard for the integrity of cultural diversity and opinion. Often `humanitarian' concerns have been used to justify military intervention, and the promise of aid is used to deflect dissent. Based on her experiences as an aid worker in post-conflict Kosovo, the author makes two central points. First, that the social, cultural, and institutional chaos precipitated by conflict is highly predictable and constitutes a powerful argument against military solutions. Second, that aid is not a universal panacea. It is a last resort and often, even with the best intentions, done badly. It should never be used to mask political imperatives.
  • In order to take up the challenge of responding to the thought-provoking insights found in The Selfish Altruist (Vaux 2001), the author brings together some of the threads in the book and combines them with her own psychological approaches to increasing self-awareness in order to put forward specific suggestions as to how personal development and self-awareness could be enhanced for both aid agency managers and frontline workers.
  • In 2002, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan established a Panel on UN Civil Society Relations, to which were appointed more than a dozen `eminent persons'. The establishment of this Panel was a signal that the UN at its highest levels recognised, rightly, that an opportunity was being lost for it to work more effectively with civil society, and to take more account of the views of civil society in the pursuit of human development.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This paper examines the excesses of the `audit culture' in relation to North-South development NGO partnerships. It argues that the focus on documentation needs to be reduced, and greater faith placed on personal interaction and judgement between Northern and Southern development NGO partners. In some circumstances, this is a strategy that can encourage more rigorous monitoring and accountability practices, which are able to move beyond a problematic focus on quantifiable targets. The paper draws attention to similar debates over the public sector in the UK, and the problems associated with micro-management in a culture of distrust.
  • In English only
  • In English only
  • In this interview, Rosemary Thorp, an expert on the political economy of Latin America and currently Oxfam GB Chair of Trustees, discusses the impact that decentralisation reforms have had in promoting development and deepening democratic governance in the region. Focusing in particular in the experiences of Chile and Colombia, Thorp argues that, while the process of democratic decentralisation is promising, it needs to overcome multiple challenges if it is to live up to its full potential. Some of the key factors that she identifies for decentralisation to be successful include an engaged political leadership, strong political parties, and capacity at the local level - all of which are often missing in the Latin American context.
  • This paper reviews the lessons of democratic decentralisation in Madhya Pradesh (MP), a poor and semi-feudal Indian state that emerged as a leader and bold experimenter in institutional design in the 1990s. Despite inauspicious beginnings, political leadership in MP set out to use decentralisation as a lever to expand and improve basic service delivery. The architects of the MP strategy were fully aware of the social and economic constraints, but they believed that through careful design, proper support to build social capital, and the achievement of early successes, the initiative could unlock powerful forces for community development. This article focuses on two initiatives, one to improve access to school and another to promote direct democracy at the village level. The authors find that, while the first phase of decentralisation has resulted in some significant improvements, especially in the area of education, the second stage has been far less successful.
  • The promotion of democracy has often been a top-down process characterised by assistance policies targeted toward the macro level. When bottom-up policies have been attempted, they too have tended to address professionalised NGOs, with scarce grassroots membership and contact. Only over the past few years have donors begun to implement programmes aimed at developing what can be called `micro-assistance' to democracy, defined as democracy assistance directed to small, often community-based, organisations in the field. This article describes the EU's micro-assistance to democracy in South Africa after 1994. The data gathered comes from interviews conducted with project officials and semi-structured interviews with all directors of Community-Based Organisations that have received funds from the EU. Some preliminary findings suggest that micro-assistance to democracy in South Africa responds to specific problems affecting local civil society, even though most of these organisations remain scarcely sustainable and their skills to influence local policies are limited.
  • Since Ghana's decentralisation process began in the early 1990s, government officials as well as international aid agencies and NGOs have engaged in efforts to enhance attention to women's concerns and improve gender sensitivity in development processes at the local level. This article looks at three collaborative projects between international development organisations and district assemblies throughout Ghana to promote gender sensitivity and increase the representation of women in local governance. Though, as the author suggests, it is still too early to assess whether such initiatives have succeeded, it is also clear that decentralisation efforts need to be accompanied by adequate resources and appropriate institutional support and capacity building if they are to make a difference.
  • This article analyses a decentralised transformative leadership pilot project launched by the UNDP to combat the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Nepal. The project aims to strengthen district leadership and participatory multi-sector planning, clarify the district government response, and create regional, nationwide, and international networks to effectively respond to HIV/AIDS. The goal is to create leaders who envisage possibilities and see opportunities previously unimagined, and bring voice to those previously unheard. Tracking the reports and follow-up comments of project participants, the authors find that the project has provided them with valuable tools and skills to act on their commitment to stem the disease, and it has contributed to learning lessons from a global perspective on what has and has not worked in HIV/AIDS responses to date.
  • This overview draws on selected theoretical and empirical works to explore the links between decentralisation and democracy and their impact on participation and empowerment at the local level. Understanding decentralisation as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, the author argues that its potential benefits can be realised only when complementary policies and specific national or local conditions are in place. In addition, it is also important to strike a balance between the local, regional, and national levels of government so as to protect local autonomy while also promoting a reasonable level of uniformity across regions. The essay draws from the author's fieldwork in Mozambique as well as decentralisation experiences in other developing countries.
  • This review essay analyses three recent works on the relationship between democracy and decentralisation, with a focus on local participation and empowerment: Democracy and Decentralisation in South Asia and West Africa: Participation, Accountability and Performance (Richard Crook and James Manor), Good Government in the Tropics (Judith Tendler), and a thematic issue of the European Journal of Development Research on `Democratic Decentralisation through a Natural Resource Lens: Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America', edited by Anne M. Larson and Jesse C. Ribot.
  • The authors examine the role of international faith-based NGOs in foreign aid and development assistance for Africa, with special reference to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). The MCC is successful in its contribution to development and empowerment in the 20 African countries in which it works because of its philosophical and programmatic focus on accountability, its holistic approach to basic rights, and a `listen and learn' approach which embraces empowerment and social justice. Although a `small is beautiful' philosophy does not necessarily feed the `quick fix' methods associated with the New Policy Agenda, it remains the most effective, efficient, accountable, and grassroots-responsive way of dealing with development issues.
  • The author highlights the contributions of four Latin American thinkers and activists in relation to communication for social change. Arguing that development activities are about communicating on various levels, and are deeply embedded in the cultures of those involved, involving significant inter-cultural issues. The author draws on his own extensive experience in these fields, and distils a set of principles and lessons for wider application.
  • This article focuses on the importance, complexity and ambiguity of the symbolic terrain both in everyday life and in social struggle. Taking Mayan women's traditional dress or traje as a text, the author reflects upon the multiple and contested meanings this evokes, and argues that Mayan women are playing a role which has not received sufficient analysis or recognition within the Mayan movement's struggle for indigenous identity and rights. Opening with a brief theoretical overview, the article goes on to analyse the different meanings in dispute and how these are related to wider issues, and concludes with a reflection concerning the challenges facing inter-ethnic relations and the recognition of indigenous peoples in Guatemala.
  • NGOs and social activists run the risk of following the policy directions favoured by foreign donor agencies to the detriment of their own organisational and moral capacity to act in solidarity with those whose interests they claim to support. With specific reference to Tanzania, the author argues that while NGOs readily take action to protect their own interests, they do not consistently stand up for the basic freedoms of working people. In a unipolar era, which holds that the age of politics and international solidarity is over, it is vital for NGOs and other social activists to keep alive the belief that an alternative to the existing world is both necessary and possible.
  • The measurement of impact is difficult in development work as it entails attributing longterm social, personal, and community change, to relatively small-scale short-term interventions in a community's life. This paper examines the experience of the Australian NGO Oxfam Community Aid Abroad in measuring its impact in two of its operational regions, India and Sri Lanka. The findings highlight the importance both of participation and `downward' accountability mechanisms, and of linking local-level activities within a broad regional, national, and global context.
  • Children under the age of 18 years represent the largest group of the poor in Uganda (62 per cent). Their perspective has not, to date, been incorporated in the many poverty analyses which have been conducted. The survey reported in this paper asked children between the ages of 10-14 years about their perceptions of poverty, and also about the effectiveness of local government in addressing issues of concern to them. The survey found that children have a different perspective on poverty from that of the adult key informants consulted in our sample; they have a positive view of their own potential role in mitigating poverty, and are highly critical of the current performance of local government.
  • The role of Northern-based civil society organisations has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. In particular, their principal role as `redistributive' agencies working in the South has come under criticism, leading them to seek new ways of defining their part in eradicating poverty. One widely adopted strategy has been an increasing emphasis on advocacy for social justice, while another is the creation of partnerships with non-state and state actors, including the private sector. Such partnerships raise some difficult questions relating to the underlying values and civic legitimacy of the action, in particular of Northern-based development NGOs. This paper examines the question of partnership between civil society organisations and business through a case study of the `Economy of Communion', a global project bringing together small businesses and church-based organisations whose shared aim is that of eradicating poverty.
  • Issues related to democratic restructuring and citizenship at the municipal level in Latin America have been the subject of increasing interest and debate among scholars and development practitioners in recent years. This study investigates how international cooperation may facilitate enhanced citizen participation in local-level decision making in the region through examination of a specific Canadian-sponsored linking project involving the cities of Charlesbourg, Quebec (Canada) and Ovalle (Chile). The study presents a relatively optimistic account of the role which innovations transferred as a result of this project have played in enhancing citizen involvement in local government. At the same time, it suggests that any such gains may be limited and must be viewed within the larger politico-administrative context in Latin America and attendant factors restricting the establishment of a broad democratic culture at the local level.
  • There are large potential synergies from collaboration between a research and an operational organisation, such as an NGO, but explicit collaborations between them are not common. This Practical Note examines the institutional partnership between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and CARE-USA, as a concrete illustration of the difficulties and potential benefits of such a collaboration. It gives examples of the gaps in organisational orientation that can lead to problems, provides ideas about how to bridge those gaps, and highlights what bumps to expect along the way in constructing a productive collaboration.
  • In English only
  • Redressing the inherited inequalities of apartheid has established a complex and challenging context for meeting basic needs in contemporary South Africa. Given the physical and political segregation of apartheid, meeting the demand for housing has been a central development challenge since 1994. But even as local government has been drawn into more responsibility in this area, it must do so while managing complex relationships with private sector actors seeking access to basic service delivery previously associated with the public sector. The result is that not only has the structure of local government been dramatically reformed since 1994, it has also acquired a new responsibility to enable markets to work in the name of poverty alleviation.
  • Project monitoring and evaluation in Africa have traditionally depended on the `expert' knowledge of `professional' evaluators to develop so-called SMART indicators. But this expert knowledge has not permeated the various implementing agencies - which include communities themselves. The result has been sporadic and unreliable data and weak monitoring and evaluation frameworks. In Zimbabwe, these difficulties have inhibited the development and establishment of a social statistical database. One weak area of social statistics is information on children. Since 1995, UNICEF Zimbabwe has worked with communities to produce up-to-date and relevant statistics through projects such as the Sentinel Site Surveillance Survey and more recently the development of a village register that will contain simple but vital programme indicators. This paper seeks to document and highlight the thinking on these exercises and the challenges faced by both UNICEF and the communities thus far.
  • Within Australia, State employment programmes are an essential means of attempting to redress the substantial social and economic disadvantages experienced by indigenous Australians, particularly at the community level. While such programmes expend large sums of money, the social and economic outcomes for indigenous Australians remain far below that of the non-indigenous. This paper argues that an important constraint to indigenous human development arises as a result of institutional racism within a range of responsible public sector agencies at all three levels of government within the Australian federal system. The results of an evaluation of the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) within a remote indigenous community are presented. This serves to illustrate how the exclusion of indigenous people from the design and delivery stages of key government programmes has the potential to result in substantial misallocation of funding from purposes meant to assist in the alleviation of indigenous social and economic disadvantage.
  • Throughout the world, deeply entrenched barriers exclude women from meaningful participation in socio-economic and political activities. This is not merely an issue of fairness and equality. It has been argued that by expanding women's opportunities, society as a whole would simultaneously be strengthened and this would enhance broader development prospects. Recently, a wide variety of international initiatives have been developed to expand women's opportunities. One such programme is the funding of heifer projects for women. Using data from the Red Cross, this study examines the potential of heifer projects to expand women's opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • From mid-1999 to mid-2001, the authors carried out a qualitative study in rural Vietnam to explore relationships between gender equity and reproductive health. One of the study's objectives was to develop culturally appropriate indicators of women's empowerment, specific to the Vietnamese context. This paper describes the process of developing, testing, and refining the empowerment indicators, presents some of the findings, and discusses the methodological challenges entailed. The paper concludes by recommending a set of Vietnam-specific domains for assessing women's empowerment in social and economic spheres of life and in reproductive health.
  • This paper examines participatory processes in an Asian Development Bank (ADB) technical assistance package in Thailand's water resources sector. The authors analyse various levels of social interaction in the local community, in meso-level stakeholder consultations, and in opposition to ADB's environment programmes expressed by civil society organisations. While participatory approaches are employed to promote more bottom-up management regimes in water resources, the authors find that local power and gender differences have been overlooked. Evolving institutions of resource governance are constituted by gender, reproducing gender inequalities such as regarding water intended for agricultural use as a `male' resource. Finally, it is argued that understandings and practices of participation legitimise particular agendas especially in a politically polarised arena.
  • Since the 11 September 2001 attacks on targets in the USA, debates concerning the situation of women in the Muslim world have tended to focus on the extent to which they are victims of religious dogma. Like any other religion, Islam can be oppressive towards women; however, working women are not affected only by religious factors. This paper reviews women's experiences in Indonesia and Iran, countries in which Islamist movements have taken a leading role in the government. In the former, the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s precipitated civil unrest and brought an Islamist government to power. Since then, female employment in Indonesia appears to have been affected more by the economic crisis than by the Islamist movement, which was itself a by-product of the crisis. In Iran, it might have been expected that women's formal employment would have declined after two decades of Islamisation, but in fact it has increased. A review of these two cases shows that the impact of the rise of political Islam is complex and cannot be captured by simple stereotypes.
  • The May 2000 coup in Fiji prompted a flight of capital from the country's garment industry. As workers lost their jobs, attention turned away from improving wages and conditions to retaining garment factory jobs in the country. What can feminist researchers contribute in a climate of high capital mobility that prohibits organising for a living wage? This paper applies Amartya Sen's idea of women's `fallback positions' in relation to their husbands to an exploration of women's `marriage' to capital. An exploration of the lives of women garment factory workers beyond the workplace reveals the potential to enhance women's negotiating power in relation to their employers - by boosting women's individual and collective assets, their access to support from state and NGOs, to other income-earning means, and to social support systems upon which to call for assistance.
  • This article focuses on the challenge and effects of adhering to community participation as a principle of community development and the related issue of reflecting diverse representation in prevention and health promotion planning. As a requirement of funding agencies, the consequences of upholding these principles in light of the resources made available are explored. Information is drawn from a case study of an advisory committee with diverse membership. A participatory evaluation of this committee illuminates the difficulties encountered when a community agency initiated a health promotion project to address the needs of women who are non-verbal and at risk of sexual assault. Suggestions are made as to how these difficulties may be overcome. The advisory committee is a common means for community development but also has the potential to be a model for increased communication and understanding.
  • Mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS is not just about adapting NGO programmes, but involves adapting partnerships. Working in a context of high HIV/AIDS prevalence has a considerable organisational impact on implementing NGOs. As staff, or relatives of staff, fall sick there is more time off work, declining work performance, increased medical costs, and extra training and recruitment costs. Simply to maintain capacity, NGOs will have to invest in changes to their staff planning, training and awareness programmes, health policies, and financial management. It will necessarily cost more money to achieve the same work output and these activities will have less impact (as a proportion of beneficiaries may also be sick and dying). Providing effective support for NGO partners affected by HIV/AIDS therefore has major and difficult implications for donors, particularly at a time when their own back-donors are demanding visible `value-for-money'. Mainstreaming into partnerships requires that both partners change - can we rise to this professional and moral challenge?
  • In 1993, the international community acknowledged for the first time that violence against women (VAW) is a human rights issue, while VAW is also increasingly recognised both as a global public health issue and a barrier to sustainable development. However, even where they are committed to reducing VAW through their programmes and advocacy activities, development practitioners are sometimes unsure about where this fits into the poverty reduction agenda. This article tries to situate VAW in the poverty discourse, drawing from a range of documentary sources to outline the conceptual links between VAW, poverty, and human development. It then goes on to look at issues surrounding the impact assessment of programmes aimed at reducing VAW, and offers examples of how specific programmes have been evaluated.
  • In English only
  • In English only.
  • This essay reviews the often heated controversies unleashed by the 2002 publication of Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and recipient of the2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. His critique of IMF policies and other economic orthodoxies, particularly in Russia and South Asia, has since come to be accepted more widely among mainstream economists. The author argues, however, that while Stiglitz is sympathetic to some of the arguments made by the so-called `anti-globalisation' movement, his views are far from the radical end of the spectrum.
  • Participatory approaches have become increasingly popular in international development. Although traditionally associated with small non-governmental projects they are increasingly used by governmental and international organisations such as the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank. This article - focusing on a small health agent project in Amazonas Brazil - challenges the assumption that participation inexorably empowers and argues that culturally inappropriate participation may be used to legitimise prescriptive intervention.
  • This work presents a product development methodology for use with indigenous rural workers. It is based on the revival of cultural and social values, with a focus on the conservation of natural resources. Illustrated by the case of Mixtec craftswomen in Mexico, this paper shows how poor groups can improve their living conditions through innovation and the diversification of their products. The process combines techniques of product development based on marketing, with a participatory focus and continuous improvement, in order to develop a unique and high-quality product that can be more successfully marketed. The craftswomen are now able to plan their production and can evaluate and commercialise their products.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Proyecto Tequisquiapan (PT) provides protective microfinance services in a small region of rural Mexico, including, importantly, open access deposit facilities. The authors report on new research which examined PT's record in enabling people with different degrees of vulnerability to build assets and protect themselves from both sudden shocks and more predictable demands for lump sums of cash. PT was found to be relatively more useful for the most vulnerable households. Its successes rely on its small scale and on the commitment of its staff, whose salaries are subsidised, to innovation and experimentation in order to remain relevant to members' changing and differentiated financial lifeworlds. This stands in contrast to the current trend towards large-scale commercialised microfinance. The World Bank, the authors argue, should take note.
  • This paper explores the development issue of democratisation from a gendered perspective, emphasising the need to look for the building blocks of democracy within civil society sectors where women play a key role. Chilean and Argentinean women prove an important example for sustainable political development through their roles as Mothers, particularly in the 1980s in the movements to protest political disappearances. The author seeks to demonstrate how these women's practical endeavours have made them an indispensable ingredient in the achievement of real democratic development at the grassroots level, and how they serve as a model for policy makers in developing countries elsewhere.
  • The evaluation of development NGOs has seldom considered their impact on social capital and local organisational learning. Deeply intertwined, both are key dimensions of the long-term impact of development interventions. Studies have highlighted the relative success of NGOs in poverty reduction, but have been critical of the sustainability of the benefits and of NGOs' failure to strengthen institutions. This paper analyses the experience of a sustainable natural resources management project coordinated by CARE in Villa Serrano, Bolivia, between 1993 and 2000. The article compares the outcome of a traditional evaluation with that of an impact evaluation, which allows us to identify significant flaws. The article concludes by reflecting on the limitations of traditional intervention approaches and on the need to rethink the strategic role of NGOs.
  • Social researchers continue to grasp for critical factors that foster or impede the development of social capital. This article highlights some of these factors based on an investigation of a low-income urban settlement in Guatemala. Community activists and leaders, elected representatives, regional government service providers, local residents, NGO directors and staff, and other key informants living and working within the designated locality indicated a complex and diverse range of social, cultural, political, and economic issues that contributed to low levels of `broad-based' social capital. Long-standing fears related to violence and corruption within a historically top-down, authoritarian state were the most significant factors impeding social capital, social organising, and civic participation. Northern-led service-providing NGOs in the area also curbed `broad-based' social capital by fostering dependency through intervention strategies that were external, top-down, non-participatory, and not community based.
  • Donors face many issues when trying to support development goals in large regions such as Latin America. In their attempts to channel assistance to appropriate end-users, they also have to provide coherence with national strategy, balance supply and demand of technical resources, and ensure accountability to their taxpayers. Resolution of these issues requires considerable focus and a clear understanding of all relevant factors. This is particularly so for, but not exclusive to, small donors. This paper provides agencies with a model to assess regional involvement and create a decision-making framework for future investments. It places the quality of aid above the quantity of donation.
  • Although participatory research methodologies have been widely advocated, most projects do not involve the radical reversal of approach implied. Though defined in theory, participatory research is hard to implement and more precise description is therefore required at the practical level. Here, we describe a participatory research project on agroforestry tree domestication undertaken in the Meru area of Kenya. Continuous interaction between participants allowed the project to evolve from a tree species suitability test, to a species saturation study, and finally to a perception of tree species diversity survey. By allowing evolution through interaction, research results more relevant to the actual needs of farmers were obtained.

  • By the turn of the twenty-first century, UNDP had embraced a new form of funding based on ‘cost-sharing’, with this source accounting for 51 per cent of the organisation’s total expenditure worldwide in 2000. Unlike the traditional donor - recipient relationship so common with development projects, the new cost-sharing modality has created a situation whereby UNDP local offices become ‘subcontractors’ and agencies of the recipient countries become ‘clients’. This paper explores this transition in the context of Brazil, focusing on how the new modality may have compromised UNDP’s ability to promote Sustainable Human Development, as established in its mandate. The great enthusiasm for this modality within the UN system and its potential application to other developing countries increase the importance of a systematic assessment of its impact and developmental consequences.
  • The abrupt closure of the WTO Summit in Cancún in September 2003 without any formal agreement dealt a powerful blow to what had been designated as the ‘development round’ in Doha in 2001—and with it to the promise that the concerns of most interest to developing countries would for the first time take precedence in international trade discussions. In this interview, Adrian Lovett, Campaigns and Communications Director of Oxfam GB, talks about the collapse of the summit and about what the future of international trade negotiations may hold. While in many ways Cancún was a missed opportunity, Lovett also argues that the enhanced assertiveness of developing countries may mean that there is now a better chance that the failed negotiations lead to rules that work for the poor as well as the rich.
  • Women’s development has been and shows every likelihood of continuing to be compromised by unsustainable policies, plans, and programmes regarding human settlements. Gender inequalities harm well-being and hinder development. Women and girls, especially the poor, bear the brunt of these inequalities. To attain the objectives of sustainable development of satisfying needs and meeting development goals, to which the international community has repeatedly committed itself, sustainability itself has to be engendered through gender mainstreaming.
  • The pro-poor agenda sees the dissemination of research findings as fundamental to ensuring that research helps contribute to poverty alleviation. In recent years this has led to a substantial growth in intermediary services, such as ‘infomediaries’ (1), networks and websites. Yet the pathway to, and actual uptake by, the ‘poor’ continues to elude practitioners, researchers and policy-makers alike. This article draws out the key lessons of recent dissemination experience, and sets out a new challenge to maximise research impacts: the support of the poor in exerting their own perspectives (and demand) for knowledge-based services.
  • Since July 1999, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at the request of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Kosovo Force (KFOR), has undertaken the implementation of the Information Counselling and Referral Service (ICRS, which aimed to provide support mechanisms for demobilised Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) combatants in their return to post-conflict society. This Practical Note is based on the findings of a research project funded by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to assess the initial impact of this reintegration process.
  • Conceived by nurses in the hospital of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, and inspired by Norwegian People's Aid, the international aid agency of the Australian trade unions was designed to give a genuine material base to solidarity with national liberation struggles. Bridging the difficult division in Australian labour politics between the Catholic Right and the social democratic and pro-Moscow Lefts, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad (now Union Aid Abroad, APHEDA) was able to channel funds from unions and the Australian government to agriculture, health, and vocational training projects in southern Africa, Eritrea, Palestine, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Kanaky. Unlike most counterpart organisations in Europe and the USA, its earlier partners were rarely trade unions. In the last decade, emphasis has turned to work with trade unions: on gender equality, literacy, cooperatives, HIV, and occupational and environmental health. Only recently has APHEDA directly supported trade union training in Cambodia, East Timor, and Indonesia, under pressure from Australian unions, who see workers' rights in neighbouring countries as crucial to their own fate. Yet unions in advanced capitalist countries don't spontaneously understand the humanitarian and development needs of countries, such as Papua New Guinea, where waged workers are a small minority of the population. Unionisation is only one part of the solution. The April 2000 Durban congress of the ICFTU called for trade unions to `organise the unorganised', such as informal-sector workers, and to build alliances with NGOs and civil society around shared values. As a trade union NGO, APHEDA is located in the middle of a challenging intersection. Mandated to educate Australian workers on globalisation issues, APHEDA finds itself often more partisan than other international development NGOs in Australia, sometimes more circumspect. With reactionary national governments since the mid 1990s, attacks on union rights, and the increasing share of the Australian aid budget delivered through/to high-profit companies, APHEDA faces decisions about its independence, alliances, direction, and sustainability.
  • Founded in 1951, War on Want is a UK-based NGO committed to the alleviation of poverty with strong roots in the labour movement. War on Want's programme on The Global Workplace provides trade unionists with a range of practical skills and knowledge about international development issues. Part of the programme involves a `Global Workers' Forum', which takes grassroots trade union activists from the UK to a similar sector or even a plant owned by the same employer in the South. The aim is to enhance participants' understanding of the impact of globalisation on the industries in which they work, establish relationships that can act as starting points for global action, and encourage participants to spread the message within their own unions. There is also a website which raises awareness of the global economy and encourages activists to make links and undertake joint action. It is essential that now, as never before, trade unionists should work together as an international force to challenge globalisation and fight for the recognition of workers' rights. The Global Workplace suggests that showing global solidarity to workers around the world can help trade unionists rise to this challenge.
  • This paper argues that the NGO position on global labour rights is mistaken. NGOs' concerns over race and gender inequalities and their rejection of the primacy of class in today's global, capitalist economy have frustrated the project of incorporating labour rights into the global free trade regime. Trade unions, meanwhile, are one of the few agencies dedicated to dissolving class inequalities, especially between workers in the North and the South. Until NGOs rethink their position on class, trade unions are the only agency capable of pushing the labour rights agenda forward.
  • This article considers the problems of organisational survival, innovation, and inter-organisational partnerships for unions and for immigrant community-based organisations. The analysis focuses on the Citizenship Project, a project for assisting and organising Mexican immigrants, launched in 1995 by Teamsters Local 890 in response to the assault on immigrant rights in California. It concludes that new community-based partner organisations sponsored by existing unions can be one effective response to these problems if the participants establish and sustain an appropriate balance of autonomy and accountability. The article also traces the development of a radical and expansive notion of citizenship by the Citizenship Project, and a related set of methods that integrate organising with service delivery, labelled `citizenship work'. It recommends that non-profit tax-exempt support centres be established at labour centres, labour councils, and international unions in order to lower the costs of such innovation for local unions.
  • In the early 1980s, support for trade unions was a significant component of Oxfam GB's programmes in various parts of the world, most notably Central America and South Africa. In Central America, this was motivated both because organised labour played an important role in popular movements that were pressing for equitable political settlements to the wars ravaging the region, and because unions as such, as well as their members and leaders, were the targets of repression and political violence. This article explores the background to the rise in funding for unions in Honduras, reflects on this experience, and discusses some of the factors that might change a potentially awkward donor-recipient relationship to one of dialogue and solidarity.
  • Between 1991 and 2002, the international anti-sweatshop movement experienced significant growth. A series of interconnecting international networks developed, involving trade unions and NGOs in campaigns to persuade particular transnational corporations (TNCs) to ensure that labour rights are respected in the production of their goods. While the loose, networked form of organisation that characterises the movement has helped it to grow and progress despite its diverse constituency, arguably a lack of coordination has undermined its ability to achieve policy change. There is a need to develop new forms of global cooperation in order to avoid fractures within the movement and the loss of impetus.
  • Reviewed by Luz María de la Mora, Trade Representative of the Mexican Ministry of Economy at the EU, Brussels
  • In English only
  • In English only
  • The challenges posed by economic globalisation make it imperative that civil society organisations break down the barriers that have traditionally divided them, in order to ensure that the rights of those who are marginalised or vulnerable are kept firmly on the international agenda. In particular, globalisation brings fresh impetus to the need to forge alliances between the trade union movement and NGOs concerned with social and economic development. While there is plenty of evidence of successful cooperation, major problems, fears, suspicions, and at times hostilities remain between them. Some of these are substantial and sharp policy differences, but others are the consequence of colliding political or organisational cultures, prejudices, financial competition, and a mutual lack of understanding of respective roles and objectives. Debates surrounding the organisation of workers in the informal economy, including the ILO discussion in June 2002, provide a useful case study.
  • Trade unions in India work mainly with workers in formal employment, particularly in the public sector. However, most people in India work in the informal economy, and their needs are attended mainly by voluntary agencies or NGOs. Economic globalisation and the policies associated with it are resulting in the increasing informalisation of work; as representatives of working people, unions and agencies alike are being further marginalised. Paradoxically, this situation is encouraging these organisations to overcome the mutual mistrust that has characterised relations between them in the past, and to join forces in order to pool their strengths. This article describes the background and current situation in general terms before presenting a case study of the National Centre for Labour (NCL), an apex body of labour organisations of all kinds working in the informal sector in India. Its members include unions and agencies active among workers in the construction industry, as well as in forestry, fishing, and domestic work. Such collaboration has not only enhanced the effectiveness of both the unions and the agencies, but has also increased the unions' representative character.
  • This article describes an action-research project which has the multiple objectives of mapping the range of home-based work in different countries, investigating the ways in which such work is embodied in local or international production chains, and developing a methodology which will facilitate the establishment of sustainable organisations of home-based workers. The article focuses mainly on Latin America and in Eastern Europe, though the project is also active in India and has begun to explore the possibilities of working in China.
  • The garment and textile factories and assembly plants in the Central American free trade zones, known as the maquila industry, have given rise to new actors on the labour scene, as women's organisations and local monitoring groups now work alongside the traditional trade union sector. Furthermore, some of these new organisations are linked to networks based elsewhere, mainly in the USA and Europe, and are actively involved in transnational campaigns to improve working conditions in the maquila. To date, attempts between trade unions and these new labour actors to collaborate have been disappointing and often characterised by conflict. Challenging the idea that trade unions and NGOs are in competition for the same limited `space', by looking at the relations between trade unions and women organisations, this paper asks whether such conflicts are inevitable, and suggests ways in which the two kinds of organisations could work together to improve the conditions of workers in Central America.
  • Concern about working conditions in a global supply chain has brought unions and NGOs in the North around the same table. Collaborative initiatives include campaigns such as the European-wide Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) and ethical trade forums, like the UK Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI). Relationships have not always been easy. Unions and NGOs have different ways of working, and there have been insensitivities on both sides. What we see emerging, however, are new forms of labour internationalism which can respond in effective ways to the threat that globalised production poses to workers rights.
  • The author describes the evolution of the garment-manufacturing sector in the district of Totonicapán in the Guatemalan highlands, an area long associated with weaving and related skills. Producers have been shrewd in finding ways to take advantage of changes in the global economy, for instance by importing cheaper fabrics from Asia to reduce the cost of the final products. Producers have thus been able to exploit the domestic and regional market niche for lower-cost garments than are available in the department stores, adapting their output to respond to fashions and trends. This adaptability has in turn generated more local employment and wealth among home-based workers and village workers, as well as among townspeople and traders, and a high level of self-employment. Paradoxically, a factor that has contributed to this situation - as opposed to becoming involved in maquila production - is that the failure of unions to organise the workers in the 1960s eventually brought about more equitable relations between the traditional elite and their former employees and a higher level of mutual dependence than exists in the maquila.
  • This article explores the implementation of Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in Honduras. It highlights key lessons learned from a joint Save the Children Fund-UK and Ministry of Labour project. These lessons are of relevance to similar projects addressing the application of child labour legislation and to projects focusing on institutional strengthening and children's participation. The article examines the centrality of partnership and ownership, and the value of child-centred approaches. It also explores the capacity of NGOs to engage in national and regional level government, and the importance of linking national, regional, and local-level initiatives.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. The debate over workplace codes of conduct has created tensions between trade unions and human rights NGOs. These tensions result from the inherent structural differences between interest-driven trade unions and ideals-driven human righst NGOs. The differences play themselves out in how these actors pursue social justice in a globalised economy. Human rights NGOs tend to see codes of conduct as a method to prevent violations, akin to their traditional work on legal reform and human rights monitoring. Trade unions assess codes for their potential to help empower workers, especially to help ensure freedom of association, which will lead to the realisation of participatory rights. In our understanding of human rights as a means of empowerment for vulnerable groups, we argue that the trade union perspective on human rights is a good long-term approach. Short-term successes, such as improving working conditions through outside patronage, seem useful only to the extent they serve this long-term goal.

  • In the context of globalisation, transnational social regulation is increasingly the product of NGOs intervening in the sphere of global trade. Drawing on empirical research in SE Asia, the author contends that what matters as much as codes of conduct are spillover effects whose force extends beyond building walls into the broader society of the host country. The basis for effective labour law lies within states, and activism must focus on improving legal, political, and social conditions for workers in the host countries, rather than on trying to affect corporate behaviour through consumer pressure.
  • The proliferation of corporate codes of conduct generates both alliance and tension between trade unions and NGOs that deal with workers' rights in the global economy. Alliance, because trade unions and NGOs share a common desire to halt abusive behaviour by multinational companies and a broader goal of checking corporate power in the global economy. Tension, because unions and NGOs have differing institutional interests, different analyses of problems and potential solutions, and different ways of thinking and talking about social justice in the global economy. There are fears that codes of conduct may be used to undermine effective labour law enforcement by governmental authorities and undermine workers' power in trade unions. The substance behind the rhetoric on this new generation of corporate codes of conduct is certainly open to question. However, this paper argues that, given unions' weak presence in the global assembly line and the rapid-response capabilities of many NGOs, such codes are a valuable asset. Trade unions and NGOs still have more in common with each other than either has with corporations, governments, or international organisations that see free trade and free-flowing capital as the solution to low labour standards. But both need to be clear-eyed about their differences and their proper roles as they navigate the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
  • Workers face tremendous challenges in their fight to organise, both in terms of personal risk and the sheer number of obstacles. Overcoming such challenges requires multiple strategies and broad-ranging collaboration. In this article we begin by reviewing the repression workers face. We then look at how voluntary workplace codes might help workers organise. Using the SA8000 standard as an example, we look at some of the elements that could be most useful in organising workers. Finally, we look at a collaborative project between the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation and Social Accountability International to develop a training programme that not only helps workers understand how to use codes to their benefit but also builds on their current organising and education strategies.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this `double divide'. The first is a combination of organisations, including unions and NGOs in both North and South, that are focusing on blatant violations of the dignity of workers in apparel export processing zones in the South. This `basic rights complex' has resulted in important victories. A second complex of organisations, also involving unions and NGOs in both North and South, has raised broad macro issues of governance focusing particularly on the anti-democratic character of current proposals for a free trade area of the Americas. Neither of these complexes is without its weaknesses, but each makes it clear that bridging the double divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as work in progress.

  • Human rights NGOs were the vanguard of the struggle for democratisation in Nigeria, but they had to forge alliances with labour unions and other groups to galvanise this process effectively. This paper explores the alliances between labour unions and NGOs in the struggle against military dictatorship in Nigeria to analyse how horizontal relationships have fared in exchanges within civil society. It argues that the exigencies of sustained political struggle throw up conflicts over issues of participation, accountability, and egalitarianism that in turn promote social capital within civil society by mitigating hierarchically structured and asymmetrical patterns of exchange among its members.
  • This paper examines the relationship between workers in the health sector and users of health services as seen through two case studies of trade unions and NGOs working together, one in Malaysia and the other in South Africa. In spite of a history of tensions between these two types of organisations, when they work together effectively, the results can be influential. The Malaysia Citizens' Health Initiative has set up a separate organisation and now has the power to mediate differences between trade unions, NGOs, and the government. The partnership between the Treatment Action Campaign and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in South Africa is providing a unified voice demanding government action on HIV/AIDS.
  • With the passage of the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act in the UK, a system of vouchers for all new asylum seekers was to be introduced from April 2000. These vouchers were widely regarded as iniquitous in that they discriminated against an already vulnerable sector of society. A unique coalition between two NGOs (Oxfam GB and the Refugee Council) and a trade union (the Trade and General Workers' Union - TGWU) led to a concerted campaign against the voucher scheme that included a range of media work, political lobbying, and public awareness raising. The voucher scheme was eventually scrapped. This article draws various practical lessons on how to develop successful collaborative relationships across different social sectors. The author concludes that the principal lesson is not that NGOs must work with trade unions, but that by working with others, united by a common goal, they can challenge injustice effectively and make a difference to people's lives.
  • A comparison of trade unions and NGOs in Iran demonstrates the diverse nature of their activities. Over the last 90 years, trade unions have played important roles in changing the political system in that country. However, unions are largely male- dominated organisations, which explains why some women have begun to organise women's trade unions. This article focuses, however, on the activities of women's NGOs, which are engaged in improving the socio-economic conditions of the most marginalised sectors of society. Their activities are limited and they are not engaged in structural change. However, they are challenging gender-specific access and influence over institutional power, matters that are crucial to the process of democratisation. It is argued that, since many trade unions and NGOs in Iran are strengthening community-based institutions in different ways, their collaboration would have a mutually transformational impact which would turn these organisations into more powerful forces in the process of democratisation.
  • Trade unions are typified as having `two faces'--one of social justice and the other of vested interest. This article examines the tensions and difficulties confronted by trade union movements in the South Pacific seeking to balance the `two faces' of unionism during a period of political and economic instability in the region. It looks at the difficult choices trade union movements in Papua New Guinea, the Fiji Islands, and the Solomon Islands have had to make to preserve their interests in response to sweeping microeconomic reforms and how they have sought to work with civil society organisations to restore political and social stability. The paper draws out some tentative lessons that may enable South Pacific unions to better respond to these difficult challenges.
  • This article describes the legal frameworks governing trade unions and NGOs in Ukraine, with the latter defined very much as organisations working for the benefit of their members and other citizens sharing the same interests rather than as philanthropic organisations whose mission is to assist others. Trade unions and NGOs are encouraged to collaborate in areas where their interests coincide, and the article describes two recent programmes - one to promote more sport and physical activity among the Ukrainian population in order to address declining health statistics, and the other to address the needs of the growing number of people with disabilities in the country - in which such collaboration has been central.
  • In 1987-1988, a national debate erupted in Canada on the desirability of entering into a free trade agreement with the USA and its potential effect on Canadian culture, society, and national sovereignty - as well as its economy. A national coalition of labour unions and civil society groups emerged to oppose such an agreement with the USA, and later its expansion to Mexico as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The coalition was hailed by members as a ground-breaking alliance between labour unions and civil society, as well as a new grassroots challenge to the neo-liberal economic policies of the government at the time. The experience led to a longer-term pattern of collaboration between unions and NGOs in Canada, but the coalition also experienced difficulties in reconciling the different approaches and goals of participants, which were resolved with varying degrees of success. This paper discusses the coalition in relation to gendered attitudes and practices; issues of representation and accountability; different approaches to organisation, hierarchy, leadership, and decision making; resource conflicts; class-based versus new views of challenge and social movements; and views within the Canadian labour movement on coalition work with civil society groups.
  • In English only
  • The authors analyse the experience of Tostan, a Senegalese NGO, with the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal, the Sudan, and Mali. Tostan uses nonformal, participatory methodologies to support village-based social change, especially in the areas of human rights and womens health. Following Tostans educational programme, some communities have declared a moratorium on the practice of FGC and have mobilised their families and villages to discontinue its use. This article describes the process used, considers issues that have arisen as the concept is marketed and disseminated beyond Senegal, and reviews implications for grassroots policy initiatives.
  • This paper draws on five case studies to explore potential benefits and barriers to horizontal networking to promote impact monitoring and assessment of microfinance. Its main aim is to stimulate further discussion of this issue, but it also draws tentative conclusions about factors likely to contribute towards success. In particular, experience from Honduras suggests that network organisations can work most effectively when they facilitate wider use of impact assessment (IA) activities already piloted by a lead member of the network.
  • This paper evaluates the pertinence of interventions sponsored by aid agencies that seek to meet the security needs of women in post-reconstruction Rwanda. Personal security, economic security, and socio-political security are used as the main methodological reference marks and indicators. The information and data used in the paper were gathered during several visits to Rwanda in 2001 and 2002. The study reveals that efforts have brought about positive impacts on the lives of women. However, findings also show that specific strategies aimed at increasing womens security would better benefit them if they were more consistently planned so as to take into consideration the ways in which issues of poverty, gender, and security intersect.

    This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • Smallholder farmers in developing economies face a range of marketing and exchange problems. This article concerns the organisation of vegetable markets in Ghana, in which transactions are characterised by uncertainty, mistrust and undeveloped buyer-seller relationships. It recommends adopting written standard form contracts to improve buyer-seller exchange and suggests key contractual features. Contracts furnish major advantages over existing verbal agreements by specifying the terms of an agreement by which performance can be measured and improving business attitudes and enhancing moral obligation.
  • A recent increase of publications, training courses, conferences, and policy statements on rights-based approaches shows the importance being attached to the concept by development professionals. Despite this, there is no universally agreed definition of what constitutes a rights-based approach, nor do the implications of adopting such an approach appear to have been comprehensively questioned. This article seeks to explore some of the key issues associated with the adoption of a rights-based approach that are relevant to NGOs.
  • This paper reports on some of the generic findings arising from research being undertaken in the UK, South Africa, and Uganda into the ways in which the management tools currently promoted by official donors are passed down the aid chain, through UK NGOs, to civil society organisations in the South. The increasing competition for donor funds is both squeezing out the smaller NGOs, and also setting an increasingly standardised approach, with the resulting loss in diversity. More disturbingly, NGOs at all levels are increasingly secretive about their own shortcomings, and reluctant to voice their concerns about what is happening, for fear of losing their funding. This environment, and the attitudes it fosters, are not conducive to learning; allow for donor-defined paradigms and priorities to dominate; and threaten to destroy the values and strengths that NGOs can, at their best, bring to development.
  • Development projects are under pressure to deliver positive gender changes. This paper provides a practical example of how one project in Tanzania attempted to meet this demand. It details how a conventional technical project developed its own understanding of what it is to be gender sensitive, and identified gender concerns that it might address. The main monitoring challenges became those of how to assess the significance of routinely recorded events such as increased cow allocations to women, and how to incorporate monitoring activities that might focus on researching less obvious, less visible, and more subtle processes of change into the project cycle. The paper advocates giving greater attention to meeting these challenges within projects.
  • In this paper, Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) is presented as an alternative to needs-based approaches to development. Following an overview of the principles and practice of ABCD, four major elements of ABCD are examined in light of the current literature on relevant research and practice. This involves exploring the theory and practice of appreciative inquiry; the concept of social capital as an asset for community development; the theory of community economic development; and lessons learned from the links between participatory development, citizenship, and civil society. The paper outlines how ABCD both reflects and integrates trends in these areas, and stands to benefit from the insights generated from this work.
  • Many readers will be familiar with the work of Robert Chambers, including his six biases of the development professional - namely spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic, and professional - and with his suggestions for overcoming them. Many will also be familiar with the challenge of putting his advice into practice, notably on short-term assignments. The question asked here is whether the consultant can do anything constructive about those who are last on the development ladder; and in so doing render the invisible just a bit more visible. This article provides four illustrations taken from the authors experiences in Mozambique, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe. All involve attempts to partially apply Chambers ideas. All are modest in ambition, scale, and scope. The main purpose of describing these cases is to stimulate discussion of the possibilities of incorporating the ideas of participatory and inclusive development processes within the unpromising confines of the two- or three-week assignment.
  • This paper documents the lessons drawn from several years of practical work with a range of Programme and Project Cycle Management (PPCM) processes and tools. The need for PPCM training, and not simply Logical Framework training, is emphasised, as is the importance of using an experiential training methodology. Institutional ownership of both PPCM tools and approaches are considered to be vital for success. Since so many donors now use PPCM tools, the need for development professionals to have PPCM skills and knowledge is paramount. The value of logframes as a tool to both increase programme/project ownership and communication is highlighted. The importance of thinking outside the boxes of the logframe at the project/programme review stage is also emphasised.
  • 12 September 2003 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of WHOs Alma Ata Health for All (HfA) by the Year 2000 Strategy. The strategy reflected an optimism that health could improve for poor and disadvantaged peoples around the world through the provision of comprehensive primary health care (PHC). In practice, PHC has been only selectively applied and generally under-resourced. Two progressive health groups, the International Peoples Health Council (IPHC) and the Peoples Health Movement (PHM) challenge the evidence that selective rather than comprehensive PHC is the right approach, and argue that the privatisation of health-related social services has had a devastating effect on public health worldwide. These organisations call on WHO to revive the dream of Alma Ata as a matter of urgency.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This essay is organised in terms of several propositions for discussion that link advocacy and research dilemmas. Whether researchers can make a difference to the World Bank requires a broader assessment of whether the campaigns they work with are having an impact. While there have been some spectacular successes in terms of halting or redirecting potentially harmful Bank projects, the longer-term significance of these successes is less clear. As the Banks public discourse becomes more enlightened, the challenge for civil society organisations and researchers is increasingly to highlight contradictions among and lack of compliance with its own policies, and the failure of its loans and projects to achieve their declared aims. This calls for vertical integration or systematic coordination between diverse levels of civil society - from local to provincial, national, and international arenas to monitor the parallel partnerships between the World Bank, national, provincial, and local governments. Finally, a call is made for social development professionals who conduct consultancies for the World Bank to adhere to a code of ethics requiring transparency in their relationships with the communities and social organisations who are the target of their research.
  • The failure of the post-colonial state to institutionalise democracy and regulate development for the benefit of the poor has given prominence to private actors, including development NGOs. With case studies from Malawi, this paper shows how NGOs may inadvertently facilitate the enrolment of the poor into development agendas that do not benefit them. Images (as world views) that social actors form of different aspects of the development process may undermine empowerment intentions. It is argued that an analysis of various actors images in managing development assistance should inform the pro-poor agenda of development NGOs.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Today's rapid changes within and outside Northern and Southern NGOs heighten uncertainty about how to meet new challenges and achieve results. In this volatile environment, risk management is a tool for maximising an NGO's opportunities and minimising the dangers to success. It enables NGO decision makers to think strategically all the time.
  • In English only
  • This article seeks to contribute to the debate on collaboration between national and international NGOs. It argues that it is vital for the development of stable, independent, and viable civil societies that the international NGOs promote a bottom-up approach in their support to and collaboration with local NGOs, especially among those emerging from situations of conflict or other profound social disruptions. From a study carried out in East Timor, the authors conclude that there is a noticeable discrepancy between rhetoric and practice with regard to such support. The multiple challenges to the international NGO community and persist although many years of development work have offered abundant learning opportunities. The authors argue that such challenges are less a question of standards and rules than of basic approach, attitudes, and power relations. They maintain that if international NGOs and the wider international community do not alter their approach, they will suffocate rather than foster the development of a viable and autonomous civil society in the countries in which they operate.
  • Some indigenous peoples are attempting to explore approaches to defining and implementing sustainable development in ways appropriate to them. In 1998, four Maori iwi (tribal) organisations embarked on a research project with a research team from the University of Waikato on planning for their own sustainable development. The aims of the research included enabling the groups to articulate their own values and understanding of development, establishing a comprehensive inventory of resources and taonga (treasures), identifying ways of assessing costs/benefits of investment options, and exploring participatory methods for involving the community in strategic decision-making. Useful lessons have been learned and models tested to assist community-based groups in implementing their own sustainable development.
  • The discourse on social capital continues in the development arena, within which the concept is examined both as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Strengthening social capital begins at the community level. As the linkages become internalised and institutionalised, the networks created offer both state (weak or strong) and citizens a means of encouraging participatory decision making, problem identification, and problem solutions. As the Jamaican example reflects, development in small island states is an iterative process and not top-down. The paper therefore demonstrates the critical use of the concept as a part of the strategising of national development goals.
  • Development in Practice has always been internationalist in outlook. Contributions are encouraged, no matter the language, from across the globe and efforts made for the journal to be accessible, including through translation. Aside from articles being translated into English, this involves the translation of abstracts, initially in the journal now on the website, into French, Spanish, and Portuguese and the publication in Spanish of five of the Development in Practice Readers. The Editor wanted to know whether such activities represented the best use of her meagre translation budget or whether there is potential for achieving more. This is a summary report from one of the Editorial Advisers, Mike Powell, who, by looking at other organisations and talking to subscribers and supporters of Development in Practice, tried to find out.
  • The role of organising and disseminating knowledge as a global public good has become a major preoccupation of international development organisations. One area in which they are particularly active is support for microfinance programmes in developing countries. More recently, the microfinance `best practices' deposited in, and disseminated by, these international organisations have been associated with social capital. This paper examines the ways in which the notion of social capital is employed to explain the success of microfinance programmes. It argues that various types of social interactions that are generated around successful microfinance operations are randomly called social capital. This means that the presence of social capital does not tell us much about what sort of microfinance programmes, in terms of design and implementation, should be regarded as good practice.
  • In Northeast Thailand, women are heavily involved in small-scale aquaculture. However, as aquaculture becomes more intensive, women are in charge of less. Women's decision-making power in aquaculture and in the household is stronger when women have greater material resources and knowledge than do their husbands; and the case studies on which the article draws show that what is important is not how much women have, but how much they have in relation to their husbands. The case studies also illustrate that women's gender roles and responsibilities as well as the social expectations of them limit what women will gain through aquaculture. In intensive aquaculture in particular, women are expected to invest all their resources in this activity in order to sustain the family enterprise.
  • The results of a field study examined in this article show the remarkable success of a reproductive health education and community outreach project in Cambodia that has been implemented by the Ministry of Women's and Veterans' Affairs since 1995, in terms of levels of volunteer activity and impact of the project on increased knowledge and practice in reproductive health issues among the target population. A key to the project's success appears to be its adherence to principles identified, but seldom practised, such as a strong commitment to capacity building at all levels.
  • Parent teacher associations or school management committees (PTAs/SMCs) are an important way of realising participation via collective action to improve schooling. Field visits, a literature search and a small sample survey are the three sources used to explore the status of SMCs/PTAs that have been established by provincial governments and NGOs in Pakistan. The main finding is that public sector reform, to alter the power relation between parents, teachers, and government officials, are needed to make participation effective in schooling. In general, NGO schools performed only marginally better than government schools in engendering participation.
  • The author uses the metaphor of the development practitioner as psychotherapist in order to explore the perverse relationships of dependence and projection that may be fostered between aid agencies and `beneficiaries' unless there is a clear sense on the part of both parties that the ultimate goal is that the latter should take responsibility for analysing their situation and taking appropriate steps to improve it.
  • The author examines the history of grassroots community development (CD) in rural Malawi, with reference to four case studies. The findings illustrate that while the intended beneficiaries of such `self-help' projects need to be persuaded that the costs of participation are justified, in reality the decision to participate or not is more often subject to social and other pressures, and in the past has been backed up with sanctions. The ultimate success of the CD effort may depend more on the level of political backing it can mobilise than on the support shown by poor communities.
  • Zhuhai was designated a special economic zone (SEZ) as an experimentation point of economic liberalisation. This articles traces the development of the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone from a humble village to a significant economic power in southern China, focusing on industry, trade, education, and logistics.
  • The adoption of participatory approaches has become virtually de rigueur in rural development projects, if only to satisfy donor demands for evidence of participation. Often, however, PRA and its derivatives are used in an extractive fashion and do not benefit local people as intended. This Practical Note reports on a project in Ethiopia in which PRA was used. An evaluation conducted with the same communities after the research phase was concluded confirmed that certain aspects of PRA had been appreciated, in particular the opportunities for peer-group learning, the process had been more top-down than most would have liked. It concludes with some simple lessons for how to avoid the obvious pitfalls, and how to ensure that local people get the most out of participating in a development project.
  • In English only
  • For more than a decade, resolutions from the UN and the European Commission have highlighted women's suffering during wars, and the unfairness of their treatment upon the return to peace. Yet the injustices and the hypocrisy continue. Women are reified as the peacemakers while they are excluded from peace processes. Women's suffering during war is held up as evidence of inhumanity by the same organisations that accept, if not promote, the marginalisation of women's needs during peacetime. The author reviews the processes through which these phenomena are perpetuated and outlines some ways forward which could help to break these cycles. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • This paper seeks to explode a number of myths about women's absence from wars and conflict; it considers some problems about their vulnerabilities in these circumstances; and offers some feminist perspectives for addressing these problems. The paper considers the conflicting demands made on women in periods of war and revolution, and argues that differing historical processes result in different post-conflict policies towards women. There is, however, a commonality of experiences that universally marginalise women in the post-conflict and reconstruction phases. Even when women have participated actively in wars and revolutions, they are heavily pressured to go back to the home and reconstruct the private domain to assert the return of peace and `normality'. This paper contends that the insistence on locating women within the domestic sphere in the post-war era may be counter-productive and located in the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and demands. With the dawn of the twenty-first century and the long history of women's participation in wars, revolutions, and policy making, it may now be possible to use the symbolic importance given to them in times of conflict to articulate a different perception of nationhood and belonging, and to create a more cooperative and less competitive and hierarchical approach to politics and the reconstruction of nations and their sense of belonging. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • The Gender Audit (GA) and associated reports and reviews drawn upon in this article enable an evaluation of how far the intervention processes at work in Kosova since 1999 have been inclusive of gender analysis and supportive of women's and girls' needs and interests. This assessment considers the strengths and drawbacks of various attempts to use and implement gender-sensitive projects. The GA was designed to support the emerging feminist reconstructive politics in Kosova. Its findings and recommendations tackle aspects of empowerment, equity, and opportunities, outlining some developments from community activism as well as outcomes of the international administration. By considering developments over a two-year period, it is possible to place issues of equity and opportunities in the context of change over time, with change at local and national levels linked with developing international dialogues. The article analyses local work undertaken by the Kosova Women's Network to overcome violence against women in war and domestic peace, and reviews international work engaged in by the Kosovo [sic] Women's Initiative (KWI). Many Kosovar women (of all ethnicities) do fully acknowledge their community membership, and recognise the risks involved in talking across their differences to achieve everyday security and reconciliation. International reports and reviews such as those produced in 2002 by the UN Secretary-General and UNIFEM on women, war, peace, and security, as well as the review of the KWI, allow an assessment of how dialogues are changing and what the potential impact of such change might be on policy development and implementation. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • The growth in the number of 'small wars' has led to a proliferation of post-conflict reconstruction efforts. The experience in the Balkans with post-war reconstruction can provide a significant contribution to further learning, as much learning still needs to be done from the messy, poorly conceived, and chaotic manner in which the outside world stepped in and tried to help in the 1990s. Among the most important lessons that transpired is the need to include women fully in peace building. In the case of Kosovo, as elsewhere, the international effort was dominated by men, with little insight into or concern about addressing gender inequalities. This indifference in turn pervaded assistance programmes, with particularly damaging effects for local women. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • The fact that war changes roles and responsibilities within society, while exposing men and women of all ages and classes to new threats and opportunities, has become increasingly recognised. Civil wars disrupt and destroy civilian life. Men leave, die in combat, are brutalised, lose employment, or resort to despair, violence, or apathy. Women assume enormous burdens of work and all manner of different tasks and responsibilities, lose their security and their protectors, and are victimised and marginalised. Yet few members of peacekeeping missions have any training in dealing with the civilian population, much less the specific issues relating to gender relations. In response to this, a basic training package titled Gender and Peace Support Operations has been designed for use in pre-deployment induction. This article describes the background to its development and outlines how it is expected to be used and evolve in the future. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • Much has been written about the contribution of Palestinian women to their nation's liberation struggle. They have not only survived in an atmosphere of remorseless violence, but have also made remarkable strides in terms of their rights and development as women. A question that has been less explored is the long-term impact of violence against women, whether in terms of their physical and psychological well-being or of their ability to participate in a meaningful way either in the conflict itself or in the post-conflict situation. This paper argues that, although Palestinian women are not simply victims but also agents of violence, such violence--whether random or institutionalised, perpetrated by the enemy or by their own people--places significant constraints on their ability to participate in the national liberation struggle. Consequently, they are inadequately prepared to contribute towards the peace process and, therefore, are prevented from realising their full potential in the new state. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • At first glance it would appear that despite women's vital participation in peace-making processes, they are for the most part marginalised or belittled. However, moving away from the idea of women as outsiders and/or victims, we find evidence of their involvement in projects initiated and driven by them and/or in activities in which they work in equal roles alongside men. Many women in conflict areas are advocating and working effectively with approaches to lasting positive peace that transcend traditional male-dominated structures and ideologies. Large numbers of ordinary women, men, and children are working mostly behind the scenes to achieve justice and equality. Women are very much involved but get far less recognition than men. The scale and diversity of largely unacknowledged but effective grassroots peace efforts worldwide, particularly among women, requires much greater recognition by the international community. This article is based on a research project that uses an oral testimony approach and a multicultural perspective to give voice to women working in the field in a wide range of transformational processes. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • Do gender relations change through conflict? How might conflict itself be fuelled by aspects of gender identity? A recently completed research project that combined oral testimony with more conventional research methods concluded that conflict has undoubtedly given women greater responsibilities, and with them the possibility of exerting greater leverage in decision making and increasing their political participation. The research sheds light on the role of ordinary citizens as 'actors' responding to crisis, and describes how gender identities are woven into a complex web of cause and effect in which war can be seen as a 'conflict of patriarchies'. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • This paper, based on field research in Kabul in February 2002, begins by discussing how women experience war and violent conflict differently from men, in particular by defining different types of violence against women in Afghanistan. Second, by identifying individual Afghan women, as well as women's networks and organisations, I analyse their different coping strategies and the ways in which networking and different forms of group solidarity became mechanisms for women's empowerment. Third, I demonstrate how, throughout Taliban rule, many women risked their lives by turning their homes into underground networks of schools for girls and young women. I argue that, as social actors, they created cohesion and solidarity in their communities. Their secret organisations have already laid the foundation for the building of social capital, which is crucial for the process of reconstruction in Afghanistan. In the final section, I propose that women in Afghanistan, as social actors, are optimistic and willing to participate in the process of reconstruction. As a researcher, I intend to articulate their voice, views, and demands, which I hope will be taken into consideration by policy makers and aid workers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • This article analyses the industrialisation process in Hazira, situated on the coastal belt of South Gujarat in India. The author sets out to gauge the impact of industrial development on land distribution, on the employment opportunities of local people, as well as on the environment. The views of different stakeholders - villagers and industrialists - are presented. The status of women is examined, in particular the kind of occupations women are involved in, their skills and earnings, the time they spend on economic and domestic activities, and the attitude of male family members towards their work.
  • This paper, based on a survey of benefiting and non-benefiting farm households in Uganda's Mpigi district, analyses the Heifer-in-Trust scheme. Although the scheme is intended to alleviate the nutrition and income deficiencies of the poorest rural farmers through dairy production, the actual beneficiaries tend to be the less poor because of the expenses involved. Such is the fate of many development initiatives in which the benefits often do not reach their intended recipients, with the risk of widening the inequality gap. On the other hand, those who did benefit from the scheme, though better off from the start, were found to be very active and enthusiastic, and it was obvious that the scheme had made a significant contribution to dairy improvement. The challenge, then, remains to devise the means by which the poorest farmers can be reached.
  • This paper summarises part of a research project undertaken in rural Niger. It aims to provide an insight into the development and working of grassroots organisations and the communities in which they operate. Arising from research conducted in five workshops, which involved almost 160 people from 54 community-based organisations, the metaphors of the baobab and eucalyptus trees were found to have strong cultural associations for the participants and helped explain the importance of long-term and deep-rooted interventions rather than short-term and ephemeral projects. This paper also adds to the contemporary debate within development agencies on capacity building of sustainable human development.
  • The research summarised here addresses the ambiguities and discrepancies of the capacity building dialect within the aid and development industry. Three interrelated themes are found to permeate the capacity building literature, despite diverse ideological persuasions. The appropriation of these themes within the capacity building discourse is subject to critical analysis. A meta-theoretical analysis questions the ability of functionalist constructs of capacity building to reduce poverty or achieve sustainable development. From a community development perspective, equitable social transformation will occur only when the focus of `development' involves strengthening the capacities of all people, communities, and nations to create a just and equitable world.
  • In English only
  • Through an analysis of how Bangladeshi NGOs have become institutionalised, the author examines patterns of bureaucratisation and professionalisation to argue that NGOs are part of a process of incorporation that mediates opposition to gender and other structural inequalities. Two important tendencies - the growing partnership between NGOs, the state, and donor agencies, and the discursive shift from social welfare and redistribution to individualism, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance - exemplify these processes. The paper shows how institutionalisation, accompanied by the conflation of civil society and NGOs, masks the loss of member-citizens' voices, channelling opposition through NGOs in ways that often compromise their interests.
  • This article shows how local understandings of development can be researched empirically by reference to experiences presented from three drawing workshops performed with children in the Ayacucho region in the Peruvian Andes. The children were asked to draw pictures from their community, as they would like it to become in the future. Their drawings are analysed by using an adapted form of Grounded Theory, and further interpreted as expressions of local development discourses. Although the three villages are located within the same area, and share a violent history of war and instability, the research shows how each community has its own interpretation of development.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This paper reflects critically on issues of North-South collaboration and participatory research arising from a project on participatory and sustainable local-level environmental management in the peri-urban area surrounding Kumasi, Ghana. Rapid immigration, uncoordinated conversion of farmland to housing, intensified resource exploitation, and declining water quality and availability are particular problems there. Collaborative research arrangements with local partners as well as sustained participatory relations with selected village communities were central to this project. More generally, the paper reflects on institutional issues relating to the dichotomy between research and development assistance projects, and their implications for project evaluations.
  • The `logical framework' and `logical framework approach' have become widespread planning tools, particularly in donor-assisted projects in developing countries. With its simple format and the clear relationship between variables, the logical framework is helpful for summarising main concerns relating to development schemes. At the same time, the author argues, current conventions limit the framework's usefulness; and he suggests modifications that should substantially enhance its applicability and information-carrying capacity. The logical framework approach seeks to address additional dimensions of planning. However, it is too circumscribed by standardised steps and procedures to be defended as the ubiquitous planning methodology it is commonly held to be. The `logical framework approach' is here juxtaposed with a broader and more flexible concept of `development planning', with which it should not be confused.
  • Decentralisation is a policy feature common to many African countries. Local governance is therefore gaining in relevance, though not yet in clarity. Based on the experience of a development project in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, the article examines the case of local governance in practice, grounding this in a historical analysis and focusing on the relationship between local government and civil society. Through a phased process from experimentation through piloting to lobbying, the PAMOJA project develops interface mechanisms to structure local government - civil society relations at district level. Three actors are identified for the success of the project: the external agent as process facilitator, local champions as change agents, and strategic partners for the lobby component. A successful outcome would ultimately strengthen decentralisation processes.
  • Participatory research with well established, autonomous farmer groups in Uganda and Ghana examined their viewpoints and priorities concerning agricultural information. In particular, it sought to investigate the ways in which farmers identified new ideas of common interest and to explore how these ideas were shared, modified and sometimes implemented within the group or wider community. After a series of visits, it became clear that within every functioning group certain individuals played a key role not just with regard to information exchange but also in their support and encouragement of change and development within the group. These individuals, referred to as animators, exhibited clear characteristics. Though belonging to the local community, they tended to have above-average literacy levels and were usually more widely travelled than their peers. Their role was usually to support and facilitate rather than to act as leaders, and they often acted as a key channel for sharing information. The animators acted as significant catalysts in facilitating the flow of new ideas and information, and they should receive more attention and research with regard to encouraging developmental change.
  • This paper seeks to understand the human development potential of a lift-irrigation scheme introduced by a development NGO in Western India. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this micro-level intervention has been able to create conditions for enlarging the choices of the poor. The impact of the intervention, captured at the farm and household level through both conventional and PRA data, is shown to have enhanced the productivity of the land, resulting in improved food security, higher employment, and a significant reduction in distress migration, especially among women. The success of the intervention is attributed to its appropriateness to local needs and to the creation of a suitable institutional mechanism. Given its demonstrated potential, the paper emphasises the need for replicating such interventions more widely.
  • The United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) is an independent activity located at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Originally concentrating on the economic and social arena, it was intended to include peace and security activities, thus covering the entire waterfront of UN activities. UNIHP comprises a series of books on 11 topics that range from international trade and finance to global governance via gender and global resource management (see www.unhistory.org/ for full details). Under each of these topics the history of ideas launched by the UN family will be traced. Did they come from within the Secretariat, or from outside the UN through governments, NGOs, or experts? Were these ideas discarded without discussion or after deliberation? Were they discussed, adapted (or distorted), and then mplemented? What happened afterwards?
  • In English only
  • Acknowledgements 2002
  • This article describes an NGO project intended to empower scheduled caste women working in the silk-reeling industry in India through the provision of microfinance. It documents the impact that the project had on their economic and social status over a period of time and highlights the negative consequences of excluding male relatives from playing any meaningful role. It suggests ways in which the project might have been made more male-inclusive while still empowering women. At the same time, it acknowledges that even if the men's hostility to the project had been overcome, the women's micro enterprises were unlikely to have been viable commercially. This is because the project insisted that the women operate as a group in what was a high-risk area of economic activity, with no clear strategy as to how their work could be sustained.
  • Sucre is a city of micro enterprises. The lines between business and household are often blurred: accounts are mixed, space is shared, and partners from outside the household are rare. On the surface, this kind of business organisation seems most inadequate for economic success. Yet a closer look at the internal workings of Sucre's businesses suggests that the complex `balancing act' between business and household may represent not sloppy management (as micro enterprise development agencies often maintain), but a flexible strategy for household well-being. Sucre's businesses essentially follow `triple bottom line' accounting at the household level, taking into account both financial and non-financial goals.
  • Microfinance--both credit and savings--has potential to improve the well-being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal savings mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services designed to address the development issues that confront women. The proposals call for safe-deposit boxes and for matched savings accounts for health care or education.

  • This paper explores development issues from the perspective of two villages in rural Lebanon. Educated male villagers see themselves as initiators of development and use the same language as NGO officials. Client-patron relationships and wasta (the act of accessing material favours, such as development projects, from the powerful) are means for these men to achieve their political ends. Women and the less powerful men, who are not part of the wasta network, tend to be disregarded in decision making, but nonetheless have strong views about the needs of the villages. The Islamic view emphasises the moral life.
  • NGOs have played an important role worldwide in trying to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through achieving behaviour change. NGOs have often been at the fore of innovative changes, influencing government and international programming activities. This paper identifies and analyses the evolution of the HIV/AIDS programmes of one NGO in Thailand over a period of ten years. Three generations of programming are identified both through distinct approaches to this area of work, and also by the changing jargon describing the people the programmes are aimed at.
  • This paper discusses the pros and cons of the experience of volunteering abroad and attempts to address a void in the literature on what is required of such volunteers. Following a brief sketch of the volunteer abroad and the motives to for following such a career path, the author provides a first-hand account of the pros and cons of this arcane vocation. While the advantages are commonly known, the author argues the less appealing aspects are often not and are of equal importance whatever an individual's situation.
  • In 1999, with a view to strengthening the JFM arrangement, the Gujarat State Forest Department, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Foundation, initiated a nodal agency called the JFM cell. Its mandate is to assist in strengthening and expanding JFM in Gujarat by providing training, research, and communication support to the Forest Department (FD) and NGOs. The cell commissioned a study to understand the process of instituting JFM at the village level and the impact of training and communication by the FD and NGOs in this context. This Practical Note is based on the findings of the study conducted by the authors.
  • This article deals with some aspects of Development Studies as an evolving discipline in the UK. Specifically, it offers reflections following the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE), in which Development Studies was constituted as a separate panel for the first time, albeit on an experimental basis. The writers, both user representatives on the panel, present these thoughts as individuals.
  • In English only
  • Development and the Learning Organisation: An Introduction In English only
  • This article proposes Bottom-Up Learning as a normative framework for international NGOs. It explores the common but often unacknowledged disparity between organisational values and mission versus actual practice. The first section of the paper raises the question of organisational learning disorders followed by an exploration of learning organisations and bottom-up learning in particular. A section briefly summarising positive developments in the field is followed by discussions of organisational barriers and possible mitigation techniques. The paper closes with a challenge for international NGOs to take a closer look at their learning capabilities with a view to improving service to communities of need. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • Large companies have accelerated their control of the basic commodities markets in the last decade. The author describes what this means for smallholder farmers in the developing world who depend on these markets for some cash income each year. The consequences of the growing power of distributors (the grocery or supermarket chains) and dominant brand-owners are persistent rural poverty and the ideological and economic devaluation of the sustainable and small-scale agricultural production methods that are so essential to the 70 per cent of the worlds poor who live in rural areas. The author traces the story of a successful business partnership started in 1992 linking cocoa farmers in West Africa and fair-minded chocolate lovers in the UK and USA, an initiative launched in the face of direct criticism and harsh competitive pressure from the global chocolate giants but which has mobilised a new kind of coalition and constituency.
  • Learning and knowledge management are crucial capacities for many NGOs. This article attempts to answer such questions as: why is learning seen as so important for NGOs? How do successful NGOs actually learn? And what role do key individuals or leaders play in this process? The article draws heavily on the findings of a study of South Asian NGOs, which suggests that an NGOs ability to learn is dependent on its organisational culture and in particular the development of an internal culture of learning. The case studies from South Asia reveal that the creation of this learning culture derives primarily from the attitude of the leadership towards learning: at the heart of a learning organisation is a learning leader.
  • When implementing a transformational global vision and mission, three problems typically confront international NGOs: aligning different levels of planning and strategy; balancing global analysis and priorities against local realities; and identifying measures that both indicate progress and promote and encourage innovation. This article reports on the efforts of CARE Internationals Latin America Regional Management Unit to address these problems by introducing reversals to common strategic planning principles and processes. It shows middle-managers in NGOs how they can lead from the middle, and considers the region to be the nexus enabling an organisation to change and learn across multiple hierarchical levels.

  • Change is driven not only by good ideas, but also by disagreement and frustration. This article takes, the reader through a selective organisational history of the British NGO, ActionAid from 1998 to 2001, looking at events and changes that had a bearing on the introduction and initial impact of the agencys new accountability system. Systematic change appears very unsystematic. Effective transformation took a long time to arrive, and was preceded by a number of failed experiments. It seems that the frustrations of this time were necessary to develop the creativity needed for significant change. The efforts started to bear fruit once the organisation began to realise alignment of mission, structures, procedures, and relationships.
  • Heifer International (HI) has been applying participatory approaches to rural development for nearly 60 years. Organisationally, HI focuses on building the capacity of its country programmes and NGO partners to work independently toward a unifying mission. An open structure allows HI to validate and incorporate the rich and diverse experience of its project holders and country programme offices into organisational planning and daily operations. This article analyses three recent HI initiatives which incorporate deliberate processes to facilitate organisational learning. It outlines different strategies HI uses to institutionalise learning without imposing limitations on it.
  • The integration of learning into community development processes and how that learning can stimulate positive change pose challenges that development practitioners have met with mixed success. Who are the most effective change agents, how they can be supported, and how their efforts can be diffused in the community and scaled up are key questions in the community development literature. The authors designed and implemented an action-research project in Western Kenya on traditional vegetables, recruiting pupils as co-researchers. The purpose of the research was twofold. One was to explore the feasibility of increasing the intake of traditional vegetables through a school-based horticulture programme. The other was to increase pupils competence as effective change agents by empowering them in culturally compatible ways. The results offer lessons for practitioners regarding creative means to identify and empower change agents within traditional organisations and encourage innovative creation and diffusion of knowledge.
  • The research work of Harvard professor Chris Argyris gave rise to much of what is today called Organisational Learning, an approach subsequently promulgated by Peter Senge and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first section of this paper argues the relevance of Organisational Learning to NGOs, despite its origins in the study of the private sector. The second section describes a particular project intervention based on Organisational Learning theory, which is currently underway in a Brazilian NGO.

  • This paper discusses the implications for organisational learning of recent research on NGO activity in natural disaster mitigation and preparedness. It identifies several institutional and other barriers to NGO learning. However, personal networks in NGOs are often strong, and determined and well-placed individuals can push significant innovations through. Greater emphasis on this human factor may be the key to mainstreaming disaster mitigation and other new or marginal approaches to development.
  • If aid is found to support a war effort, should aid agencies and practitioners continue to give it? The resounding answer given by aid workers all over the world is that the needs of suffering people are too important to ignore and, further, that there can be no justification for not assisting suffering people. But how can one provide aid in the context of conflict without exacerbating the conflict? The Local Capacities for Peace Project (LCPP) was formed in 1994 to learn how aid and conflict interact in order to help aid workers find a way to address human needs without feeding conflict. This paper will discuss how the learning process of the LCPP was designed, the results gained at each step, and how the results were fed back to the participating organisations.
  • Organisational principles or value standards are considered crucial for maintaining quality in humanitarian assistance. Research among staff members of Médecins Sans Frontières-Holland (MSF-H) showed that fieldworkers construct their own interpretations of principles and priorities in response to demands placed on them in the field. Organisational principles are important for the performance and the wellbeing of volunteers: they serve as beacons, identity markers, and interpersonal glue. It also becomes apparent that while in practice, staff members renegotiate the formal principles of their organisation, they also adhere to patterns of organisational culture resulting in a number of ordering principles they deem typical of their organisation.
  • The major development agencies have ex cathedra Official Views (with varying degrees of explicitness) on the complex and controversial questions of development. At the same time, knowledge is now more than ever recognised as key to development in the idea of a knowledge bank or knowledge-based development assistance. The author argues that these two practices are in direct conflict. When an agency attaches its brand name to certain Official Views, then it becomes very difficult for the agency to also be a learning organisation or to foster genuine learning in its clients. A model of a development agency as an open learning organisation, which is in sharp contrast to other organisational models such as the Church or the Party is outlined. That, in turn, allows the agency to take a more autonomy-compatible approach to development assistance with the assisted country in the drivers seat of a learning process rather than as the passive recipient of aid-sweetened policies from the agency. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • This article explores attempts by eight UK-based international NGOs currently engaged in rural development interventions in Ethiopia, to employ monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems as a means of strengthening accountability and institutional learning. Premised on the conviction that such NGOs comprise loose coalitions of interest groups at different organisational levels within them, the study explores how respondents in head offices, Addis Ababa, and field offices perceived and practised M&E. It was found that perceptions of M&E vary considerably between hierarchical levels and can have a significant impact on practice. Such perceptions are also framed by individual interests and thus frequently fail to reflect the reality of M&E practice. The story that unfolds offers valuable insights into the current myths and realities of M&E among INGOs.
  • This paper introduces the major concepts of Outcome Mapping and discusses the International Development Research Centres experience in developing and implementing Outcome Mapping with Northern and Southern research organisations. It explores how the fundamental principles of Outcome Mapping relate to organisational learning principles and the challenges associated with applying theory to practice. It presents cases where planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes have been used to encourage learning and improvement, and discusses the potential of Outcome Mapping as a tool for evaluative thinking to build learning into development programmes.
  • This brief paper describes one attempt to update the programme logic models to incorporate organisational learning. It begins with a brief review of learning concepts, describes the traditional Logical Framework Analysis, and concludes with a sketch of an alternative programme model, entitled the Temporal Logic Model.
  • Full-text sample article
  • In the late 1970s, feminist social scientists began to challenge some of the assumptions underlying the dominant paradigms on organisations, arguing that they reflect and are structured by the values articulated within the larger institutional arenas in which they are embedded, thus reproducing gender-discriminatory outcomes. This paper unpacks the deep structure of one NGO, Utthan, based in Gujarat, India, to understand the extent to which it is an engendering organisation. It suggests that while gender-sensitive leadership, training, and resources play a critical role in addressing gender equity in development practice, organisational transformation is a much harder and longer process requiring sustained commitment from the leadership, staff, and funding partners.
  • Learning organisations and their focus on fundamental change have been seen as having considerable potential for making organisations more gender equitable and improving their capacity to undertake development or human rights work that is not gender-biased. This article, developed by the Gender at Work Collaborative explores the usefulness of ideas related to learning organisations in changing institutions for gender equality. This collection of ideas and practice are seen helpful but a deconstruction of organisational learning points out some difficulties with this body of work and proposes an enhanced toolbox, which would pay attention to such factors as power relations, the spiritual basis of the work and the gendered deep structure of organisations.
  • The Learning Organisation (LO) is both a concept and a particular methodology within the larger domain of Organisational Development (OD). To fully appreciate the premises of LO, it is necessary to fall back on the main premises of OD, beginning with the view of the organisation as an open system. Many of the established concepts of systems science as applied to organisational systems such as system robustness, system intelligence, and system proactivity have a direct bearing on the capacity for continuous learning in the organisation. Moving on from concepts to action, an organisation needs a set of working practices to acquire the characteristics of a Learning Organisation. One particularly useful gateway for the LO process is a comprehensive performance management system that compels the organisations membership to re-examine ideas of performance and the assumptions about organisational processes underlying management practices. The gateway follows the Action-Research paradigm and appears well suited to non-profit development NGOs.
  • The potential for academic-NGO collaboration is enormous, but such collaboration is far more difficult than it appears on the surface, even when collaborators share a commitment to, and values that support, a particular cause or issue. This paper looks at some of the factors that derail academic-practitioner collaborations. It then identifies five different models of collaboration and makes recommendations that, if observed, should eliminate some of the tensions in collaborative efforts, while at the same time providing a foundation for ongoing learning.
  • Many organisations do not learn. There are many reasons for this, and a lack of donor support tends to be cited as the greatest of these. But this is not the primary reason for a lack of learning. We fail to learn because we are unable to see the importance of doing so. We become so embroiled in our busy-ness, our self-inflicted demands for action, that we have ceased to value learning. And we have lost sight of the fact that without learning, our action is doomed to ineffectiveness. If we are about development and cannot measure how we are doing, how can we develop a rigorous and effective practice?
  • In many development projects, individuals from one organisation are assigned and relocated to another organisation. For these guests to be effective in the provision of technical assistance requires them to learn about and adapt to the local milieu. Using a Navajo case study, this paper analyses how practices called acts allow guests to make effective contributions through learning and adaptation. It is shown that two categories of acts, calibrating and progressing, are crucial in this regard. Calibrating allows guests to assess the appropriateness of assumptions, and progressing allows them to elicit information and explanations to help develop an understanding of the context. These sets of acts contribute to cross-cultural communicative competence and, thereby, to the success of the development project.
  • The concept of Learning Organisations is gaining prominence in the non-profit sector. Most organisations see the concept as a means of attaining organisational change for greater impact on development. While the principles of organisational learning (i.e. team learning, shared vision, common goal and strategy) seem to have produced impressive results in the private sector and some non-profit organisations, the question is whether these principles can be adapted with similar results in complex bilateral programmes. This article explores this question in relation to a programme between the Dutch and Kenyan governments in Keiyo Marakwet. It analyses the process of institutionalising participation as both a learning and a conflict-generating process. In the highly politicised context of bilateral programmes, learning is not necessarily carried forward from one phase to the next due to rapid changes in actors, national politics, diplomatic considerations, and the international development agenda.
  • Many development agencies seek to work on behalf of the `poor' and the `poorest of the poor,' often creating external definitions of poverty and of people living in poverty that are based on a complex list of things that the poor do not have. There are others who have spearheaded efforts to define poverty based on criteria derived from members of (largely) rural communities, many of whom would be considered poor. All these definitions ultimately result in some type of grouping of people into different categories of `poor people.' By creating a list of characteristics of poverty, agencies believe that they are better able to target `the poor' as beneficiaries of interventions to eradicate poverty. This article is intended to challenge development organisations (governmental and non-governmental) to look beyond simple definitions of poverty that are based on static characteristics. It is intended to provoke readers to re-evaluate some of their ideas about definitions of poverty; and to critically examine their agency's role in the business of poverty.
  • This paper is based on a small micro-level study carried out to assess the impact of recent socio-economic changes in Tajikistan on the livelihoods and well-being of women in Gorno-Badakhshan. It examines the recent involvement of women in trading and informal economic activity with a focus on the trade-offs that women have faced as a result. It argues that the shift towards a market economy in a depressed economic environment has resulted in increasing socio-economic differentiation, insecure livelihoods, and declining social capital. Women's involvement in trading along with the withdrawal of the state from basic social services have increased women's workload. Women's participation in the political sphere is declining from an already low base. Increasing material poverty and multiple roles and responsibilities have made it difficult for women to take up opportunities for public participation, even at a local level. It concludes that there are structural barriers to reducing poverty in Gorno-Badakhshan and raises questions about the possibilities for disadvantaged groups and regions to benefit from a strongly market-based development paradigm.
  • Microcredit has been introduced to rural communities in Bangladesh as a means of economic and social development, but there are increasing doubts about its effectiveness and suggestions that it causes domestic abuse. A review of various studies indicates that microcredit can result in social disruption through exacerbating gender conflict. It is suggested that micro-level study is required before credit is introduced to local communities.
  • Gender experts who formulate planning frameworks, and strategies for mainstreaming gender issues in organisational policies and programmes usually characterise non-expert policy makers and planners as either active resisters or passive implementers rather than as capable change agents. Because of this, more resistance to gender mainstreaming is encountered than is necessary, and mainstreaming programmes often fail to take into account the needs and contributions of planners as stakeholders. The paper discusses these shortcomings and presents cases from the UN system in which the author was involved, where organisational change and mainstreaming were based on stakeholder participation that began to overcome some commonly identified limitations. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • This article highlights the personal and professional problems of NGO fieldworkers in Bangladesh. The paper draws on field research with the front-line workers of four NGOs, their clients, immediate superiors, and senior management. Fieldworkers face personal problems such as job insecurity, financial hardships, difficulties with accommodation, and family dislocation. These problems differ according to gender, marital status, and age. Professional problems include training, promotion, and transfer. In addition, fieldworkers face problems in their external relationships such as suspicion, resistance or lack of cooperation from religious leaders and local élite, time and resource constraints, competition for clients, and eagerness of the intended beneficiaries simply to get access to financial or material benefits. It will be argued that the strengths of the fieldworkers of Southern NGOs have been largely unexplored and undervalued.
  • This paper is based on the authors' analytical study of the experiences of participatory development interventions in Mozambique, which compared how different projects interpreted and applied the concept and identified the problems encountered and lessons learnt in using such approaches.
  • This article focuses on the personal, social, and psychological hazards that children and the elderly face in Russian state-run institutions. The paper challenges two assumptions: that Russia's problems are purely economic, and that the state is solely responsible for the solutions. We argue that Russia's problems are basically social, and that the community can take the lead in solving them. We introduce low-cost, practical, humane, and community-driven initiatives as an alternative to rigid institutionalisation. The model is applicable elsewhere, and can be customised by the community itself.
  • Two energy development projects were examined as the basis of recommending improvements in how resettlement issues are handled. One of these illustrated the [INS: following :INS] problems: lack of a proper communication channel from the implementing body to the local residents; the failure to address the resettlers' own preferences; the compensation scheme for the resettlers did not allow them to re-build their livelihoods; employment of local people in project-related activities was only marginal; and the development of communities and local industry failed to benefit the resettlers.
  • Ghana has a history of failed rural development projects and Tono seems well on its way to being one more. This paper analyses contrasting accounts of the success of a rural development project given by public officials who run it and the local intended beneficiaries. Official figures claim a great success. The intended beneficiaries, however, perceive minimal material improvement in their lives. They also see considerable disruption in their community. There is evidence of alienation due to lack of local involvement in the project and gradual withdrawal from it. Migration from the project area has not slowed. This paper asks whether the data represent two views of the same facts or a picture of the inevitable disruption caused by social change. Suggestions are made for how material improvement in people's lives can be introduced with minimal structural disruption and pain for the people involved.
  • In English only
  • Reforms and development in the Cameroon Grassfields have raised the costs of building materials, which means that the poor may never be able to afford to build their own homes and so must rent. Locally available materials have been disregarded and their use is not allowed in urban areas. It is true that Western-style medical care costs patients less than they would pay to rely on traditional doctors. By the same token, while Western imported arms have replaced traditional weapons, modern agricultural tools are badly needed in order to reduce the level of poverty in the Cameroon Grassfields.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. International funding of civil society organisations within the framework of support for democratisation processes has increased significantly in recent years. Yet this raises a set of questions quite apart from the effectiveness of the activities of the recipient organisations. Who are these groups? Whom do they represent? What effect does international funding have on their organisational workings and their rootedness in their local societies and political systems? This article presents the results of a survey that examined the sources of financing, level of organisation, domestic constituencies, and relationships to political parties of 16 civil society groups in Latin America that received support from the National Endowment for Democracy in 1999. It finds that while the groups demonstrate a remarkable diversity in their sources of funding, all of them receive the lion's share of financing from international donors. The author argues, however, that given the scant possibilities for domestically generated funding, this dependence is to be expected. The article concludes with a series of questions about the meaning of international support for local groups in developing democracies and the potential effects it may have on de-linking such groups from their broader political and party system.
  • World trade is increasingly conditioned by the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In the case of the garment industry this means the phasing out of the Multifibre Arrangement, which has dominated trade in textiles and garments since 1974. This phase-out is seen as benefiting developing countries and criticism focuses on the manner in which the USA and Europe are holding up the process. However it is important to look at who exactly will gain or lose. Not all poor countries will benefit. Furthermore, the main profits from garment production go to the Northern companies who control the industry. These companies will benefit from more open markets and associated competition between global suppliers. Meanwhile for workers North and South this increased competition brings insecurity and the threat of deteriorating conditions of work.
  • The article investigates the impact of anthropology consultancy activities in the UK university sector and the role of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as a major provider of consultancy work. DFID and other donors see anthropology consultancy as useful primarily in the delivery of technical assistance to Third World projects with a community or social development dimension. The article points to tensions both between UK-based consultancy and `grassroots' development in the Third World, and between applied anthropology and the relative autonomy of anthropology as an academic discipline. The author suggests that a necessary precondition for understanding the contribution of anthropology to policy is the need to overcome the unwillingness by practitioners to question politically the power relationships within which the social sciences, anthropology, and commissioned activities themselves are located. The primary purpose of the paper is to open up a debate on the relationship between power, knowledge, empowerment, and consultancy work.
  • In May 2000 a group from Ashoka, a US-based charitable foundation that gives grants to 'social entrepreneurs', or innovators for the common good, visited a number of projects for sustainable development on the coast of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The author accompanied the group and here relates his observations and raises challenging questions about unforeseen contradictions and pitfalls in these visionary ventures.
  • The author asks what'win-win'public policies can substantially reduce the percentage of people who live in absolute poverty and enable the poor to become richer even if the rich also become richer.
  • Gender-specific strategies have become very popular in efforts to achieve the sustainable alleviation of rural poverty in Africa. However, there is growing concern that this strategy is based upon weak conceptual grounds. Based on insights gleaned from years of involvement with women-only development projects in Nigeria, the authors highlight some key conceptual challenges to this strategy and argue that unless these are overcome, these pitfalls will eventually consign Nigeria's gender-specific poverty alleviation strategy to the graveyard of disused development paradigms.
  • Inadequate household income due to degraded resources and limited opportunities has led to migration, malnutrition, and poor quality of life among tribals in India. These problems have been effectively tackled by enabling people to re-build their resource base, and by strengthening local action through Gram Vikas Mandals (village development forums) and developing human resources at village level. The orchard programme described in this paper currently reaches more than 11,000 families and 4000 ha of marginal lands are converted into orchards. It has helped people to plan further development actions, improve their knowledge and risk-taking ability, and build social cohesiveness. Thus, it has ensured that tribals' wellbeing is linked with that of the ecosystem. This time-bound, result-oriented programme is now recognised as a model for development of tribals and rural poor and is run by BAIF Development Research Foundation and sponsored by the Government of Germany through KfW and NABARD, India.
  • The paper argues the case for innovative trail-setting projects and reviews the experience of the North Bengal Terai Development Project (India). It summariss several of its lessons: creating the conditions for 'in-project' cost effectiveness, managing goodwill, promoting innovation through the full cycle of scaling up and consolidation, linking ongoing government programmes and private initiatives with ground-level policy development, and relying on local talent. The case is made for an opportunistic approach in institutional development and policy innovation, focusing on what can be made to work rather than what is preconceived to be the correct way of doing things.
  • In English only
  • This secondary source study was conducted on behalf of UNICEF in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to establish what information was available about acid violence with a view to informing potential interventions to prevent attacks. The study showed that young women are the main survivors who, having repelled advances by men, have acid thrown at them as revenge. Although it occurs throughout Bangladesh there are limited data from reliable sources about the real number of attacks, the rehabilitation of survivors, and the outcomes for perpetrators. The report suggests that further research is required to fill these gaps and that consideration be given to capacity building data management at the point of service delivery.
  • This article focuses on performance measurement in the democracy and governance (DG) programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in its Zimbabwe mission. The article tells the story of one qualitative indicator used for measuring progress, namely the 'Advocacy Index.' It traces the history of this indicator, from rationale and concept through the early stages of implementation. The article discusses the problems of quantitative measurement and observes that there have been a number of suggested 'qualitative' responses. It goes on to describe the introduction of the Advocacy Index by USAID mission and the responses of its Zimbabwean partners, and draws out some tentative lessons and questions raised by the experience.
  • Expatriate volunteers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia work in a country where many of their fellow expatriates are paid considerably more than they are. Such volunteers often find that the financial disparities affect the perceptions that people have of them. This paper explores the self-perceptions of volunteers working with Voluntary Service Overseas in Phnom Penh, and sets these perceptions within current theories of motivation and commitment. Two issues are then raised: whether these volunteers are willing and able to deliver quality assistance; and how perceptions of their status can affect their ability to deliver such assistance.
  • In English only
  • Ethical trade is expanding rapidly in the UK. Following the foundation of the Ethical Trading Initiative many companies are adopting codes of conduct to cover employment conditions in their supply chains, based on a process of multi-stakeholder participation. Addressing gender issues in their implementation remains an important challenge for policy makers. This paper considers how gender sensitivity in the monitoring and verification of codes can be enhanced within a multi-stakeholder framework based on evidence from a case study of export horticulture in South Africa. It makes policy recommendations to address the needs of more marginalised workers, many of whom are women. Investments in process-oriented and farmer-participatory research have led to the emergence of sustainable agroforestry solutions to the problems of land degradation, poverty, and food insecurity in rural areas. Thousands of farmers in diverse ecoregions have taken up innovations that demonstrate the potential of agroforestry. This paper highlights the importance of institutional change through illustrating the approach taken by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry to scale up adoption and impact of innovations. Eight focal areas of intervention constitute the key elements of a development strategy aimed at providing 80 million poor people in rural areas with better livelihood options by 2010.

  • Never before has the Bolivian state made such a serious effort to promote peasant participation in local development. In 1994, it promulgated the Law of Popular Participation which institutionalised a Participatory Municipal Planning methodology. While fully recognising its progressive nature, it is not too hard to discover authoritarian flaws within this methodology. The authors argue that the concept of participation should be viewed as `negotiation' in order to increase the scope of peasant participation in the planning process. This in turn implies some major methodological changes, but would result in Municipal Development Plans with the flexibility to account for the specific situations of the Bolivian peasantry.
  • This paper discusses the relationship between corruption and economic development. It questions the view that under certain conditions, corruption may enhance efficiency and argues that though corruption may benefit powerful individuals, it will indubitably lead to greater inefficiency and a waste of resources at a macroeconomic level. Following a brief introduction, the author suggests that a possible cause of corruption is the weak productive base, the essential condition for the appearance of shortage which, in turn, spurs corruption. Some possible impacts of corruption are then examined. While no specific policy measure is suggested, a more accountable political system would certainly be a move in the right direction.
  • There is a widely recognised need for innovative institutional arrangements to provide financial services to poor people, and numerous efforts have been made to that end. These have ranged from modifying the services provided by existing banks to the promotion of people-centred systems. Programmes addressing the latter have tended to emphasise a broad development approach, with financial services as one of several interrelated activities. This article discusses the main features of organisation and operation in people-centred systems, explores the meaning of social mobilisation in this context, indicates a range of benefits that such systems may generate, and illustrates their features, activities, and benefits through one case study.
  • The RAAKS (Rapid Appraisal of Agricultural Knowledge Systems) methodology, in combination with PRA tools, was successfully used in the CARE-Macina integrated rural development programme in Mali. The methodology enabled the agency team to produce relevant information concerning community-based organisations at village level, and thus highlighted some of the strengths and weaknesses of its efforts to reinforce their organisational capacity. This led to several major changes in the agency's strategies. The details of the methodology used by the Macina team, some results of the exercise, and changes in programme strategies concerning the strengthening of community-based organisations, are discussed.
  • In the absence of a cohesive and controlling government in Afghanistan, NGOs have taken over much of the work in the economic and social arena, becoming, by proxy, the makers of policy and directors of practice. However the unpredictable yet growing power of the Taliban leads NGOs to put off confronting the policies of the government in favour of maintaining their own influence and implementing projects. The time has come for NGOs to abandon this proxy role, and seek to engage constructively with the dynamics of the emerging government. This paper describes seven small ways for microfinance to acquire the virtues of informal finance, which are commonly perceived as slashed transaction costs, supply of not just loans but also savings and implicit insurance, sensitivity to the constraints faced by women, substitution of confidence in character for physical collateral, socially enforced and/or self-enforced contracts, and sequences of repeated transactions.
  • This paper describes seven small ways for microfinance to acquire the virtues of informal finance, which are commonly perceived as slashed transaction costs, supply of not just loans but also savings and implicit insurance, sensitivity to the constraints faced by women, substitution of confidence in character for physical collateral, socially enforced and/or self-enforced contracts, and sequences of repeated transactions.
  • Economies based on solidarity and mutual support, and which are geared to human development and social justice, represent the basis of an alternative to the neo-liberal model that is driving the current globalisation process, and which tends to destroy local initiative and expression. The author draws on long experience in southern Mexico to describe this alternative economic vision.
  • In English only
  • Investments in process-oriented and farmer-participatory research have led to the emergence of sustainable agroforestry solutions to the problems of land degradation, poverty, and food insecurity in rural areas. Thousands of farmers in diverse ecoregions have taken up innovations that demonstrate the potential of agroforestry. This paper highlights the importance of institutional change through illustrating the approach taken by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry to scale up adoption and impact of innovations. Eight focal areas of intervention constitute the key elements of a development strategy aimed at providing 80 million poor people in rural areas with better livelihood options by 2010.
  • Community-based organisations are increasingly considered a sustainable way to scale up the benefits of agricultural research and development from a few farmers in isolated pilot project areas to spread more widely across geographical and socio-economic gradients, and to do so quickly. This paper describes and highlights lessons learned from several research and development organisations in western Kenya using different community-based approaches to scale up agroforestry and other biological options to improve soil fertility among resource-poor smallholders. The main benefits of such approaches are that the link between farmers, government extension, and other service providers is strengthened; information flow and awareness of the options available is rapid among farmers; and farmers' participation and innovation is enhanced. For effective service delivery, however, some higher level of association is necessary that goes beyond individual farmers or groups such as youth, women, or church-based organisations. Nevertheless, experience from a pilot project involving the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry and some key national research and development institutions shows that village, sublocation or location committees are often inactive without strong follow-up, which is best provided by such local institutions as government extension staff close to farmers or NGOs. Most of these institutions, however, have limited resources and information. To mitigate these problems and to better share experiences among individual organisations and projects in the region, a strategic consortium of the key institutions was formed. There are high hopes concerning the consortium, although it is too early to determine its effectiveness. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • The case studies demonstrate the breadth and richness in approaches to and lessons learned from scaling up. A key lesson is that scaling up is far more complex than simply transferring information and planting material; it entails building community-level institutional capacity for promoting and sustaining the innovation process. An overarching problem is that there is a paucity of research on the scaling up process. Careful assessments of the relative costs and benefits and advantages and disadvantages of different strategies are often possible and can greatly strengthen the effectiveness of scaling up. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • Participatory research that combines the knowledge of farmers and researchers promotes the development of a variety of agroforestry options that may meet the various needs of different farmers, and thus exploits one of the greatest strengths of agroforestry--its plasticity. The design and evaluation of agroforestry systems with eight farmer research groups in south-east Mexico was conducted through surveys of individual production aims and limitations, and through group identification, testing, and analysis of production alternatives. Farmer trials were used as a basis for agroforestry development projects implemented by community and government organisations, thus disseminating technologies that had been tested and adapted by local farmers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • Valuable tree genetic resources are declining around many farming communities in the Peruvian Amazon, limiting farmers' options for economic development. The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry is working with farming communities to increase productivity and long-term sustainability of their forests, and to empower them to conserve tree genetic resources. This paper describes some principles of participatory tree domestication, and how researchers are working with farmers to select improved planting materials, reduce the risk of poor tree adaptation, produce and deliver high-quality planting material, and scale up participatory tree domestication. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • Southern Africa experiences severe degradation of the natural resource base caused by population growth and poverty. Agroforestry technologies are now available that have a large potential to improve the livelihoods of many households. The outcomes of technology development and how the development evolved into a more client-driven process are described. Regional development trends are assessed and six agroforestry options are described that offer better livelihood options to smallholder farming families. Problems and successes experienced in facilitating the wider use of agroforestry are discussed. Lessons learned on partnerships, the time frame of impact, using farmers as change agents, and addressing the special needs of women are highlighted. Emphasis is put on using agroforestry as a learning tool in building local capacity for innovation development. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • This paper describes developments in forestry extension in two districts of Kenya conducted under the auspices of the Nakuru and Nyandarua Forestry Extension Project 1990-1995 and the subsequent influence of those developments on extension policy pertaining to agroforestry in Kenya. It provides examples of innovative aspects within a conventional service- delivery programme and describes in some detail the successes, weaknesses, and opportunities of the pilot activities using a participatory extension methodology. These activities, together with others piloted in the country, have contributed to conceptualising the bottom-up planning approaches that underpin the National Agricultural Extension and Livestock Programme, a government programme that, in conjunction with the ongoing government restructuring, has replaced the previously dominant national approach of Training and Visit. The current programme relies on interdisciplinary and participatory planning in focal areas. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

  • Scaling up agroforestry adoption requires technical innovations that are adapted to the environment, demand-driven, require low capital and labour inputs, and provide tangible benefits in a short time. The basic inputs, usually information and germplasm, need to be available. To reach out to millions of rural poor who require the products and services of agroforestry innovations, the scaling-up process has to be cost and time efficient. Often, the common project mode of scaling up is too slow and expensive, and natural resource management issues need addressing on a large scale. Experiences from south-western Uganda suggest that local governments and organisations can be encouraged to initiate cost-effective, large-scale adoption. The recently introduced decentralisation process in Uganda makes it feasible for farmer organisations to do this. Research and development organisations concentrate on their comparative advantages, which lie developing innovations and monitoring. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • This paper describes the structure and impacts of a development project in Nagaland, India. The project was a large-scale experiment in participatory development that emphasised local technology based on farmer-led testing of agroforestry, where farmers themselves select agroforestry technologies, implement the field tests and assume responsibility for disseminating the results locally. This assessment suggests that agroforestry has spread rapidly and been primarily adopted on land that otherwise would have been used by traditional farmers for swidden agriculture. Thus, Nagaland appears to be on a path to intensifying its land use, based on agroforestry, which is likely to brake deforestation rates. The high rate of scaling up was due to an effective property rights system, access to a large and growing timber market, a continual process of internal monitoring and evaluation, provision of low-cost seeds and seedlings, and a participatory project strategy with interventions based on flexibility and community empowerment. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • Fodder shrubs provide great potential for increasing the income of smallholder dairy farmers. Following successful on-station and on-farm trials and considerable farmer-to-farmer dissemination in Embu District, Kenya, a project was initiated to introduce fodder shrubs to farmers across seven districts. Over a two-year period, a dissemination facilitator working through field-based partners assisted 150 farmer groups comprising 2600 farmers to establish 250 nurseries. Farmers planted an average of about 400 shrubs each. The experience has confirmed that successful scaling up requires much more than transferring seed and knowledge about a new practice; it involves building partnerships with a range of stakeholders, ensuring the appropriateness of the practice and farmers' interest in it, assisting local communities to be effective in mobilising local and external resources, and ensuring the effective participation of farmer groups and other stakeholders in testing, disseminating, monitoring, and evaluating the practice. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • Sustainable land use is critical for the development of the Philippines uplands, where about 18 million people live. This paper relates our experiences using a participatory approach to develop agroforestry practices and institutions for conservation farming that ensure food security, alleviate poverty and protect the environment in Claveria, Northern Mindanao, Philippines. We found that natural vegetative strips provide a simple solution to the technical constraints of soil conservation on slopes. These are buffer strips, laid out on the contour, in which natural vegetation is allowed to regrow into a thick, protective cover. The strips also provide a foundation for developing more complex agroforestry systems including fodder, fruit and timber trees. The tremendous surge in adoption of these systems has been enhanced by the Landcare approach. Landcare is a movement of farmer-led organizations that share knowledge about sustainable and profitable agriculture on the sloping lands while conserving the natural resources. The Landcare movement is spreading rapidly to many municipalities in Mindanao and Visayan islands. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research
  • In English only
  • In English only
  • As a result of the internal and external reforms introduced in the last two decades in Argentina, as in most Latin American countries, urban-based manufacturing activities have experienced a dramatic process of restructuring, which has prompted new social and environmental conflicts. In a context where macro-economic strategies are resulting in long-term restructuring of production patterns and local conflicts, it is important to assess the sustainability of current urban development trends. Focusing on a case study of the city of Mar del Plata, this paper looks at how the fishing industry has been restructured from a nationally confined to an internationally open system. The paper examines how and why governance frameworks regulating the appropriation and transformation of nature have changed during the restructuring process, and have consequently reshaped the ability of the local state, firms, and citizen-workers to protect the natural resource base on which the local economy depends This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Sub-standard and insecure housing conditions are recognised as a crucial aspect of urban poverty. In most large cities in the developing world, the formal market serves only a minority of the population. It is estimated that between 30 and 70 per cent live in `irregular' settlements, and that up to 85 per cent of the new housing stock is produced in an extra-legal manner, with severe social and environmental consequences. John Turner's ground-breaking work and the first Habitat conference in 1976 marked a paradigm shift towards an enabling and participatory approach to housing provision. However, little progress has been made in translating the new paradigm into practical and sustainable policies. Relocation schemes, social housing, slum upgrading, and sites and services are beset by two related problems: first, they are far too small-scale to serve the growing demand, and second, products are far too expensive to be affordable for low-income groups. The paper states that the informal sector's strategy of incremental development and improvement of housing and infrastructure can be incorporated into public policies, and introduces cases from the Philippines and Pakistan as best practices in this direction. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • A major proportion of urban housing in developing countries, and also in some European countries, is developed outside officially sanctioned processes. This is less a reflection of a global desire to break the law than of the existence of inappropriate planning regulations, standards, and administrative procedures. Many countries have inherited or imported their regulatory frameworks from outside, and these were designed to meet very different conditions to those currently facing countries in the South. By attempting to impose such approaches on populations which are invariably too poor to be able to conform to them, the danger is that respect for the law and official institutions in general will be undermined. For urban development to be socially, economically, and institutionally sustainable, it is therefore vital to assess the extent to which changes in the regulatory frameworks are required in order to lower the bottom rung of the legal housing ladder so that the urban poor can start climbing it. This paper serves as a `position paper' for an international research project to evaluate the social and economic costs of such frameworks for new urban development. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Large areas of Zimbabwean cites still reflect colonial planning traditions designed to promote racial segregation, which no longer adequately meet the demands of urban areas which are doubling in size every 10 to 15 years. This paper looks at the political, economic, and social influences on urban space production and use in Harare, and the extent to which the planning and regulatory system accommodates competing demands on public space in a fast-growing city. It argues that urban space is a crucial resource for poor households that cannot be ignored in the context of sustainable development, and that the failure of official policy and regulations to recognise its importance inhibits the ability of the urban poor to help themselves. Policy initiatives to redress this balance are explored. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Centralised housing provision has co-existed in Cuba with the widespread reliance on self-help approaches to meeting housing needs, though there has been no mechanism to articulate the two with each other. The author discusses ways in which to bring together the technical and financial resources of the state sector with the creativity and vision of people living in Cuba's towns and cities in order to generate approaches that are socially and ecologically sustainable. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • The Casa Propia programme of the Buenos Aires City Government is an innovative case of public-private financing of social housing. It aims to encourage investors to build housing on private land for sale to low-income buyers receiving `soft' credits from the state. The Casa Propia experience suggests that in the South, where states tends to lack consolidated `social contingency networks', the design of housing programmes that are theoretically sustainable for low-income groups tends to give priority to financial variables over social and environmental concerns. This creates contradictions within such programmes that result in negative social and environmental impacts. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • The North-South disparity in access to new information communication technologies is well known, but there is a need now to get beyond simply measuring and documenting that gap, and develop more sensitive indicators on how such technologies might be, and are being, used by popular organisations (such as residents' associations) in order to give more effective voice to the interests of people living in poverty. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • The MOLAND methodology adopts earth observation techniques combined with geo-processing tools and statistical data to monitor environmental and morphological changes in urban areas. The methodology is an aid to understanding urban development processes as well as a tool for planning. The MOLAND methodology provides detailed territorial information at a regional scale, enabling development agencies accurately to derive specific environmental indicators, and to improve existing urban sustainability indicators. This article describes the kinds of information that can be produced with the MOLAND methodology, efforts to develop comparable data series over time in different locations, and applications of these data to planning tasks involving population growth, mobility and security, strategic and environmental impact assessment on a large scale, and urban sprawl. Recent experiences in applying the methodology to Eastern European and Third World cities are discussed. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Despite improvements in access to urban land and services since the 1980s, in both Brazil and Mexico, the consolidation of peripheral urban settlements has accentuated social segregation. Such trends highlight the continuing existence of poverty on a global scale. How have urban planners and urban managers chosen to frame the challenges facing low-income communities? How far does the language used by the technical experts allow them to engage in a dialogue with the people living in these marginalised communities, who place little faith in the outcomes of negotiations with the state? This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • As part of a human rights education campaign, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) fixed 700,000 posters throughout Bangladesh. This met with opposition from religious organisations. This paper investigates the nature and cause of the backlash and sets out strategies for how development organisations can achieve their objectives in the face of opposition. The opposition was found to be in response to interpretations of the posters based on the Holy Koran and Islamic practices, and a perceived intrusion into the professional territory of religious organisations, which affected the socio-economic interests of these organisations' representatives. It was therefore concluded that development organisations should pre-empt such opposition by spelling out their objectives to potential critics, and formulating programmes that do not provide scope for opponents to undermine their development activities. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • With reference to Dar es Salaam, this paper examines experience to date with the concept of urban environmental planning and management (EPM), an approach promoted by the UN agencies concerned with human settlements (UNCHS) and environment (UNEP) to enhance the capacity of local governments to manage rapid urban growth and development in partnership with key stakeholders. The paper highlights the opportunities EPM provides to revitalise urban management, particularly in capacity-starved contexts such as those seen in Tanzania. Militating against sustained partnership between local governments and key stakeholders are constraints including weak political will, overemphasis on short-term physical outputs, reluctance to share power, and the protracted nature of the EPM process. Changing entrenched attitudes and habits of the political and administrative élites (e.g. conservatism or inflexibility, mystification of urban planning and management, and the monopolisation of power) is imperative if EPM is to be institutionalised within Tanzania. Other issues include how to sustain consensus among diverse stakeholders, the balancing of long-term strategies with immediate or short-term expectations in poverty-stricken environments, in addition to problems of dialogue with substantive participation by civil society in immature multi-party democracies. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Democratisation, structural adjustment, state reform (including decentralisation), and liberalisation of the economy (including privatisation) have brought about dramatic changes in the nations, societies, and cities of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). As central governments devolve greater responsibilities to them, local governments are obliged to perform new roles and strengthen their managerial capacity to cope with increasing urban problems and popular demands. In response to the state's inability to address local problems, there has been a flourishing of civil society organisations (CSOs) engaging in self-help initiatives, building social networks and mutual support groups in order to meet their basic needs. To deepen democracy and promote popular participation in resolving urban issues calls for clear guiding principles and methodologies. These should be based on the wealth of experience that Latin American cities have acquired over the years. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Using Lima as an example, the author analyses the meaning of sustainable development and how grassroots community-based organisations can contribute to its achievement in megacities. Demands are today made of cities and countries of the South to develop in a sustainable way, although Northern nations did not themselves do so. `Sustainability' on a global scale is thus attainable only at the cost of the urban poor in the South. The paper argues that the recent shift towards placing the problems and concerns of Third World megacities back on national and international agendas is founded on environmental preoccupations, rather than being an attempt to address poverty and the lack of basic services. The fragmentation of issues and people in urban environments is seen as a threat to genuine development, while community-based organisations may suggest some ways towards achieving a form of development that integrates social and political concerns and is, therefore, sustainable. The paper asserts that `public spaces' are a way of achieving a decentralised approach to development and democracy in the megacity, provided these are informed by an understanding of the individual and the community, and by a vision of development and politics. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • High rates of urbanisation in the South have led to unsustainable development in its cities and towns. The form of development that is taking place is `parasitic', in that it excludes the poor and follows the development paradigm of the North rather than one more appropriate to the situations faced in the South. Sustainable development is seen as a measure to counterpoise economic growth with environmental concerns, but it remains doubtful whether this can be realised since the impact on countries of the South of their participation in the global market has proved disastrous. This paper highlights the need to be aware of a country's `carrying' and `caring' capacity, and argues that work towards sustainable development needs to go from the poor upwards. The Philippines epitomises these concerns, especially regarding the high rate of urbanisation in Metro Manila, where environmental problems and lack of services have led to a deterioration in the quality of life. This is seen by the author to be the responsibility of five overlapping power groups - the state, business, the church, the media, and international aid agencies. The latter tend to follow the Northern development paradigm, which places the South in a vulnerable position and forces Southern governments to act against their country's best interests. A new development paradigm is desperately needed that will avoid the mistakes of the past and improve future prospects for the poor and the environment. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • The mainstream debate on urban development looks either at urban development or sustainable cities, and tends to miss out on people-centred approaches to development. The former addresses the issues of economic growth, whereas the latter that of environmental problems, to the exclusion of development concerns of the poor. The new perspective of Sustainable Cities in the South is an `inclusive approach', which puts the vision of the poor and marginalised sectors at the centre and includes all the dimensions of development in a holistic and synergetic manner. The paper presents such a vision of sustainable cities in India and describes activities aimed at reaching this vision. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • At 300 million, the urban population of India is still less than one third of its total population. It is projected that by 2045 nearly 800 million Indians will be living in its cities - more than the total population of the whole of present-day Europe. Already, the infrastructures of all the six mega- and 40 million-plus cities of India are under very severe stress. The ground water is depleting rapidly, pollution is reaching crisis levels, the transportation system is in disarray, and sewerage and sanitation are in shambles, all of which is affecting public health and hygiene. This explosive state of affairs has not been adequately appreciated at the national and international level. This paper analyses the programmes and policies adopted so far to correct the situation, identifies their shortcomings, and looks into the new initiatives that have been undertaken to make the cities self-sustainable units of governance and reliable service-providers. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • Past international cooperation in support of urban projects and programmes, while focusing almost entirely on actions through government agencies, has been based upon major misunderstandings of the limited possibilities of government intervention and with a weak link to academic attempts to conceptualise the processes of urbanisation. The main international urban cooperation programmes, such as in transport, sanitation, and water supply, have been fragmented and often politically, socially, and technologically unsustainable, even in the short term. New initiatives have emerged that do recognise the need to work with actors and stakeholders other than government and these are producing very different practical results. As yet, these remain small-scale and little work has been done to develop the implications of `scaling-up' these approaches or of creating a coherent framework within which to pursue effective sustainable urban development initiatives. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities
  • In English only
  • Until very recently private capital flows to developing countries have been growing rapidly. In the wake of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, foreign direct investment has been identified as a vital ingredient to restore and invigorate the economies in the Asian region and beyond. In an attempt to attract overseas capital and to stimulate economic development, countries such as the Philippines have stepped up the adoption of policies that allow for greater access by foreign investors. Increasingly, it appears that foreign capital, provided through transnational corporations, is set to replace official aid and to promote economic development first and foremost, with 'trickle-down' social benefits to follow. This study examines the role of one transnational corporation called the Alliance, in the promised development of Bohol in the Philippines, as a by-product of a water treatment and supply proposal linking the island provinces of Bohol and Cebu. The findings suggest that economic objectives tend to take priority over social development. The Alliance seemed to expound its economic and technical ability, with less effort given to involving and consulting with affected communities. This resulted in residents being disenfranchised from the development process, and gave rise to a feeling of mistrust and resentment.
  • In a largely unregulated NGO sector, Living Earth Foundation (LEF) is piloting an externally accredited learning course in Environment and Community Development as part of an overall NGO capacity building strategy. The programme has a needs-led approach with the design and delivery of the course being managed in close consultation with the learners themselves. The advantages of such an approach are beginning to become apparent to individual learners and is informing the way in which LEF promotes community-based learning.
  • Communication among stakeholders within international aid projects has long been recognised as problematic. The authors interviewed five different stakeholders on a Chinese-Australian project to explore whether (a) stakeholders have exclusive worldviews; (b) farmers and donor agencies see farming as a system; and (c) stakeholders can be arranged on a learning spiral, incorporating techno-centric, socio-centric and balanced socio-biological system views. In this sample, the stakeholders had distinct views, with only the donor agency espousing a balanced systemic view. For example, farmers trialling zero tillage were interested in yield advantages but not in the profitability or the possible environmental benefits which motivated other stakeholders. Different perceptions were arranged on a learning spiral which was used as a framework for reflection on the desirability of supplementary steps in the research and development process, particularly involving collective governance, which may create a more inclusive outcome for all stakeholders
  • Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Government of Georgia has been struggling to provide healthcare services to a population experiencing a deterioration in health status, while at the same time restructuring and reforming the delivery, priorities, resource allocation, and overall focus of this healthcare system. International humanitarian and development organisations in Georgia can exploit this historic opportunity by serving as facilitators and mentors in stimulating a process of positive social change within this reform dynamic. But this process will require strategies and tactics that are broadly inclusive of internal actors and stakeholders, and that can be put into practice by using a range of participatory approaches.
  • Fifteen Egyptian firms producing goods and services were classified into two sets by method of finance, i.e., profit-sharing for the seven Islamic versus debt-at-interest for the eight non-Islamic firms. Interviewed in 1993 and 1994, the two groups were found to be similar in customer relations and market behaviour and in paternalism toward employees. However, the non-Islamic firms had a significantly higher average profit rate, while the Islamic firms paid a significantly higher average wage, suggesting that cultural institutions shape economic behaviour even in a well-established market economy.
  • The concept of 'community' became a popular buzzword towards the end of the twentieth century. However, its meaning is increasingly vague because of its rhetorical use in politics, as well as in development, gender, and environmental circles. Based on the experience of a Mohlakeng Township Site and Service Scheme that was undertaken between 1990 and 1994, the paper examines some of the implications of the flexible use of the term 'community' in South Africa.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Can prospects for improving livelihood security and building sustainable environments in Africa be increased if women have greater influence in decisions about how to manage resources? Anecdotal evidence suggests that this question should be answered in the affirmative, yet few development agencies perform systematic evaluations with gender-disaggregated data despite nearly two decades of development literature describing the pitfalls of failing to do so. This paper explores this question through analysis of cases from Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, The Gambia, and Rwanda gleaned from a literature search of more than 50 natural resource management projects across Africa. It highlights enabling conditions which facilitate effective involvement of both men and women in natural resource management, and develops indicators to clarify progress in terms of impact, process, and sustainability. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • This article argues that if children were the focus of more deliberate attention on the part of donors, it could result in more effective use of the resources available for poverty reduction. Instead, development assistance neglects some of children's most pressing needs, and fails to take advantage of the long-term benefits to be gained by ensuring their physical and psychosocial welfare. The article focuses especially on the living environments of children in poverty, an area which receives little attention, but which is integral to poverty reduction.
  • The development of civil society depends on a partnership between government, the corporate sector, and representatives of civil society. NGOs are players in development of civil society, but they are weak in relation to the other partners, because they are not independent and are rarely representative. NGOs need to develop the skills to market their causes in order to reduce dependency, increase accountability, and root themselves within the societies in which they operate.
  • Civil society and grassroots campaigns are increasingly affecting foreign policy. Some of these campaigns are driven by solidarity groups in the North, who are in solidarity with a struggle in the South. This paper looks at the role of the martyr as a motivating factor to participation in solidarity groups. It looks at the pitfalls of relying on a martyr image, including the fall-out from a controversy between two books: I, Rigoberta Menchú and Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.
  • Nearly half of the world's population lives in areas which are malarious or in which there is a distinct risk of malaria transmission. Advances against malaria continue to made despite limited resources. Whatever biomedical advances are made against malaria they will become meaningful only when they can be applied in the field on a large scale. The complex of human factors, partially exemplified in this paper, will be crucial in such application being successful. It would be unfortunate if more becomes known of the biomedical aspects of malaria without a fuller complementary understanding of the human contexts in which the disease occurs and in which biomedical advances have to be applied.
  • Many farmers in less developed countries (LDCs) lack comprehensive information detailing the acute and chronic health impacts of pesticide use. Even at low levels, the use of pesticides can have significant chronic health implications. The results of research conducted among sugarcane farmers in Fifi demonstrate significantly higher occurrences of illness and disease among farmers using pesticides compared with a control group. Government agencies, NGOs, and donor groups must provide farmers with information describing the short- and long-term health risks in using pesticides. Improved information will allow farmers to make rational decisions regarding the types of pesticides to use or whether to use pesticides at all. Otherwise, LDCs can expect levels of chronic illness to increase alongside increasing agricultural output.
  • In English only
  • Often the primary barriers to improving women's health are rooted in socio-economic, legal, and cultural factors. Women are generally assigned subordinate status in terms of economic power, decision making, and options regarding education, work, and family. National laws often restrict or prohibit equality and choice within society. Thus, the improvement of reproductive health is not only a matter of effective health interventions, but also a matter of social justice and human rights. This article discusses how the international human rights (IHR) system can be used more effectively for the protection and promotion of reproductive rights. In particular, it focuses how IHR treaties can play an important role in fostering state compliance with rights relating to reproductive and sexual health. It ends with a discussion on how NGO advocacy work can better collaborate with the treaty body monitoring process in order to advance women's reproductive rights.
  • Good governance is currently seen as a means to development with decentralisation acting as one of its main tools.This paper illustrates how development institutions use decentralisation as a technical tool, neglecting its essentially political aspects.
  • This paper is concerned with the requirements of microfinance organisations (MFOs) that seek both to reduce poverty and to become increasingly financially self-reliant. They need information on their impact in order to improve the services they offer. But impact assessment (IA) work has generally been carried out primarily to comply with the accountability requirements of their financial sponsors. This Note advocates re-orienting IA towards the MFO's own strategic decision processes, and integrating it more closely with internal monitoring.
  • This paper reports on an attempt in Zimbabwe to use methods and techniques commonly associated with rural contexts, Rapid Rural Assessment (RRA) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), to undertake an assessment of the needs and perceptions of private sector enterprises in two urban settings. These participatory methods were well received and also facilitated dialogue among different, and sometimes mutually hostile, stakeholders.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Participatory methods are increasingly being used in development work at grassroots level in Africa. Western liberal concepts like `one person one vote' underlie these methods. However, such concepts may not be easily compatible with a grassroots reality in which ethnicity (i.e. superior and subordinate ethnic identities) is an important factor shaping the social order. This article provides insights into the socio-political realities of ethnicity at village level in Botswana. The tension between participatory methods and the ethnically-structured village reality are illustrated with examples from a project that tested the relevance of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in Botswana. The authors identify problems and opportunities of participatory methods in addressing the inequalities in ethnically divided communities. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and Development and Culture.
  • While gender has become a central factor in development, age and older people are seldom considered, and many organisations assume a top-down, non-participatory model of care - even when these organisations are otherwise engaged in sustainable and partipatory development. This paper looks at how older people have been involved in sustainable community-based care efforts in Southeast Asia, and argues that the key factor for project success is the building of 'social capacity' - the ability of a social group or community to function and care for its older members - which depends on the strategic approach to participation taken by the project.
  • There is considerable focus nowadays on the involvement of communities in planning their own projects. Much of this involvement is in the form of verbal communication whereby villagers inform development workers of their problems and how they propose to solve them. Drawing on experience from two projects in Uganda and Ethiopia, this article argues that the starting point for any project planning in a community context is the current practice of that community. It is argued that if one looks at the community's practice, beliefs, and knowledge, one has a firmer foundation on which to build a project.
  • The 1998 floods, which inundated much of Bangladesh, had a major effect on the lives and work of urban slum children. Lack of work opportunities, and beliefs about appropriate roles for young children, meant that the floods did not lead to great increases in workforce entry and in some cases led to a reduction the opportunities available. Children's domestic work was also affected. Children's paid and domestic work had an important impact on how well households survived during and after the floods. The findings highlight the simultaneously beneficial and harmful nature of much child labour, and are therefore relevant to the dilemmas that face policy makers in this area. The research reported on in this article also has implications for those involved in disaster relief policy making.
  • The ethos of technical assistance in emergency relief work has emphasised the importance of recruiting people with appropriate professional and technical skills to work under the difficult circumstances of disasters. The authors used the Critical Incident Technique to assess job-related skills that were seen to be crucial for the achievement of the objectives towards which emergency relief personnel were working. Fifteen Irish nurses, working predominantly in refugee camps, identified over 60 different work objectives and 54 distinct job-related skills. It is argued that greater account should be taken of the variety of objectives which motivates such field workers. The job-related skills identified were primarily process- rather than outcome-oriented skills, and the authors hold that a greater emphasis should be placed on the development of fluid as opposed to crystallised skills. The possibilities of using the Critical Incident Technique as a mechanism for feeding back authentic field experience and operationalising effective process skills is discussed.
  • The paper presents the major differences between the approaches to project planning known as Logical Framework Approach (LFA) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and discusses whether these can be used in a complementary fashion. It is suggested that LFA be used to provide the overall structure of the planning process while PRA may be used in discussions and to place decision making at the grassroots. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • Stepping Stones is a training package on HIV/AIDS, gender, communication, and relationship skills designed both for use in existing HIV/AIDS projects and more generally. Narrating her experience of a training of trainers programme in India, the author explores the possibilities and challenges of using this as a means of integrating gender into HIV/AIDS projects.
  • Needs assessments of adults and children in households affected by HIV/AIDS in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa indicate that food provision is a critical support area which has been neglected in mitigation interventions. This paper looks at practical options for targeting food aid within a development framework, using Zambia as a case country.
  • This paper attempts to draw some lessons from the experience of development NGOs throughout the world over the last five decades. It starts by describing the meaning of alternative development paradigm as practised by NGOs. It then examines some of the major socio-political changes that have occurred in recent years, and their impact on development NGOs. Finally, it outlines some key dilemmas facing development NGOs, and their potential implications for their future roles and contributions at the start of the new millennium. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • The forces associated with economic globalisation and the apparent supremacy of market forces have unleashed a range of political and social processes that have served, and were indeed designed, to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the majority. These include phenomena such as the rise in armed conflict, threats to food security, the loss of livelihoods and traditional ways of life of millions of people worldwide, the commodification of social provision, assaults on national sovereignty, and the privatisation of citizenship. However, the author argues, the most significant impact of globalisation is the `localisation' of social and political struggle, and the emergence of new forms of international solidarity. Many NGOs have too readily succumbed to the view that globalisation in its present form is inevitable and irreversible, and have accommodated to it by trading their essential values for technical professionalism, often imported from the private sector. However, if NGOs are to assume their place as part of a transformational movement for social justice, they must re-discover and foster the values of citizen participation and develop a genuine respect for diversity. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This paper analyses the significance and scope of the globalisation process, focusing on its implications for the autonomy of national actors, on the one hand, and on the new demands that global governance imposes upon multilateral action, on the other. It is argued that the current form of globalisation is in fact compatible with some degree of autonomous coordinated social action outside the realm of the market. This allows us both to differentiate between the realities and mystification (i.e. ideology) that underlie the concept of globalisation and to reject the standard discourse and economic therapy offered by certain international organisations to developing countries. If globalisation does not rule out the possibility of autonomous national-level action, it also establishes the basis for more solid and effective multilateral action. The factors that support the need for such action in the future are analysed, action that responds to demands for greater management of international public assets, and to calls for more effective global governance. The article ends by analysing the necessary characteristics of such a multilateral system if it is to meet the needs arising from a new international reality. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This article examines why the World Bank adopted neo-liberal economic policies. It argues that neo-liberal discourse favoured the interests of key Northern actors, and, more surprisingly, that it also allowed many Southern state actors to maintain or extend their political power. This is because World Bank discourse offers little or no political analysis of the state, instead focusing on `technical' issues of economic adjustment. While there may now be a certain shift in World Bank discourse towards somewhat greater acceptance of a role for the state, there is still a widespread absence of a political analysis, which means that dominant power relations will still not be fundamentally acknowledged or challenged. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • In recent years, both the corporate sector and civil society organisations, particularly international NGOs, have become more influential in shaping development debates and policies. There is increasing awareness within the corporate sector of the need to demonstrate social responsibility; and growing acceptance among NGOs that business is essential to the economic growth which will fuel social development. This paper shows how the two sectors can engage constructively in order to establish and monitor standards, though it also argues the need for some pressure groups to retain an uncompromising and radical agenda in order to keep the critical debates alive. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Interest in partnerships between international NGOs and the corporate sector is growing as both sectors see their roles changing in response to increasing consumer awareness about social, environmental, and human rights issues. This article presents the case of the partnership between the sports goods industry, The Save the Children Fund (SCF), and various international and local organisations in the district of Sialkot in Pakistan. The author uses this case in order to discuss the important elements of a cross-sectoral partnership, the considerations for the various parties that enter into such partnerships, and the implications of these partnerships with the corporate sector for the future of NGOs and their vision of development. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Development NGOs are in crisis. They are losing their capacity to engage in critical analysis and propose global solutions; to react to or seize the political initiative; or to situate themselves on the cutting edge of those social and political processes in which new approaches and potential solutions might be found. While some NGOs have sought to accommodate themselves around donors' policies and projects that focus on reducing the negative effects of structural adjustment, the raison d'être of NGOs is to have the autonomy, initiative, and flexibility that the non-governmental status confers upon them. A growing split between NGOs' capacity to lobby and do research and their grassroots work reflects a deeper division that exists - both practical and theoretical - between the concept and process of development and the concept and process of democratisation. The author argues that human development and participative and representative democracy are both mutually reinforcing and indivisible and that the challenge the NGOs face is to link - theoretically and practically- democracy with development. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • In this overview essay, the co-editors examine the new challenges and opportunities facing development NGOs in relation to their relevance, their mission, relations between Northern and Southern NGOs and with other agents of power, including business, and their effectiveness. There is a balance to be drawn between keeping up with emerging issues and agendas, and retaining the values that underpin their integrity and unique nature. NGOs saw phenomenal growth in the neo-liberal policy environment that flourished in the late twentieth century, but this very prominence means that more questions are being asked about their accountability, and about their mandates. Will the twenty-first century see NGOs still living complacently in the past, or will they genuinely rise to the challenges ahead? This editorial overview is freely available as the opening chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. After 50 years of spectacularly successful work (particularly in raising the equity stakes, improving the quality of ODA, fostering Southern NGO work at the international level, and organising quick and effective humanitarian assistance), Northern development NGOs have come to a crossroads. Van Rooy argues that the history of the NGO `occupational category', coupled with a changing political and economic environment (the end of the cold war, rising international investment, declining ODA, and vastly heightened Southern NGO capacity), means that most Northern NGOs should close up shop. Instead, a kaleidoscopic rebirth is envisaged, where four key functions remain for Northerners (as humanitarian agents, economic policy watchers, North-South brokers, and corporate responsibility advocates). This change of job is heralded as good news: evidence that the project of global social justice has moved dramatically forward.
  • This paper questions whether development agencies and their staff, at whatever level (community-based organisations, national or international NGOs) are sufficiently clear about their own values and roles, and seeks to analyse tensions and dilemmas that arise when roles are confused. Clarity about the roles of the people and agencies involved is essential for the development of a valid global citizens' movement that can inter-connect local and global problems and actors, and work towards sustainable solutions. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Every organisation has certain core convictions about its endeavours and about the ways to go about its work. When these convictions are translated into relatively enduring practices they can be called organisational values. Managing an organisation's value system is an important strategic task in itself, and the concepts and methods for undertaking this task are examined in this paper. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • While the forces of globalisation have intensified economic polarisation, diverse social movements worldwide are struggling to defend the public interest and to promote a more rights-based and sustainable form of organising human society. In allying themselves with the causes of the dispossessed at the local level, and raising international awareness of such issues, NGOs have a part to play in building a more equitable global order. However, NGOs urgently need to find better ways to link these struggles with their analysis, their action, and their ethical values. This article is freely available as the opening chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This article reports the results of and conclusions from a survey of Northern NGOs conducted during 1998 and 1999 for the purposes of testing generalised criticisms of Northern NGO advocacy and providing benchmarks further research on the policy impact of the Washington Advocacy office of Oxfam International. Based on the survey findings, the author challenges Northern NGOs more thoroughly to evaluate their advocacy so that they may effectively demonstrate their advocacy achievements and, by so doing, confidently invest a greater proportion of resources into advocacy programmes which effectively contribute to their goals of reducing poverty. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • NGO campaigns have become increasingly high profile in recent years. Three contemporary examples are critically examined (Brent Spar, landmines, and international debt), both in terms of the various ingredients behind their success, and in relation to their real significance and long-term impact. The author looks at the trade-offs, challenges, and opportunities for NGO-sponsored campaigns within a changing political order and in the light of the potential offered by New Media. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • The growing crisis of external indebtedness in the South has become the focus not only of multilateral policy debate, but also the subject of an increasingly vocal international anti-debt campaign, the influence of which was clear at the abortive World Trade Organisation at Seattle in December 1999. Though effective, however, the anti-debt campaign encompasses a range of different positions, which result in diverse strategies and tactics. This paper examines the reasons for and implications of such differences, particularly in relation to North-South solidarity and action, and makes the case for Northern campaigners and lobbyists to take their principal lead from anti-debt groups that are mobilising public opinion in the South. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • NGO advocacy is sometimes portrayed in a heroic light, but efforts to influence World Bank-supported economic policies confront considerable ambiguity. Influence is difficult to demonstrate, but advocacy should be more rigorously assessed in the interest of transparency and effectiveness. Two (partial) solutions to this ambiguity are to focus on the process of NGO campaigns themselves; and to monitor impact on component parts of a model of institutional change at the Bank. This article assesses a recent advocacy campaign by testing it against five criticisms of NGO campaigning, then proposes that NGO advocates develop a practical model of policy change and monitor and evaluate their efforts with reference to the model's component parts. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • The conventional (but false) dichotomy between humanitarianism and development, hitherto grounded in the perceived differences between international humanitarian law and international human rights law respectively, is not merely unhelpful in practical terms but also serves to diminish our understanding of the shared issues underlying the two discourses. There are welcome signs, however, of a growing recognition that all development and relief work is essentially rights-based and of efforts to integrate thinking and practice under one common set of principles. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Despite a growing emphasis by aid agencies on local participation and consultation, the recipients of aid commonly have mixed, if not hostile, responses to relief assistance. Agencies need to acknowledge the inequalities that are inherent in an aid relationship, and be more judicious in determining their proper role. Finally, the author calls for aid providers and recipients to accept our innate human equality and our circumstantial inequality in order to establish relationships of mutual respect and contemporaneous enjoyment of each other. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This paper examines the application of the Local Capacities for Peace framework in field operations in Sudan, and identifies lessons learned about planning and implementation in the World Vision programme over a 20-month period. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Is it preferable for aid agencies to listen to their prophetic calling and risk their hard-earned credibility by engaging in advocacy that is intended to avert disasters, or should NGOs instead be wary of calling wolf too often? Written from the perspective of an advocacy practitioner, this article looks at the conflicting pressures on NGOs both to scale-up and to limit advocacy during disasters. It is important to evaluate NGOs' motives and also the impact of their preventive advocacy efforts: whenever advocacy is an issue, questions of accountability, veracity, and legitimacy are never far from the surface. The paper ends with a plea to NGOs to take seriously their credibility as a resource which should be risked, where necessary, as part of the overall humanitarian ethic of saving lives. The dangers of appearing self-serving and misleading are genuine, but ultimately the potential to change dire events is too important to be surrendered lightly. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • The concept of capacity building is elusive, and our current approaches are doomed to failure, not because we lack adequate models, but because these approaches are in themselves inadequate. This article attempts to outline some of the fundamental shifts which a new form of approach to capacity building would entail, the first shift being from the tangible to the intangible, and the second being from static model to a developmental reading. Some of the consequences of such shifts are discussed. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • As the century has just changed for the Western calendar it may be appropriate to bear in mind that for a vast part of the world the centuries are different and rolling at a different time and under different conditions. So, although we live and trade in a global village we are yet divided by time, space, and ideologies. The hope is that the twentieth century will enable us to have a closer look at each other and that the global network, the websites, and the electronic mailing systems will work as a bridge rather than a new means of widening the gaps. This article is a plea for a better understanding of the different priorities and views that Islamist women have of themselves, of their place in history, and what it is that they need to fight for. It is also a call for the universality of sisterhood and a wish that the solidarity that was forged in latter part of the twentieth century will not be fragmented into smithereens in the new millennium. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future and in Development and Culture.
  • While women's movements in Latin America and elsewhere have succeeded in putting many issues that are relevant to women and to gender relations onto the political agenda, and although most international aid agencies have made efforts to incorporate gender analysis into their work, this progress has been neither comprehensive nor unproblematic. This article focuses on ways in which the development co-operation agenda, and the priorities and working methods of development agencies and NGOs, have served to distort the vision and practice of the women's organisations whose work they seek to support. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This article summarises the results of a joint action-research project undertaken by a number of international and local NGOs, which involved case studies in four countries in Africa, three in South Asia , one in Latin America, and one in the UK. The paper seeks to situate the discussion of impact assessment in the context of a growing critique of international NGOs. Overall, it is suggested that simple models of cause and effect which link project inputs to outputs and impact, although important, are usually inadequate for assessing the impact of what NGOs do. Instead, the author recommends the need to develop models that embrace the wider context of influences and change processes that surrounds projects and programmes, and the broad-ranging impacts that result. A major conclusion to emerge from the case studies is that the ability to select a judicious mix, and sequence, of tools and methods is vital. The paper concludes by looking at the broader policy implications of the studies notably in relation to: dealing with the problems of attribution and aggregation; exploring the issue of poverty reach and gender relations; warning aganist simplistic use of impact assessment to allocate resources; and in suggesting how impact assessment can be part of a 'virtous circle' of change that can help promote greater accountability and learning among international NGOs. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • The question of how development agencies should assess their impact has no simple answers and so is often either unasked, or is framed in terms that privilege time-bound and quantitative findings. Describing a council estate neighbourhood project in the UK, the author probes the understandings and perceptions of different stakeholders concerning what they believe has changed over the life of the project, and to what they would attribute those changes. The findings suggest that the impact of development interventions is always contingent upon many factors and can only be properly viewed over time; and that many of the most critical factors in shaping change are intangible and have to do with a wide range of social relations and with human motivation and drive, both individual and collective. The author does not present a `blueprint' for how to conduct impact assessment, but offers some insights into how to frame the questions and interpret the answers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • This paper argues that the distinctive values common to many NGOs gives them a particular advantage over other types of organisations. This perspective should be seen in the context of donors' increasing willingness to fund non-traditional development actors, including the military, parastatals, quangos, private service contractors, and consultancy firms. To distinguish themselves from other recipients of aid funding, NGOs need to identify, articulate, and nurture their core values and identity. The paper identifies some of the key indicators that best reflect values and organisational capacities that distinguish NGOs from other agencies. The concern is that if NGOs lose their core values they lose their role. This article is freely available as the opening chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.
  • Literacy programmes conventionally focus solely on non-literates and use a 'learn first, do later' model that is ill-suited to adult learning. Programmes based on existing groups (whether function- or location-based), and which use a 'learn through doing' approach, are more likely to be successful both in achieving literacy and in reinforcing other development goals. This paper reviews the theory and practice of adult literacy programmes.
  • This paper describes the Participatory Change Process (PCP), a model that promotes the formation and action of sustainable grassroots organisations in poor and marginalised communities, using participatory learning and action methods to provide people with the capacities, self-confidence, and organisational structures needed to plan and implement development projects and influence policy formation. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • Conferences are typically organised around specialist presentations and panel discussions in ways that do not foster broad participation or effective knowledge-sharing. The paper describes a computer-based method to facilitate focused dialogue among participants.
  • The author reports on the triennial conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), held in Paris in 1999. He found a disturbing lack of historical analysis and awareness, and a surprising dearth of discussion of the value of knowledge, or information sharing, in the North-South relationship of the future.
  • The author reports on this conference held in Tromsö, Norway, in June 1999. Discussion centred on the discourse of `gender' and on the women's movement, and the author considers these themes from the dual viewpoint of the practitioner and the academic.
  • This Conference Report presents the recommendations taken from a Summary Report of the South Asian Agenda Regional Meeting for South Asia, held in New Delhi, India in 1999. The event was convened by the Disaster Mitigation Institute (DMI) and supported by the Department for International Development (DfID) of the British government. Measures to reduce the disaster vulnerability of poor communities, to improve the standard of, and review public expenditure on, relief, for example, are discussed.
  • In English only
  • This article looks at the lessons learned in reviewing two long-running international campaigns, one to promote breastfeeding in Ghana, and the other against the use of child labour in the carpet industry in India. In particular, it focuses on understanding the nature of campaigns and what makes them effective. It asserts that campaigns are not linear or mechanistic, but need to be understood as passing through various stages and requiring different kinds of action at different levels and at different times. The variety of work and skills thus required make it vital that the various organisations involved collaborate with each other. In particular, grassroots mobilisation has a role in bringing about sustained policy change that is often forgotten. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.
  • In the 1990s, fair trade, as practised by alternative trading organisations (ATOs), has evolved from a solidarity to a partnership model. This paper explores the nature of fair trade partnership using a case study of Cafédirect and one of its suppliers, the KNCU in Tanzania. For ATOs, fair trade is articulated in terms of a partnership with both producers and consumers. Partnership in this paper is conceived in terms of a fusion of the market and ethics in the links in the supply chain from the producer and consumer, the core partnership being that between the ATO and the producer organisation. The case study is used to highlight the elements of the partnership that are necessary for a fair trade relationship to 'work', highlighting the importance of participation by the producer partner.
  • Agricultural co-operatives have been promoted in India's economic development programme as a means of encouraging large-scale agricultural production while enhancing community Cupertino and equity. Focusing on sugar co-operatives in Gujarat state of western India, the author shows that these co-operatives have been successful in promoting large-scale agricultural production and in improving the economic and social standing of their members. This success, however, has been built upon the exploitation and pauperisation of local landless communities and migrant labourers. As a result, there has been an increased differentiation of the peasantry in south Gujarat.
  • By exploring two approaches to organisational change, gender and organisational development (OD), the author argues that OD is flawed since it perpetuates existing gender inequalities by failing to address them. By contrast, the gender approach brings change both for women and for men and is contextualised in a broader agenda of social transformation. Analysis of how power is gendered is the critical starting point. While gender is not disconnected from other forms of oppression - such as race and class - special attention needs to be given to gender because experience has shown it gets 'lost'. The article seeks to contribute to breaking new ground in theory and practice in order to promote organisations that are both equitable and effective. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • The paper considers the effectiveness of different strategies used in urban areas by development agencies to reduce poverty, including the relative merits of income generation and housing and neighbourhood improvement. Drawing on the findings of recent case studies, it suggests that the advantages of housing and neighbourhood improvements may have been under-estimated, and that too little attention has been given to integrating housing and neighbourhood improvement with income-generation.
  • Educational and societal development programmes in the Third World have paid too little attention to the facilitative and motivational merits of using indigenous languages. From primary education through to development activities among adults, the use of a non-indigenous language may in itself hinder the development process. In academic institutions, more interaction between the two fields of language planning and development studies is needed.
  • The author examines the contemporary liwac or barter system in Addis Ababa, a thriving part of the informal economy which involves the exchange of household goods for second-hand clothes and shoes. He concludes that this form of transaction positively co-exists with and is not superseded by the monetised economy.
  • This paper describes the relative advantages and disadvantages of formal Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCAs), in contrast with informal RoSCAs, as seen in Argentina. NGOs, it is argued, are not in a good position to use the formal RoSCA structure to developmental advantage, since they could not manage the risk assessment or legal framework necessary with formal RoSCAs, which do not rely on social censure and capital for their operation.
  • Based on primary research, this paper describes the negative human, occupational, and environmental impacts of the Kiraz Dere dam project in Turkey, concluding that financial compensation for people who are displaced by such projects is unlikely in itself to lead to the resettlement recommended by agencies such as the World Bank.
  • In English only
  • Full-text sample article
  • MOPAWI is an NGO in La Mosquitia, Honduras, working with indigenous communities in the region to create ecological sustainability and to strengthen technical knowledge and resource management. This paper presents the findings of research into how MOPAWI has `created linkages among the grassroots, the state, and ultimately the international level of politics in practice.' The strategic role of NGOs, and their ability to work across these levels, is discussed.
  • The author discusses the importance of rural family poultry (RFP) in Africa as an income generating and/or subsistence asset for families, particularly highlighting the gender dimension of RFP, since women are often the main owners of, and carers for, chickens. RFP development programmes must take account of other demands on women's time, but should aim to keep profits in the hands of women, increase production (for nutritional and financial gains), facilitate setting up co-operatives and, through these, the provision of training and supplies (making use of economies of scale).
  • This paper examines a Community Banking Scheme set up in Nigeria in 1991, in terms of its financial capabilities - `deposit mobilisation capability, and the value and ratio of its loan portfolio' - and considers four examples of its non-banking development functions. The author believes community banks have much development potential, and, while stating that the Scheme `has had mixed achievements', argues that the growth of non-banking facilities, and increased collaboration with self-help groups or NGOs, should lead to greater success.
  • The author summarises the results of research into the health of older adults in Malawi, India, and Tanzania, which found high levels of malnutrition and anaemia among them, as well as, and linked to, poor functional ability. The data suggests the need for development agencies to specifically consider older adults - who form an increasing proportion of the population - in their programme work, since the problems highlighted arise from poverty-related factors.
  • The author reports on this conference, held in Tokyo in 1999, which brought together leading development thinkers and practitioners, and finance experts. The main discussions are summarised, often with reference to the recent Asian financial crisis, and the author states that the IMF's apparent neglect of the link between finance and development was worrying, and evidence of the need for its reform.
  • As part of a human rights education campaign, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) fixed 700,000 posters throughout Bangladesh. This met with opposition from religious organisations. This paper investigates the nature and cause of the backlash and sets out strategies for how development organisations can achieve their objectives in the face of opposition. The opposition was found to be in response to interpretations of the posters based on the Holy Koran and Islamic practices, and a perceived intrusion into the professional territory of religious organisations, which affected the socio-economic interests of these organisations' representatives. It was therefore concluded that development organisations should pre-empt such opposition by spelling out their objectives to potential critics, and formulating programmes that do not provide scope for opponents to undermine their development activities. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.
  • Spirituality is central to many of the daily decisions people in the 'South' make about their own and their community' s development, including that of whether or not to participate in risky but potentially beneficial social action. Despite its importance, development literature and development practices have systematically avoided the topic of spirituality. This avoidance results in inferior research and less effective programmes and ultimately fails to provide participants with opportunities to reflect on how their development and their spirituality will and should shape each other. The author offers some possible explanations for the avoidance and suggests ways in which to address spirituality in development theory and practice. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • In 1997, 30 women and men of different ages and from a range of cultural, religious, social, and geographical backgrounds, participated in an Encounter to seek a deeper understanding of the implications of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' in their lives and their societies. Each had responded in writing to questions like: how did I become aware of 'womanhood' and 'manhood' ? how are these differences expressed in my society? how far do I see social changes that are taking place as a result of 50 years of women' s movements? The process provided a challenge to move beyond the feminine/masculine divide towards fundamental issues of human dignity. This article draws on the written and oral contributions of the participants.
  • ABANTU for Development embarked on a regional programme to strengthen civil society capacities for engaging with policy from a gender perspective. An early activity involved an in-depth study of NGO capacities for policy engagement which ABANTU carried out in Nigeria during the recent period of military rule. In keeping with ABANTU's commitments as a regional human resources network dedicated to promoting development and gender equality from an African perspective, the local research team used a participatory action methodology to gather and interpret the findings in a way that privileged local NGO perspectives and understandings of gender and policy. The exercise generated hitherto unavailable information and experiential case study material, and simultaneously identified and involved a core group of NGOs in the development and planning of the subsequent training programme. More importantly, it also furnished the regional training network with an understanding of indigenous cultures and local gender politics. These were found to be infused with diverse local cultural dynamics, as well as with the contradictory legacies of the military's state-driven programmes for women, both of which constrain the extent of gender activism, especially when this is monitored through instances of direct policy engagement. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • The author describes the movement of the Tobas indians from their nomadic, rural lifestyle in northern Argentina (due mainly to industrial deforestation) to Rosario, a city of around 1 million inhabitants. He highlights the difficulties the Tobas face in Rosario; their economic destitution, and the lack of education in their own language. He advocates economic support for co-operatives and training in traditional crafts, and changing the education system - or failing that, supporting non-formal workshops - to reflect the Tobas' own cultural values.
  • The author analyses the concept of social exclusion, arguing that the term has become a label for `another `vulnerable group' with no differentiation, complexity, agency, or resistance'. She instead suggests that we look to broader ideas of justice, participation, and citizenship, to bring the `social' aspect back into the concept, which should be more synonymous with discrimination and marginalisation than with the failure of formal (education, employment, legal etc.) systems.
  • Women's groups in Papua New Guinea, often under the influence of colonial and church governance in the past, still have an ambiguous function which serves to isolate women and `women's issues' rather than spread gender sensitivity. The author concludes that the existence of these forums for women actually encourages the continued marginalisation of women from governing and decision-making structures, since women's groups `tend to operate from separate and unequal spheres of influence'.
  • The author provides a matrix examining gender-based financial, economic, social/cultural, and political/legal obstacles to women benefiting from microfinance and enterprise. She goes on to discuss how impact assessment work can be approached in the light of this matrix, highlighting the importance of establishing the nature of gender relations prior to projects, considering the potential outcomes that assessors should look out for, and carrying out gender-sensitive assessment.
  • In English only
  • The authors explore the deleterious effects of economic globalisation on people in the USA, and explain the rise of poor people's organisations as a response to these conditions. They look at the impact of economic changes in terms of public policy and argue that the global economy is preventing a growing number of people from being able to meet their basic needs, by limiting or eliminating living-wage jobs as well as welfare programmes. However, poor people in the USA are organising to end poverty, and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union is given as a case study. Finally, the authors discuss the challenges faced by social workers and how they can be most effective in the face of a dying welfare state alongside growing exploitation and exclusion of the poor.
  • The author describes incentives used by governments to attract foreign investment and create export processing zones (EPZs), also known as special economic or free trade zones. The low cost of labour, mostly provided by women, is one of these incentives. Making special reference to Jamaica, Belize, and Barbados, the author discusses the impact of EPZs on the Caribbean, and the challenges facing small countries in the face of monopoly agreements.
  • The author argues, using the example of microfinance institutions, that it is essential to build genuinely solid and alternative institutions if development is to take its direction from the poor and vulnerable. He sets out his view of the characteristics such institutions would have, and the vulnerabilities currently seen in microfinance institutions.
  • In this personal Viewpoint, the author argues that globalisation has led to increased inequity in health and healthcare provision, just as it aggravates social inequity in general. He highlights the growing sacrifice of equity to efficiency, and the complicity of `elite' countries and companies in the deterioration of social conditions. Medical knowledge is being traded as a for-profit commodity, and the benefits of globalisation and liberalisation are bypassing poorer countries because of the concern for profit.
  • With reference to a recent visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the author gives his personal view on the spread of IT technology that accompanies globalisation. He comments particularly on the communication potential of the Internet and email, and the tendency of the technology to aggravate existing inequalities.
  • Cyberfeminists share the belief that women should `take control of and appropriate the use of cybertechnologies in an attempt to empower ourselves.' The author argues that the demystification of technology is necessary, but not sufficient, for empowerment (or re-empowerment, a term she prefers) since mainstream cyberfeminism fails to `address the complexities of the lived contexts of women in the South.'
  • The author argues that Northern NGOs are increasingly moulding themselves in the image of, and accepting the impetus of governments to become, a delivery service for global welfare. Commins believes that NGOs can, and should, avoid this by reassessing themselves on a variety of levels, including where they fit in complex emergency situations and how the new vocal presence of Southern NGOs presents a challenge for their role. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • This international NGO conference was held in Birmingham, England, in January 1999, to explore `the opportunities for civic action that global trends are creating for NGOs.' Discussions around NGOs and aid, capacity building, civil society, social capital, complex political emergencies, community development, advocacy, gender and microfinance took place, and the author highlights the most interesting points from each of these sessions.
  • There has been growing concern in Bangladesh that access to higher education is restricted to high-income families. Here, the author reports on the early findings of research into the socio-economic backgrounds of students at Bangladesh's major universities. These findings indicate that the average student is from an affluent, probably land-owning, family. The results are worrying since they suggest that doing well in the education system prior to university is not enough to ensure one has access to higher education.
  • In the context of inequity which makes achieving `health for all' extremely difficult, Where Women Have No Doctor attempts to give access to health information to those who lack it. The authors applaud the book, and stress that there is great need for this information, despite criticism from the book's reviewer in Development in Practice 8(3).
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Recent initiatives from the OECD, the World Bank, and others on the subject of corruption have received widespread attention. However, the author argues that the incidence of corruption is closely connected with contracting-out, concessions, and privatisation, where multinationals based in OECD countries stand to gain profitable business. The encouragement of privatisation by the World Bank, and the economic benefit to OECD multinationals from this business, mean that action against corruption needs to involve effective sanctions by developing countries against multinationals which engage in corrupt practices; greater political transparency to remove the secrecy under which corruption flourishes; and resistance to the uncritical extension of privatisation. This article looks at empirical evidence on this subject.
  • This paper looks at the nature and extent of privatisation around the world, including an analysis of the bodies or interests which promote this `panacea' policy. It identifies a number of responses which public sector trade unions have made to such policies, especially where these have been ideologically driven. It offers some examples of ways in which trade unions have developed their own models/proposals for modernisation of public services and shows how these have been both challenges and benefits to unions and service recipients. It looks at how agencies such as the World Bank have responded to these initiatives.
  • As the agonising over `what next' for Kosovo and Serbia continues, Eastern Slavonia offers a transition experience and timescale from which we may learn. Each case is specific in historical and political terms, and in the nature of international intervention. But questions of transition and minority rights are inherent across the region. Though Eastern Slavonia was one of the areas of former Yugoslavia that saw some of the fiercest fighting in the 1991 Serb-Croat war, few international aid agencies now remain. The 1995 Dayton Agreement provided for a one-year transition period for its re-incorporation into Croatia, under the auspices of a special UN mission (UNTAES). Based on extensive fieldwork, this article details the constraints on the UN's input into integrated social and civil structures, and describes the Kafkaesque welter of legal and bureaucratic obstacles as well as economic and other forms of discrimination that now face minority groups living in, or returning to, Croatia. Without a firm government commitment to full equality and fair treatment of all citizens, the pattern of violent `ethnic cleansing' may yet repeat itself.
  • The author differentiates between globalism, an ideology, and globalisation, a process that affects us all. He compares globalism and nationalism, considering the positive, negative, and similar, aspects of each, using examples from Eastern Europe where a struggle is taking place between the two, interdependent, ideologies. He advocates 'the constant presence of both to avoid the hegemony of either'. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • The author, the former president of Tanzania, answers this question resoundingly in the negative, arguing that while universal social principles may be possible, the inequity of wealth alone between countries means that social standards cannot currently be universally applied and adhered to. He goes on to argue that the equality of sovereign nations should be the basis for international economic, social, and political relations.
  • Describing the way globalisation has affected India over the last decade, the author considers the impact of these changes on women, in the main areas of `development' due to globalisation: commercialisation, capitalisation, foreign trade orientation, and financialisation and industrial restructuring. She develops the point that the `skewed income and wealth' structure in India, and the gender discrimination suffered by women, has not altered in the face of the changes brought by globalisation: women continue to lose out, and are losing out more severely than before.
  • A fundamental question to be decided at the November/December 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting is whether to support or resist a new round of trade negotiations. The author argues that while many developing countries, and development NGOs, are right to feel that the earlier Uruguay round produced results skewed in favour of developed countries, there is nothing to be gained from resisting a new round: rather, developing countries should signal their willingness to get involved, but only if certain conditions are met. `[C]onstructive, but critical, support' is the only way to realise benefits and avoid further marginalisation.
  • Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was agreed, thousands of maquiladoras (assembly plants) have sprung up along the Mexican side of the Mexico/US border. Around a million workers are subject to violations of their human, labour, and health rights, the author argues, and this is a by-product of `free trade'. Abell advocates worker organising, appropriate training and access to information, and international solidarity, in order to avoid such abuses here and in the growing number of export processing zones (EPZs) around the world.
  • In English only
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. While global problems of poverty, inequality, and social upheaval are on the increase, the language used by development agencies and development experts sounds increasingly radical and idealistic. New socio-political conditions have been borrowed from real contexts in the South, only to be re-imposed on Southern `partners'. Notions like empowerment, participation, and governance are paradoxically enforced through top-down, external intervention. Hans Christian Andersen's parable of the Emperor's new clothes highlights the illusory nature of this re-packaging of development policies in the 1990s. One major difficulty is that micro- and meso-level socio-political conditionalities remain subordinated to macro-level economic liberalisation.
  • KwaZulu-Natal has the highest HIV infection rate in South Africa. The authors here report on a workshop using a participatory approach to train doctors, nurses and Environmental Health Officers from the region. The methodology, an adaptation of SARAR techniques, successfully provided an open forum for discussion, and, the authors feel, could help in developing household coping strategies and highlighting ways health care professionals can provide support at a community level.

  • The author, founder and Chairman of WorldSpace Corporation, describes the creation of the WorldSpace Foundation to promulgate access to information in the developing world. WorldSpace has launched a digital radio service, and has gained licences to broadcast in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, with the aim of closing the gap between rich and poor countries' access to information. He argues that such access is a sufficient condition for development.
  • Many NGO financial institutions and co-operatives are, arguably, incorporating the rules and norms of banking which, as `alternative' institutions, they sought to avoid. Here, the author uses CARUNA (the National Savings and Credit Co-operative `Caja Rural', in Nicaragua) as a case study through which to discuss what makes a truly alternative financial institution, with a gender focus. These institutions should recognise the value of promoting `innovative services that support social reproduction and food security activities, and promote participation by and accountability to communities.'
  • The author gives personal feedback on the Practical Note `How to pre-evaluate credit projects in ten minutes' (Hank Moll, Development in Practice 7(3)). She argues that it is difficult to give yes or no answers to the three checklist questions Hank Moll proposed, and that it might be disadvantageous to do so without fully understanding the underlying issues.
  • The author gives personal feedback on a review of this publication (Development in Practice 8(3)). She argues that the reviewers' criticisms in respect to the book's treatment of abortion and intra-uterine contraceptive devices, and it's failure to consider cultural and religious sensitivities, were unsubstantiated or incorrect.
  • The authors respond to some of the criticisms of Where Women Have No Doctor (Development in Practice 8(3)). They argue that, far from it being dangerous to give medical information to low-literacy, untrained people, the reverse, i.e. no information at all, can lead to more damaging attempts at health care.
  • By the 1990s, innovative ideas such as Sustainable Human Development (SHD) and People-Centred Development (PCD) had begun to shift the development discourse beyond economistic perspectives and the ideological (market versus state) debates of earlier days. This article describes how, despite their promise and the genuine efforts of international development agencies such as UNDP and ActionAid to put SHD/PCD ideas into practice, the conceptual deficiencies of the SHD/PCD paradigm, and internal organisational interests within the two agencies, have gradually displaced the agenda's core components. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • This paper examines the role of ideology in underpinning the operations of major development movements. As a confessional NGO, World Vision presents a useful case study; and this article examines the influence on this NGO of the interaction between ideology and wider development trends. It is argued that from roots in a specific cultural expression of Christianity - which enabled a highly focused and homogeneous ethos - World Vision's ideology has been transformed by growth and diversification into a fusion of mainstream Christianity and the pursuit of the concept of partnership; a process which underlines the role of development and geo-political forces constantly to challenge NGOs' self-image and strategic directions.
  • Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Microfinance programmes are increasingly popular in Bangladesh, and are especially renowned for the excellent repayment performance of women borrowers. This article examines the loan use pattern of women involved in wage employment and the benefits they gain from such loans. It also explores the effects of wage employment on gender relations. Women wage earners are found to value paid work more than they value credit. It is thus argued that more employment opportunities should be created for women as these would help to promote economic and social empowerment.
  • A historical study of migratory patterns in central Mexico shows that rural communities have seen shifts in population ratios as well as in the type of activities and responsibilities undertaken by men and women. This has also affected women's use of livestock, particularly the donkey. In this case study from the State of Mexico, the use of donkeys is analysed using PRA methodology. The donkey was found to be appropriate to needs of women and men, but is unlikely to be locally accepted for productive activities such as cultivation or breeding, as it is viewed as an animal reserved for household (reproductive) activities.
  • In 1997, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), which was formed in 1962, came close to being dissolved. The author provides a personal viewpoint on the way that the ICVA moved towards this point: highlighting organisational, managerial, financial, and structural errors of judgement. The ICVA remains in existence, but the author argues that while it continues to act as a promotional network encompassing NGOs with differing agendas and resource bases, it will lack `a genuine basis for a common agenda', concerning itself more with individual members' institutional security than with its emancipatory remit.
  • Using their personal experiences of the East Africa office of a small international NGO, the authors discuss the difficulties faced by NGOs attempting to work in partnership with governments and the private sector. NGOs' comparative lack of resources constitutes an immediate barrier to mutually beneficial partnerships, as does their inability and/or unwillingness to shoulder inherent risks. The authors argue that NGOs can learn from and contribute to these partnerships - for example in their supposed grassroots orientation and representation of the marginalised in society - but should be aware that unless they have input into the design of projects NGOs become no more than contracted service providers.
  • Based on her own experience as part of a Primary Health Care (PHC) community development project in Angola, the author assesses the way the project was set up, identifying problems and potential solutions. Greatly concerned with ensuring local participation in and ownership of new health clinics, the author dwells on the dynamics of relations between local clinic nurses, their trainers, and the community using the new services.
  • The author describes AEAZ's role in sensitising rural voters, so often marginalised and voiceless, with a series of civic awareness campaigns organised throughout Zambia in the run-up to elections in November 1996. The campaigns made clear the roles of MPs and their accountability to the electorate, as well as the notions of participation, self-determination, and democracy in a newly pluralist political system, for example. Difficulties with language and funding were encountered, but the campaigns were successful, as the Elections saw a rise in the number of voters, and subsequent questioning and holding to account of elected representatives.
  • In English only
  • The author offers a definition of what a civil society should be, drawing on the vast outpouring both of democratic activities within the Third World, as well as the emergence of those forces that inhibit or thwart the full realisation of civil society. He argues that the diversity of such activities are indicative not just of the potential of civil society but also, and more importantly, of the lessons that they teach us on the limits of representative democracy, on the adverse implications of the current patterns of development, and on the responsibility of citizens in contemporary society - lessons that are fundamental to the building of a democratic and just polity and a humane society. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • Describing two models for the development of informal women's groups in Orissa and Kerala, India, the author discusses how it is possible to avoid the `top-down management' and bureaucracy that often contribute to the failure of other schemes. Informal self-help groups in rural areas serve to empower women, and provide a basis for the provision of credit and other support for various production and income-generation activities.
  • Civil violence affects people as individuals, small groups (for example families), communities and society as a whole. Attempts to help the victims of violence, displacement, and trauma, then, must address each of these strata. The author draws on his experience as former Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Programme for Survivors of Violence, in South Africa, to illustrate this.
  • The author gives an account of a partnership between a UK-based NGO and the Zambian government, designed to encourage `smallholder farmers to form `cattle clubs' [to] operate and manage community cattle-spraying points on a full cost-recovery basis'. The project's success has been tempered by changes in the external environment and the perceptions of the farmers, and the inability of the government to continue to allocate enough resources to it. The author offers practical lessons to be learned from these difficulties.
  • The authors report on this workshop, held at the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University, which brought together participants experienced in each of these three fields to share their knowledge and enrich each other's understanding. There was debate on the social factors which make communities vulnerable to hazards, including consideration of human rights, environmental sustainability, and the extent of our definition of vulnerability, as well as how `globalisation' can either enhance or threaten the ability of groups to cope with hazards.
  • This paper examines the potential for participatory rural appraisal techniques to contribute positively to community development and empowerment in a deprived rural community in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. A series of participatory workshops was undertaken in which a number of innovative techniques were used to identify people--environment relationships and, in particular, the community perception of the value and problems relating to the river and riparian zone. The workshops led to the community taking positive action to address problems identified. The study indicates the value and role of participatory research among disempowered communities in rural Africa.
  • Major conceptual advances in thinking about gender relations suggest the need to reassess conventional gender analyses within the context of development interventions. Evidence from development practice supports the conviction that targeting can be undermined by processes of gendered bargaining around project interventions. Academic research points to key problems and potential methods for looking at how gender relations change, that might be adapted to project contexts. Existing gender planning frameworks focus on shifts in gender relations but need also to address the process whereby gender relations are renegotiated if they are to inform better planning, monitoring, and evaluation.
  • This paper questions the appropriateness of some of the 'help' that has been given in mental health in 'developing' countries, particularly Africa, and examines some of the complex ideological issues underlying different cultural understandings of the aetiology and treatment of mental illness. Some personal experiences, illustrating examples of the imposition of culturally inappropriate ideology in the teaching of psychiatry, are described. In conclusion, some principles of good practice are suggested which could form the basis of a synthesis between cultures, and maximise the possibility of Western aid in the field of mental distress being more culturally appropriate. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • The paper argues that the increase in official development assistance to South Africa following its transition to majority rule was largely at the expense of other countries in the region. While this refocusing of aid has been aimed at disadvantaged black groups, it will also reinforce the regional dominance of the South African economy. Aid to Botswana, Lesotho, and Namibia has also become far more concentrated on human resource investment than on, for example, assistance for industrial development. It is argued that this too will create a skill base which will benefit South African business expansion and which, when placed in the context of liberalised trade regimes, will tend favour those already well placed in market terms who will often be white, male, and South African. Only a properly coordinated gender- and poverty-sensitive regional aid programme will help to counterbalance the polarisation in favour of established South African business interests that seems the likely consequence of present policies.
  • Developing countries with large nomadic populations have found it difficult to cater for itinerant people in their healthcare strategies. Some have tried to settle nomads, others to bring in health workers from outside the nomadic community, both costly and ineffective intervention measures. The author advocates a strategy which seeks to build on the traditional healers' and birth attendants' skills present in nomadic communities, to encourage self-care as far as sensibly possible, and to take account of `community ecology, the definition of an epidemiological profile...and group identity' when planning health services.
  • With specific reference to the case of granite mining in the Mutoko District in Zimbabwe, the author argues that while the state continues to hold rights to communal land, and freehold tenure is prohibited, Zimbabweans are being denied rights: in this case, a say in, and compensation for, damage to `their' land caused by mining. The author compares the current injustice to the `inequitable bias' with which tenure was distributed in the 1950s.
  • When Hurricane Mitch hit South America in November 1998, it most harshly affected Honduras and Nicaragua, and most of those affected were already living in extreme poverty. The author highlights the connection between the extent of the damage from this `natural disaster' and deforestation and bad land management practices, which greatly increased the impact of Mitch in these countries. He advocates a rebuilding strategy for the countries, which reconstructs the economies more equitably rather than reinforcing the socio-economic and political orders that perpetuate the violation of human rights. He makes specific reference to the need to cancel debt repayments.
  • The author wrote this open letter to her friends in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, from the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa. She describes the devastation, how nearby countries have sent assistance, and her fears for the future.
  • In English only
  • In a previous paper the author gave two views of development management. One was management in the context of development as historical change. The other was the management of deliberate efforts at progress, of development tasks. This paper adds a third: a style of management with a development orientation, that is, an orientation towards progressive change. It is argued that this third view allows for a normative definition of development management. Thus a distinctive notion of what is good development management is that it should consistently promote the values of development at all levels, even if this is not the most straightforward way of getting particular development tasks done successfully.
  • This paper, based on a review of SIDA's funding of NGOs in Bangladesh, explores the changing relationships between bilateral donors, Northern NGOs (NNGOs), and Southern NGOs (SNGOs). It compares direct and indirect funding routes between donors and SNGOs. Most SIDA funding of SNGOs was previously undertaken through Swedish NGOs. As SNGO competence and capacity has increased through their own efforts at professionalisation, through wider recognition and support from government, and by the provision of `capacity building' partnerships with NNGOs, these Southern organisations have taken up positions within the burgeoning `third sectors' of aid-recipient countries alongside the governmental and business sectors. SIDA has increasingly funded SNGOs directly through its Dhaka office. The paper sets out to address two main themes in the context of Swedish aid to NGOs in Bangladesh. Firstly, as bilateral donors provide an increasing proportion of their resources to NGOs, how can sound and responsible funding relationships based on mutual trust be built between bilateral donors and NGOs? Secondly, how can NNGOs work usefully in contexts where the number and capacity of local SNGOs has expanded significantly?
  • The paper presents a potentially effective empowerment strategy for women, using Nigeria as a case study. The strategy evolves from an evaluation of recent empowerment strategies in Nigeria, empowerment concepts, and Karl's (1995) scheme of empowerment. The author argues that the empowerment of women (understood as enhancing their capacity to influence and participate in making decisions which directly or indirectly influence their lives) is the key issue in protecting women's interests. She argues that (a) the concept of empowerment implicit in an empowerment strategy predetermines its effectiveness; (b) endogenous empowerment is likely to be more effective than exogenous empowerment because it locks into real needs, as revealed by a prior assessment; and (c) a dynamic conception of empowerment is more appropriate than a static one because it leads to endogenous empowerment strategies. The author recommends a three-pronged strategy consisting of awareness-building, skills and capacity development, and political action within a framework of endogenous empowerment.
  • What does organisational decentralisation mean? What types of decentralisation can NGDOs choose from and what appears to be occurring? The author sets out answers to these questions and proceeds to analyse the pressures and forces involved in choosing, pointing towards devolution as the preferred option. The author argues that globalisation calls for a truly international response from NGOs, namely the formation of global associations. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • The authors describe the phenomena of `perverse inertias' - effects and tendencies which are the opposite of what was intended - in the context of Southern responses to Northern NGOs. Two specific impacts on recipient populations are discussed. `The project culture', where `beneficiaries' feel compelled to invent as many projects as they can, in line with areas of perceived funding possibilities, which may not reflect real or most sorely felt needs. And `living by the wound', whereby communities recount their sufferings in order to receive assistance. The authors offer a critique of the way `lives and...expectations are taken over by others in the name of international solidarity'. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.
  • Using the example of a project in Sheffield intended to promote user-involvement and participation in planning healthcare services, the author criticises the failure of the project to actually provide any forum for user-participation. The structures used to set up these partnerships are often too prescriptive, he argues, setting out a framework in which consultation may take place, and leaving no room for legitimate local interests which may not fit this framework. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • The Assuit Burns Project (ABP) is a small Egyptian NGO working to help burns victims. The author describes the work of the Project, setting out its various capacities, and criticises funders' and donors' over-emphasis on preventative medicine at the expense of this type of curative work. Burns victims can become economic and social outcasts, and this impacts on development, and equity (particularly gender equity). This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • Six development managers working for Health Projects Abroad in Tanzania provide an account of a typical working day, outlining their work, their frustrations, and the way they are perceived by local communities, for example. This Practical Note provides an insight into the pressures on managers, who must cope with day-to-day tasks while maintaining perspective on the bigger picture. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • This paper looks at a Gender Review conducted for Oxfam GB of their programme in Uganda. The Review found that the programme lacked a coherent strategy and gender work was invariably considered an add-on rather than an integrated part of development planning. They advocate developing a strategy for social change, including monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, and provision for capacity-building among staff and with local women's organisations. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • This Practical note describes the work of the Southall Black Sisters, a group, based in London, England, which provides a variety of assistance to, mainly Asian, women who have been victims of domestic violence and abuse. The author discusses how the UK legal system fails to help some of these women, as well as how patriarchal Asian social structures enable this abuse to go unchecked and unreported. The SBS consciously try to challenge on many fronts at once, working 'against gender and racial oppression (including religious fundamentalism and communalism) and...[operating] at the level of the family, the community, and the state.' This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • The author examines the perception that information technology (IT) can be used to stamp out corruption in organisations. Using examples of corrupt practices, he argues that, invariably, development managers should consider the underlying organisational and environmental causes of corruption rather than seeing the introduction of IT systems as a solution in itself. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • Thailand is experiencing the unfamiliar phenomenon of aid and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank lending money for internal development programmes. In the economic boom years, aid was neither sought nor required since structural development was funded from the growth which South East Asian countries had begun to take for granted. Today, falling growth and rising unemployment linked to a depreciating currency and weak export markets have meant that Thailand has had to look elsewhere for development capital and to become proficient in managing educational projects. This article describes a rapid training needs analysis of the Thai educational sector commissioned by the British Council, the purpose of which was to discover the capacity of the education sector to undertake and deliver externally-funded projects. Using the Kolb learning cycle as a paradigm of good practice, and an adapted version of the soft systems approach to planning, the paper describes a learning process for developing an action plan to produce a training package for enhancing project management skills. Finally, the paper reflects on the experience of the project and sets out some learning objectives for future exercises of this type.
  • Using the findings of the 1996 Presidential Commission on Corruption in Tanzania, the author emphasises the impact petty corruption, especially bribery, has on poor populations. He proposes that international organisations recognise that controlling corruption should be part of poverty-reduction strategies, and needs to be tackled by increasing the political literacy of the affected populations - empowering citizens to complain about corruption. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • Urban and industrial growth in developing countries makes the provision of adequate waste management services vital. Public sector-private sector partnerships (the authors describe potential structures for these partnerships) offer one way to manage this provision. The authors discuss how responsibility for public services should ultimately remain with the public sector, investigate different types of public-private partnership, and present five guiding principles for effective partnerships, as identified by the Cairo Workshop on Micro and Small Enterprise in Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • The author highlights a community participation scheme in Hyderabad, India, which allowed informal sector workers, organised by the Municipality, to take steps towards a more cost-effective and ecocentric method of waste management. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.
  • This paper focuses on the contradictory relationship between tools, always open to criticism as technocratic and mechanistic, and processes of development. It focuses on the tools often known as Logical Framework Approach (LFA) which are increasingly used as process tools by many different agencies, including those who espouse values of participation and empowerment. We assess the tools from the perspective of their use in public action-based approaches, as a means to improve clarity and focus in multi-actor interventions. No one tool can fulfil the range of tasks required in complex situations and LFA is useful as one of various options. We consider two of its limitations. First, it can be used in many different styles, including as a means to analyse public interest as contested terrain, or as a technocratic tool. Second, the focus on viewing assumptions as immutable can limit the effectiveness of interventions.
  • How organisations and associations can work together over time to develop new norms and practices which enhance the sustainability of development initiatives is an ongoing problem. This article looks at how processes of negotiating shared agendas over the meanings of sustainability, exploring assumptions behind proposed actions, establishing means of accountability and setting up mechanisms for investigating cause and effect in the processes and outcome of development programmes can be a source of action-learning. It is argued that such processes of action-learning can help lead to institutional sustainability.
  • The authors draw on experience from Uganda's commitment to decentralisation. This commitment is transforming the way services are planned and financed; new associations between local governments, NGOs, and private sector agencies are being created. Much attention has focused on the adoption of various techniques - such as participatory rural appraisal - through which direct and intensive forms of participation can be encouraged in decentralised planning. This trend is critically examined and potential unintended consequences are highlighted. A broader concept of accountability is outlined to illustrate a more inclusive approach to planning and allocation for more equity and sustainability in rural services.
  • In India, the pressing concern in education is with bringing in at least 32 million children estimated to be out of school, to meet the goal of Universal Elementary Education. Support for decentralisation of public services is widespread because of the equity and efficiency benefits associated with it. In particular, decentralisation is seen to facilitate the matching of services with local preferences, thus increasing the chances for policy goals to be met. This proposition is examined in the context of research carried out in a village of Raichur district in India, where poor households `preferences' with reference to school timings are analysed with a view to reflecting on their implications for education policy and management. The paper attempts to address the following concerns: how homogeneous are local preferences? What if these run counter to policy interests? Can aspects of services be selectively decentralised, or does the `production' of the sector as a whole require to be re-thought? The paper concludes with some thoughts on the importance of processes of `preference' articulation, and the need to recognise preferences implicit within policy intentions.
  • With its emphasis on target-setting and performance measures, the New Public Management appears to offer a coherent and `no-nonsense' approach to public sector reform and the public management task. This article suggests that three questions require further thought: `Management of what?', `Management by whom?', and `How to manage?' It considers these questions using the case of Community Based Health Care and its promotion by NGOs in Tanzania. The article argues that the task of public management is one of managing an arena of public action which includes (and excludes) a range of actors and agendas. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the challenge to all development managers is how to manage more effective interdependence.
  • This paper is a comparative study of institutional change and efforts to create networks and linkages in the science and technology (S&T) systems of Poland and Tanzania at a time of market-led economic reform. It argues that in both countries, S&T has been hampered by linear approaches to technology transfer and that future efforts should focus on non-linear approaches involving multiple actors. Discussion focuses on a consideration of organisational goals and agendas, the resource base of different organisations, and fostering organisational capacities to learn, adapt, and change.
  • This paper looks at the opportunities for civil society organisations (CSOs) in Brazil to increase and diversify income. It demonstrates the range of potential new sources of funds, including the Brazilian public, commercial activities, and government institutions. The role of volunteers is also addressed. The institutional and cultural changes that CSOs must make in order to mobilise these resources are highlighted, along with associated risks, such as diversion away from their representational and advocacy roles, loss of political independence, and bureaucratisation. The paper then suggests how aid agencies might fulfil their responsibilities to help counterparts bolster income, and raises the possibility of more inter-institutional collaboration in what is increasingly a global rather than national activity. Finally, some comments are offered regarding the funding priorities of the international NGOs, given the new income opportunities facing CSOs. The main recommendation is that these concentrate on supporting advocacy work rather than service provision.
  • In English only
  • Since the late 1980s, democratic institutions and an active civil society are being prescribed as important ingredients and preconditions to reduce poverty, social exclusion, and violent civil strife. Multi-party systems and elections are seen as the most important expressions of formal democracy. This paper argues that more attention is needed to substantive democracy, which requires a greater understanding of the various lega-political variants within a democratic framework. The paper discusses in some depth the crisis of governance in Belgium. The analysis raises questions about the relationship between 'political' and `civil society', and between social movements and political parties. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • This article sets itself to answer the question: why theatre in development? It examines the reasons why development agencies have been reluctant to put Theatre for Development high on their agendas. It demonstrates the importance of critical pedagogy in the history of the form, which is linked directly to the emphasis placed on learner-centred participation in the Theatre in Education movement and in the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed. It advocates a central role for the cultural component in any development process which claims to represent the needs of specific communities as articulated in their own voices, while exploring the particular dynamics of theatre as a non-literary form of dialogic communication that creates a `safe space' of fiction in which those who are habitually marginalised can not only find, but also use, a voice to effect change.
  • This paper offers an insight into the creative ways in which a major social institution in one of the most progressive States in India has attempted to take gender issues on board. The Maharashtra Police Force has taken a major step towards empowering women by opening all mainstream duties to them as from 1994. The paper records the process through which the Force has taken this up as part of a larger agenda to tackle the issues of violence against women, and may serve as an example for similar organisations and students of gender issues.
  • Worldwide concern for the environment has spawned a new field of interest and expertise within the development assistance industry. Environmental projects have become the new `darling' of the foreign aid community with donors and practitioners vying for suitable `eco' projects to support. While this support for the environment mimics the attention the development industry has paid to women (and later, gender), concern for these equally fashionable issues has not always been synchronised. Many development practitioners promote environmental projects which accord nominal concern to gender issues. Drawing on a case study of eco-timber production in the Solomon Islands, this article demonstrates how environmental sustainability and gender equity should be seen as complimentary project goals.
  • The concept of sustainability has evolved and expanded to include more than just environmental issues. Development practitioners now address questions linking sustainability to population and, in particular, to poverty alleviation. Environmentally sustainable development cannot be achieved, let alone maintained, unless poverty is reduced. Thus, the connection between sustainability and poverty reduction must be properly understood if economic assistance for the poor is to be successful. These questions can be confusing and difficult to address satisfactorily in practice. How can poverty reduction programmes and projects be designed for sustainability? How can the elements of sustainable poverty reduction be built into all stages of the project cycle? These issues are examined and a set of guidelines and minimum standards proposed. Relevant examples are cited to illustrate how the inclusion of poverty alleviation concerns into the project cycle can be achieved.
  • The author puts forward the personal view that participatory methodologies (such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)) are often used by NGOs in such a way that they create a negative impact on the community they were intended to empower. Arguing that these methodologies incite the poor to feel the need to seem poor - a potentially disastrous starting point for any collaborative community/NGO initiative - the author advocates an approach by which communities identify their resources, and their capacity to improve their quality of life. An earlier version of this article was presented by the author at a PAMFORK Partticipatory Methodologies Workshop held on 24-27 September 1996 at Resurrection Gardens, Karen-Nairobi, and was published in Baobab, Issue 22 (1997). This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • In 1996 the Peruvian NGOs ALTERNATIVA, FOVIDA and INCAFAM spoke to many soup kitchen members, all women, to establish how they felt about the work and the future of the kitchens. The author reports on the connected activities sometimes run by these organisations, and on the benefits members have received from their membership, including discussions of capacity and skills built, changes in gender relations in households, and the sense of social and personal recognition for work. The women interviewed also identified difficulties, including reconciling work with the demands of motherhood. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • While larger non-governmental development organisations are implementing gender policies and practices, smaller NGDOs - while generally aware of the relevance and importance of gender-awareness - are yet to put this concern into practice. One reason for this is the lack of focussed gender specialists in these smaller organisations, but also, in the 5 Cameroonian and 8 UK-based organisations surveyed, there emerged little understanding of gender in the wider development context. Gender issues are marginalised and the NGDOs, while recognising that women's participation in the economic growth of a community is vital, fail to identify the fundamental inequalities regarding power, division of labour, and access to and control over resources.
  • The author reports on this conference arranged by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, England, in April 1998, ostensibly to agree on ways forward for socially responsible enterprise and corporate accountability. Participants were overwhelmingly business leaders and academics, and the author found challenging views were not particularly in evidence; it became clear that the issues under discussion were too complex for a consensus to be reached at this time, and by these representatives. The author argues that NGOs should take part in the ongoing debate and build mass support from the consuming public, as well as from states: `the final arbiters of conflicts of interest between social and economic goals.'
  • In English only
  • The authors begin to outline the epic now unfolding at the grassroots, arguing that pioneering social movements are groping for their liberation from the `Global Project' being imposed upon them. Going beyond the premises and promises of modernity, people at the grassroots are re-inventing or creating a fresh new intellectual and institutional frameworks. As is clear from the recent rebellion in southern Mexico, ordinary men and women are learning from each other how to challenge the very nature and foundations of modern power, both its intellectual underpinnings and its apparatus. Explicitly liberating themselves from the dominant ideologies, fully immersed in their local struggles, these movements and initiatives reveal the diverse content and scope of grassroots endeavours.

  • Teams at their optimum efficiency during the normal course of work are more likely to be able to respond appropriately and handle pressure in emergency situations. This Practical Note goes on to describe various work procedures to ensure efficiency, communication and learning in a team. The author suggests ways of offering feedback to team members, skills supervisors should cultivate, and highlights the importance of `continuous learning'.
  • It is argued that community development can contribute to national development, in conjunction with other phenomena. Village-level development efforts depend on the dynamism of community groups. The populations of the Cameroon grassfields possess the creative capacity to adapt new techniques and knowledge to their local realities. The paper identifies the critical factors that influence the effectiveness of their self-help development efforts. Issues discussed are: the socio-political setting; the concept of mutual help; rural leadership and authority; socioeconomic factors; socio-cultural and institutional factors; and self-help development initiatives and gender. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author reports on the proceedings of this conference, opened by Clare Short (UK Secretary of State for International Development), who suggested that the event had come about due to a desire to `tackle the underlying causes of conflict and strife'. The participants, though, made it clear that humanitarians are divided over the principles governing their work. Many key questions, while discussed, remained unanswered; such as how to prioritise principles, whether political will or humanitarian principles (or both!) are lacking, and how to handle humanitarian intervention into just wars. The author concludes by discussing the under-representation of women at the conference.
  • This Research Round-Up provides a brief literature review of the use of pre-departure briefings (PDBs) for NGO staff delivering overseas aid programmes, especially from the point of view of Australian NGOs. The professionalism, productivity and effectiveness of aid workers can be enhanced using improved human resource management. The author reports the results of a questionnaire sent to aid workers in 22 countries; the vast majority reporting that they had received no effective PDB, although job satisfaction was high. Respondents identified areas in which they would have liked more assistance, particularly cultural information and language training.
  • There is a widespread perception that Southern NGOs best represent the authentic voices of the Southern poor. This article challenges this perception, arguing that poor people in general, and children and women in particular, continue to be disenfranchised, while NGOs - both Northern and Southern - offer a poor imitation of their voices. It argues that what is needed, given the current global economic paradigm, is an authentic `joint venture' between NGOs in the North and the South and the authentic voices of poor people themselves, that would bring the poor into the mainstream; and a new approach to capacity-building that would seek to empower them better to advocate for themselves. It concludes that, to achieve this, economic advocacy should perhaps take greater precedence over political advocacy. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Development and Social Action.
  • Non-governmental organisations now play prominent role in UN peace-keeping operations, mainly in the areas of humanitarian relief, demobilisation and resettlement, support for elections, and mine-clearance. This reflects the preference of major donors to use NGO channels for their own aid. This article examines the challenges this expansion poses both to the agencies involved and to the government of the country in question, with particular reference to the 1992-95 peace-keeping process in Mozambique. The author describes the many practical difficulties facing NGOs in a politically charged post-war environment, and concludes that there is a need for a sharper definition of appropriate roles and minimum operational standards if NGOs are to implement such programmes in ways that neither compromise their integrity nor jeopardise the longer-term reconstruction process.
  • 'Multilateral debt is not a widespread problem for Severely Indebted Low Income Countries' wrote the World Bank in September 1994. Two years later, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) - the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -agreed to a proposal to bring the debt of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) to sustainable levels. While imperfect, the proposal went some way to meeting the demands of NGOs which, with progressive forces both within the World Bank and among creditor countries, have played a crucial role in this process. While the multilateral debt problem is now too great to ignore, the authors maintain that it has been the persistent pressure of these players that has been responsible for the enormous progress made by the IFIs. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.

  • Official aid funding for the development NGO sector grew fast in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These halcyon days are over. Thinkers within the NGO community are concerned with how to adapt to the end of the funding boom, and to correct its adverse effects. However, in spite of many calls to reorganise, re-think, and professionalise, one major set of issues has been largely ignored: the scope for introducing collective self-regulation of the organisational structure and procedures of NGOs in developing countries. The authors argue that this could make a major contribution to solving several problems currently faced by NGOs. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • The standard models of the state and civil society balancing each other, as propounded by de Tocqueville, Hegel and Gramsci, are no longer useful in all cases when thinking about the relationship between the state, civil society and NGOs. The emergence in many countries of a weak state and relatively strong civil society organisations has led to NGOs filling the gaps in the provision of services which should nominally be provided by the state. The dangers of this are well-documented, and the author argues that NGOs should be seeking to strengthen the capacity of the state to perform these functions, as well as nurturing civil society.
  • An examination is presented on a type of NGO, known as a network NGO that, it is argued, is currently exploiting the personal links across the government-NGO divide, and acknowledging their interdependence. Characteristics of such NGOs are that they have a broad membership, consisting of professionals from the same ethnic background. Two examples of such network NGOs are Dupoto e Maa, which is based in Kajiado, Kenya, and is an organization mainly lobbying for Maasai pastoralists; and SADEA, based in Same, Tanzania, focusing on conventional) fundraising activities for social projects. Case studies of these two organizations are reviewed in a discussion on their relevance in the government-NGO debate. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The paper presents a case for all organizations that work on development, environmental, social justice, and human rights issues to work more closely together, arguing that many of the issues these organizations are addressing are one and the same. It is a call to reflection, debate, and action concerning the protection and guarantee of all human rights, and the holding accountable of all actors for actions that contribute to their violation. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Using the example of reforms in Bolivia, the author discusses `second generation' structural and institutional reforms taking place in Latin America, in the aftermath of Structural Adjustment Programmes' (SAPs) failure to reduce poverty and inequality. Providing a new context for social policy and participation, the most radical reform in Bolivia is the Popular Participation Law, intended to decentralise the allocation and administration of resources and encourage participation in democracy from all sectors of Bolivian society. According to the author, the Law has been only partially successful in achieving these aims, and he discusses its limitations.
  • In English only
  • Victimising women as witches is prevalent in the tribal regions of South Bihar. As a result, between 1991 and 1994, over 60 women are known to have been killed in West Singhbhum district alone. The main reasons behind this persecution are to maintain women in economic and social subjugation, to exploit them sexually, and to wrest property from their families. This article examines the issues behind this form of socially sanctioned violence, analyses their implications on development work, and suggests appropriate methods of intervention. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • The author reports on a visit to Lagos State, Nigeria, to research aspects of primary healthcare, and highlights how communities knew what they needed to improve their quality of life, and how they felt health education was not necessary. Their self-determination forced the researchers to adopt a participatory approach, and provide assistance in getting the locally identified schemes underway before attempting, collaboratively, to set up an education programme.
  • It is noted that identifying with protection and enhancement of natural resources as central to EC development support, articles 33-41 (of the Lome IV Convention) focuses on three principles: a preventive approach aimed at avoiding negative impacts on the environment as a result of any programme or operation; a systematic approach for ecological feasibility studies at all stages, from identification to implementation of a programme or operation; and a multi-disciplinary and trans-sectoral approach, taking direct and indirect consequences of EC-supported initiatives into account. The paper addresses these needs, with the goal being to develop a systematic procedure for the Belgian Agency of Development Cooperation (BADC) to test the potential environmental impacts of development projects before these are implemented. The BADC aims to avoid sponsoring projects that have a negative impact on the environment in the broadest sense. A comparative study is presented of guidelines and procedures, drawing mainly on the EC environment manual, the OECD guidelines on environment and aid, and the various environmental guidelines of the OECF, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The Small Enterprise Development Fund of the Department for International Development (DFID) of the British Government commissioned a literature review and held workshops, both co-ordinated by ActionAid UK, to assess the impact of micro-finance schemes on women's empowerment. Three broad approaches to micro-finance for women are identified as well as the constraints affecting impact in each case: approaches emphasising financial sustainability, integrated community development or feminist empowerment. The author provides a framework for assessing degrees of empowerment and presents a `minimal gender strategy' for micro-finance.
  • In 1996 UNRISD sponsored a survey, using questionnaires, interviews and participant research, into the parallel pharmaceutical market in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire). The author describes `typical' purchasers and vendors, the quality of products sold and bought, and the levels of regulation possible/needed in such a market, and challenges policy makers to develop a system of partial regulation combining the relevant merits of government and private sector control.
  • Using data from a recent ethnographic study in rural Bangladesh to explore relationships between men's violence against women in the home, women's economic and social dependence on men, and microcredit programmes, this paper suggests that microcredit programmes have an varied effect on men's violence against women. They can reduce women's vulnerability to men's violence by strengthening their economic roles and making their lives more public. When women challenge gender norms, however, they sometimes provoke violence in their husbands. Male violence against women is a serious, widespread, and often ignored problem worldwide. By putting resources into women's hands, credit programmes may indirectly exacerbate such violence; but they may also provide a context for intervention.
  • Drawing on recent research, the author explores how far and in what ways UK NGOs have tried to incorporate gender into the policies and procedures of their international development work, and how far a formal recognition of gender issues is shaping the way each organisation functions. The author assesses the strengths and weaknesses of different strategies (such as specialist staff or units, formal gender policies, gender training, equal opportunity recruitment policies, and mainstreaming) for transforming organisational practice.
  • This article describes and analyses the Gender Quality Action-Learning (GQAL) Programme of BRAC, a large rural development NGO in Bangladesh. This works with men and women field-staff and managers in a process of issue-analysis, action planning, and implementation (the GQAL cycle) to address organisational change and programme quality concerns that is informed by an understanding of gender. Gender, meaning women or the relations between men and women, is sometimes lost as deeper issues of power and instrumentality surface. The greatest challenge for the Programme now is to explore the gendered nature of both, and find ways to change gender bias along with other organisational, structural, and process features that promote gender inequity both within BRAC and in the delivery and impact of its social change objectives.
  • This paper focuses on the role of women in the Barmanan rural production system in the Manghadié area of Mali. The suggested methodology aims to identify areas of women's autonomy in production activities and factors determining their degree of control. For women, control over work depends both upon their involvement in the decision-making process and on their ability to negotiate access to the various components of their activities. The paper highlights gender-related and other social factors such as inter-ethnic relations and relationships between women that determine women's autonomy in production activities. Some economic and environmental factors are also identified.
  • NGOs, like other organisations, are gendered; that is, they reflect society's power relations between men and women. The author argues that NGOs must begin a process of gender-sensitive institutional change, building equitable practices and attitudes in the long-term, benefiting and empowering NGO staff as well as impacting on their programme work, and strategic objectives. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • Coffee production was the main source of family income in the North West Province of Cameroon until there was a fall in coffee prices. The author recounts a positive side effect of this potential economic crisis for the province: the empowerment of women. Previously denied land-ownership, due to men's traditional hold on land and women's legal status, women bought now-unused land and successfully made money from their produce. The resulting shift in financial power saw the beginning of a shift in status for these women: with economic control came decision-making power.
  • The author identifies three key weaknesses in the debate leading up to establishing the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) for the European Union (EU). The process started in 1996 and a generally useful and relevant discussion has taken place between various governmental and non-governmental actors concerning conflict-prevention and structural stability. The author believes there must be further consideration of inconsistencies in international policy, the incoherence of the view that conflict and structural instability are essentially problems of the `South', and the tendency to analyse only countries where conflict has broken out, ignoring those where the potential for violence existed, but was avoided.
  • An examination in presented of a pilot project to strengthen Primary Health Care (PHC) in Sheikhupura District, which was initiated by the Department of Health, Punjab, Pakistan. The project seeks to create a viable PHC model, providing accessible and sustainable services. Community Development Workshops for Village Health Committees (VHCs) to promote local participation are being held, and several experiences have been gained, from conceptual shifts to implementation issues. Issues discussed are: sowing the seeds through dialogue; organization of the workshop; duration and timing; introductions; discussions on health; the health system; the role of community; individuals and groups; community organization; an examination of what is development; threats to the village; the road to development; and empowering people. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In English only
  • The author recounts his experience in developing Community Listening Theatre with RISE, a Namibian NGO that works in shanty-town districts and with dispossessed farming communities. In depicting their concerns through dramatic expression, previously diffident people began to address pressing political issues, and to challenge their own 'self-oppression', before proceeding to organise around specific issues, and take sometimes audacious collective action towards their own (re)empowerment. Reflecting on the role of the outsider, the author warns that it often proves disempowering to assume that such experience can be distilled into a replicable formula. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • SatelLife was set up by the organisation International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) in 1985, with the aim of providing a forum for the involvement of medical colleagues in the South in discussion of health and peace issues. SatelLife set up and run a satellite linking service (HealthNet) providing email and a medical information network for organisations and communities world-wide, integrating people working in countries with limited communications infrastructure into the debate. The author provides an overview of the system and the ethos behind it.
  • The authors offer some initial thoughts on the potential of using video to record Participatory Rural Research (PRR) sessions, highlighting the medium's apparent strengths and weaknesses compared to taking written notes and/or still photographs. They conclude that the use of video should be considered afresh in different contexts so as to determine whether its use is appropriate and desirable.
  • Global Knowledge '97: Knowledge for Development in the Information Age was organised by the World Bank and the Canadian government and held in Toronto. The Benton Foundation put together a group of US experts from the NGO sector, and the author reports on the conference and how various NGO representatives viewed the discussions. The consensus at the conference was that technological improvements and updating infrastructure were of the greatest importance for development. The NGO representatives quoted here, however, felt that an emphasis on meaningful content would also have been appropriate, as would the recognition that market forces alone should not drive policy in this area.
  • Drawing on a case study from Central Argentina, this article suggests that researchers can be too cautious about introducing technologies of which farmers have no previous experience. In particular, it challenges the notion that the only technology appropriate to peasant conditions is that which is rooted in traditional ideas and culture. Under certain circumstances, externally supplied technologies may also be appropriate. Rather than focusing solely on the technology, it is necessary to look at the socio-economic and historical context in which the technology will be used.
  • The vision shared by most development scholars and practitioners today is for beneficiary-driven development, the impediment and the means to which both lie with communication. The debate concerns the communication approach that would best realise this vision. This paper examines and critically comments on two major approaches, Development Communication (DC) and Development Support Communication (DSC), though it argues for neither of these. Rather, it draws on the `Another Development - Another Communication' paradigm and proposes a Participatory Communication (PC) approach, which both resonates in people's own moral values, conforms to the reality of many communities in Africa, and offers better prospects of achieving beneficiary-driven development.
  • This paper elaborates on two themes. Firstly, it presents the historical evolution of Northern Non-governmental Development Organisations (NNGDOs), proposing an enlarged and transformed proposal based on Korten's Generations. Secondly, it puts forward several recommendations in order to develop a hypothetical Fifth Generation of NGO - Northern and Southern alike - whose activities may contribute to a very broad, diverse, and unpredictable social movement for structural change on both the political and social levels. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • Organisational capacity-building may be so focused on the hope for an improved future that it unwittingly fails to draw upon key learning from past experience. Reflection upon and public affirmation of those moments in organisational life when members felt high commitment can ignite imagination and build momentum for a better future. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methods of organisational transformation suggest that a positive future image of one's organisation can be a compelling, if not irresistible, force, the creation of which needs to embrace the already-lived and shared satisfying moments of members. Organisational capacity is best understood, and most enjoyably and authentically pursued, when the process and desired product is co-generated from within the lived realities of all its stakeholders. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • The author gives a personal account of the importance of the late Paolo Freire's work and thinking. Freire's influence can be seen in many of the ideals and practices of educationalists, community workers, and specifically adult-literacy workers across the globe.
  • Many governments and international organisations have offered utopian visions of a Global Information Infrastructure (GII), a successor to the Internet, which will enable global sharing and communication. The development of the GII rests on the capacity of all nations to have access to the requisite technology, and the currently widening gap between access to PCs and telephone lines does not bode well for the prospects of the envisioned network. The People's Communication Charter may provide a framework for critically assessing and influencing the quality and distribution of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their products. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Development and Social Action.
  • The author considers how Northern NGOs present the South, in order to recruit volunteers and fundraise. Negative and positive images have been used to illicit feelings of pity and self-satisfaction respectively. Here, the author describes the effects of using different images, and argues that NGOs should be educating and building long-term supporters by substantiating the use of images with information about the causes of poverty, famine etc. The concept of mutual dependence between South and North should also be emphasised: a more pragmatic reason to help.
  • The author, formerly Director of the Clearinghouse Project, describes the aims, achievements and underlying philosophy of the Project, which was set up in 1979 by the American Public Health Association (funded by USAID) to improve access to information for health-practitioners in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Clearinghouse is a capacity-building resource, providing information on women and children's nutrition, as well as training for staff in the field, and works from the principle that services can match users needs more accurately if the users and service-providers are involved in communication and networking promoting information-sharing and dialogue.
  • In English only
  • The article explores the moral difficulties for international humanitarian workers operating as third parties in the midst of war. The main part examines current usage of the terms `humanity', `neutrality', `impartiality', and `solidarity' as they are used in the discourse of humanitarian operations. The article then considers the psychological implications for relief workers of operating as non-combatant third parties in war. Finally, the article recognises that a range of different positions is both inevitable and desirable in a given conflict, but concludes by emphasising the responsibility of any third-party relief organisation to be transparent in its position and to preserve rather than distort traditional humanitarian principles and language. It ends by recommending concerted support for international humanitarian law and its possible reform as the best way to focus the current debate about the place of humanitarianism in war. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • Focusing on the land-use issues pertaining to the 'cultivable' and 'non-cultivable' categories of land contrast to the third category of 'cultivated') in developing countries, an examination is presented of the technological criteria that have been used to determine land types and qualities. It is argued that deciding how much land should be used for what specific purpose, and by whom, is not a simple prerogative of land-use professionals, but is a political decision. Issues discussed are: land classification and availability; current land-use policies and related consequences; and prospects for integrated land-use planning. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author presents the views of Thailand's Population and Community Development Association (PDA - Thailand's largest NGO) about how to provide women attracted to the commercial sex industry (CSI) with economically viable alternatives to this accepted (in Thailand) type of `manual labour'. Research has shown that poverty is the major factor cited by voluntary commercial sex workers (CSWs) as influencing their move into the industry, and that economic development is their way out.
  • The author describes the sub-sector analysis method and applies it to tailors working in the informal sector in Kenya. The results of the analysis allow the author to discuss the factors which influence the success, or otherwise, of micro-enterprise in this sector; he also advocates the research method itself as a useful tool for identifying `system blockages' (by tracking the movement of a product from input to output) and possible intervention strategies.
  • The Summit, held in February 1997 in Washington DC, involved participation from governments, UN agencies, corporations, NGOs and credit practitioners. The author reviews the discussion, much of it concerning the importance of distinguishing between development reasons for advocating and initiating micro-enterprise, finance and credit schemes and more general economic reasons for doing so. Other debates include whether income generation is a key strategy to combat poverty, whether microcredit really helps the poorest populations, how gender should be integrated into programme structures, and the value of credit for micro-enterprise compared to micro-finance.
  • This issue of Development in Practice contains twelve papers from the symposium, held in Johannesburg, South Africa 20-23 June 1996. The symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. In this preface to the series of papers, the authors briefly highlight the major topics discussed and conclusions reached. Symposium participants contribute the remaining papers.
  • While some recent conflicts have attracted international attention, other long-term conflicts with high accumulative death tolls have been relatively ignored. A decontextualised and partial view of conflict and violence is further encouraged by the separation between the emergency and development sections in many Northern aid agencies. Drawing on detailed case-studies of post-conflict experience in El Salvador, Peru, and Nicaragua, the author argues that conflict analysis, emergency intervention, and peace-building must be rooted within specific socio-historical contexts. The article ends with a critical reflection on the extent to which local-level capacities have in fact been able to influence the post-war situation and prospects for long-term and sustainable peace-building in these three countries. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • This paper reflects on the obstacles facing Salvadorean NGOs in the transition from war to peace. Firstly, on the difficulties inherent in the peace process itself: insufficient structural change; the trap of electoral politics; a transition process that was too narrowly defined; and the impossibility of reconciliation without addressing the need for collective memory, public responsibility, or justice. Secondly, on the difficulties peculiar to NGOs and popular organisations in El Salvador: the difference between the skills and resources they had developed in war and those needed in peace; the problems in establishing their role in the national reconstruction plan; and the fact that they were themselves made up of people who were still suffering the psychological wounds of war.
  • This paper explores some of the reasons for the failure of the international community to act decisively in preempting the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. These are rooted both in long-distant history and in the dynamics of post-Cold War international politics. Drawing on a decade of experience in Central Africa, the author looks critically at the widely accepted explanations of the genocide and its aftermath as `simply tribal fighting', and considers the role of external agents - journalists and aid agencies alike - in fostering this view. The paper ends with a reflection on the complex challenges posed by `reconciliation' in the wake of genocide.
  • In this paper, the author addresses some of the myths about solutions to social conflict, and reflects on problems he experienced with aid efforts organised by the international community, through the UN, focusing on Bosnia rather than Africa. Bosnia, as part of Europe, did not suffer the apathy that characterised international responses to events in Rwanda and Burundi before 1994. He then addresses what he sees as the flawed assumptions underlying the emphasis on economic reconstruction in the wake of war and conflict.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. Here, the author considers `alternative' ways of creating collective memories, used by countries and communities without access to the formal state frameworks of truth commissions or war-crimes tribunals. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • The United Nations Charter confers on the Security Council prime responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Yet these very concepts are undergoing radical change. More than the absence of war, peace has come to mean harmony both within and among nations. It has acquired a dimension far larger than the original State-centred notion of the Charter. Security connotes inclusion, cohesion and integration - a sense of belonging to a society and a prevailing international order that is predicated on fairness and respect for differences and human dignity. Today, especially given the rise in conflicts of a non-international character, the Council must urgently review the appropriateness of existing instruments and traditional diplomacy. The author calls for better links between the UN, the Security Council, NGOs, and civil-society organisations; and proposes legal and practical mechanisms both to afford better protection to aid workers, and to ensure that, when they are applied, sanctions regimes are effective means of placing pressure on those responsible for the abuse of power.
  • This paper discusses the issues of reconciliation, truth commissions, and alternative ways of healing, focusing on what reconciliation means to different people and cultures, how reconciliation works in practice, what role truth commissions play in the process, and what alternative ways of healing have been used, specifically in Mozambique. The author bases his thinking, not on established theories, but on how people become reconciled with each other in practice.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. Ingham-Thorpe describes how Mugabe's policy of reconciliation in Zimbabwe left intact many oppressive and inequitable structures, for example the land-reform issue remained unresolved. She also considers the displaced violence, massive youth unemployment, and the trauma of unmet expectations since demobilisation.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. Here, the author discusses the impact of displacement (because of war) on families in Angola and Mozambique, and is specifically concerned with its effects on women and young people, who are believed to suffer the most profound psycho-social damage in these circumstances.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. Castelo-Branco reports briefly on the use of child soldiers in the conflict in Mozambique, making them both the victims and perpetrators of violence. The trauma of such brutalisation is discussed, as well as children's coping strategies and the community-oriented psychological and economic assistance offered by AMOSAPU.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. The author here recounts her work with the Independent Projects Trust (IPT) in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, providing training in conflict-resolution skills. She describes the history of political violence and deprivation in rural areas, and discusses training for, and the essential qualities of, successful community-based peace-workers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. In this paper, the author draws on her experiences in Central America and discusses the phenomenon of NGO staff leaving the region when armed conflict ceased. She considers the need for consistent representation from NGOs during the transition from conflict to peace, and the value of long-standing, trusting relationships, which are not easily or quickly built-up by new staff. NGOs' preference for fixed-term contracts is challenged, as is the strength of their commitment to appointing local staff.
  • This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and the South Africa Office of Oxfam, drew together individuals and organisations working in the areas of violence, conflict and peace-building. Here, Thompson presents a comparative study of reconciliation and reconstruction processes in post-conflict Central America and Southern Africa. She identifies successes and failures, suggesting alternatives, and particularly criticises the tendency of multilateral agencies, especially the UNDP and USAID, to apply reconstruction packages irrespective of context, and, in Central America, to neglect the parallel need for reconciliatory initiatives. The demobilisation and re-integration of ex-combatants is specifically considered.
  • Humanitarian aid should be judged against international humanitarian law (IHL) which gives civilians certain rights, including protection in armed conflicts. Aid agencies should consider the various side-effects of their interventions in order to assess the net impact, and decide whether to work in any given situation. They have no responsibility to provide aid where the net impact is negative, or to those who violate international law. If governments fail in their responsibilities to protect civilians, this does not give aid agencies the responsibility of filling the vacuum, but does mean that they should campaign for governments to act. Current Northern debate on support for the citizens of countries that are in conflict is usually expressed in terms of charity, rather than a response to what people are doing for themselves. Aid agencies should help to change this.
  • Recent conflicts in the Balkans have been portrayed largely in terms of ethnic and religious divisions, with Western military and diplomatic intervention seen as essential to securing a positive outcome. However, these divisions are the consequence of a deeper process of economic and political fracturing. The re-structuring of the former Yugoslav economy, and the policies of the international financial institutions, have not been sufficiently emphasised. However, the author contends that, far from being the basis for social and economic reconstruction, the application of free-market policies in former Yugoslavia favoured the dismantling of social-welfare structures and contributed to the rapid decline in national economic capacity. The terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords suggest that a similar future is in store for the successor states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.
  • NGOs play an increasingly important role in humanitarian work, and the impact of their activities is often non-neutral in relation to the conflicts which underlie crises. This was the case in the Rwanda crisis, during which some NGOs lent support to the forces of the genocidal Rwandan regime through their choice of where to work; the type and organisation of support offered; and some of the public statements made by NGO representatives. This article documents how this process occurred, and concludes with recommendations for avoiding such problems in the future.
  • The author gives a personal view of her experiences in Guatemala in 1995, when she met with human-rights workers coping with the aftermath, and ongoing trauma, of the 36-year war. She describes the fear and disruption brought about by so many years of military violence and repression, and the processes which it is hoped can help rehabilitate affected communities, particularly focussing on the psychosocial implications of giving people the chance to talk about, and learn the truth about, their experiences. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • Fundamental conceptual tensions underlie current debates regarding the implementation of psychosocial interventions with war-affected populations. Three particular tensions structuring current discourse concern the generalisability versus uniqueness of relevant knowledge, the valuing of technical versus indigenous understandings, and the planning of targeted versus community-based intervention. The implications of working out these tensions in the implementation of programmes are explored, leading to the proposal of a model of phased response to psychosocial needs.
  • The author describes and assesses the use of matrix-scoring as a participatory evaluation tool. Often used as part of the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) arsenal of tools, here the author applies it specifically to evaluating the performance of the European Community/European Union (EC/EU) in the provision of aid to Ethiopia between 1976 and 1994. He describes the mapping technique, scoring/ranking system, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of its use in this case (including tables of responses/results).
  • Citing the case of the Self Employed Women's Association's (SEWA) experience in nine districts of Gujarat, India, an argument is presented for returning almost the entire forestry sector to the women through their cooperatives of groups. Such an argument is based on the fact that almost one third of poor women are directly or indirectly involved in forestry or forestry-related work in the unorganized sector of the India economy, yet forestry remains a mainly male domain. A specific case study is presented, from Banaskantha, and three of their sub-programmes are described: the Eco-Regeneration Programme; fodder security systems; and Minor Forest Produce Collection (gum collection). Some related issues on forestry and women are then presented in conclusion. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In English only
  • Major efforts have been made by development organisations to make their systems of project and programme management more participatory, in order to be accountable to local participants (or beneficiaries), while also creating opportunities for them to shape their own processes. These measures may look participatory, but have in effect become new (and often costly) forms of management and control, which do not result in great benefits for project participants. The authors argue that the dominance of three components - projects, professionals, and organisations -has been taken for granted; and that they involve practices and processes which are primarily instruments of control, rather than of participation. Attempts to generate participation will thus require a fundamental change in the way in which these components operate. In the meantime, the authors call for attention to be paid to the ways in which the current tools of participatory development, including PRA, can be used to promote either participation, or control, depending on how they are used.
  • The paper addresses the question of the purpose of Rapid Rural Appraisal and Participatory Rural Appraisal (RRA/PRA). It outlines three broad contexts in which these are undertaken in practice. It then considers some of the challenges facing PRA. These include introducing and spreading PRA within communities; institutionalizing PRA into development organizations and their projects or programmes; assuring and maintaining quality, both of the PRA process and its facilitation; and, finally, the lack of a methodological critique of PRA. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • The author provides a summary of important lessons learned from adult educational activities and research in Latin America. Basic learning skills are defined as the skills needed in order to provide for ones basic needs, in turn based on the current understanding of human rights, and while literacy training is often regarded as the primary developmental tool in this respect, illiteracy is only one symptom of inequality and poverty. Schmelkes makes values the central element in her notion of competence.
  • The UNEP's Dryland Ecosystems and Desertification Control Programme Activity Centre (DEDC/PAC) is coordinating a programme through the Environmental Liaison Centre International (ELCI) to devise methods for the participatory evaluation and monitoring of projects, forming a useful corollary to Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Community-integrated projects should allow for the community evaluation, as well as implementation, of programmes, and the author recommends a number of steps to incorporate successful participatory evaluation.
  • The author describes a quick method for evaluating the first stages of a credit project. He lists three questions, designed to illicit unambiguous yes/no answers, which assess the project's governance (external control structure), its financial viability (internal organisation), and its attitude towards potential borrowers. Answers are scored and provide an easy indicator of the project's likelihood of success. See also Evaluation of microfinance projects, Feedback, Susan Johnson ([13]Volume 9, Number 4)
  • The first in a series of papers, this paper describes the rationale behind the Manicaland Business Linkages Project in Eastern Zimbabwe. The economic and development perspectives of buyers, suppliers, and the nation are considered, including the relevance of gender in small enterprise. Potential risks and problems are highlighted: imbalances of power between buyer and seller, government regulations and union demands, and access to linkage opportunities.
  • The author evaluates the progress made since the 1996 World Food Summit on the commitments adopted there. He identifies current areas of concern, and promises made at various meetings since the Summit, and argues that Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have more capacity than NGOs to compel government policy changes and must take the initiative.
  • This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and practice of fieldworker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of fieldworkers enables and constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which `street level bureaucrats' shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves from other village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Participatory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission of failure, and finally to develop a shared vocabulary of participation and belief in success. Some of the implications for participatory approaches are that there may be significant contradictions between sustainability and participatory development.
  • This article takes an experience from Irian Jaya to clarify the centrality of popular participation to development. It explores the ways in which a focus on class and gender takes participatory development to a new level; and considers how development agents can support transformational development. Integrating the strengths of political economy and gender planning into a participatory methodology yields an approach that puts people first; that does not isolate or privilege particular sectors; that places subjugation alongside poverty as social evils to be overcome, not simply alleviated. An emancipatory concept and practice of development, in which inequalities and inequities are addressed together in order to reconfigure society to the benefit of the majority, will empower people to develop themselves as they see fit. This demands a delicate and evolving balance between guidance and support, facilitation and response, on the part of the development agent. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • There has recently been unprecedented enthusiasm in Bangladesh for Social Forestry (SF). SF projects have been launched with the goal of involving local communities in managing forest resources. Proponents claim that SF has opened new scope for people's participation in forestry. Against such promises and claims, this paper attempts to evaluate the nature and extent of participation in an SF project in Bangladesh, which is currently receiving attention from government and donors. The paper uses a systematic theoretical framework to evaluate participation in the decision-making, implementation, benefit-sharing, and evaluation of the project. It concludes that people's participation has been insignificant, and marginal. People have virtually no major involvement in project-related decisions and evaluation, but perform within strict bureaucratic limits.
  • This paper analyses the legacy of the `green revolution' in rural India, going beyond the economic to take into account the comprehensive impact of State-guided development strategies on the lives of ordinary people. Based on information collected during fieldwork in North India, it aims to provide a more finely differentiated picture of the nature and ramifications of the `green revolution' in the countryside, as well as making suggestions for future policy reform. The first section situates the `green revolution' strategy in the broader political-economic context. The second (and more detailed) part addresses some of the contradictions - the gap between increases in production and growing landlessness and rural poverty - with illustrations from a village case study.
  • The author discusses the value of speech/talking as a communication tool, and the distortions that occur depending on the way speech is recorded and presented. During travels in India, de Caires asked one question of people he met along the way, recording their responses on paper and noting the influences on people's responses and his own impact on their choice of words. In relation to development, the point is made that face-to-face talk should be valued above other reported or mediated methods of communication, which can `amplify misunderstandings, and...alienate people from the fundamental process of sharing information.'
  • The authors examine the use of development jargon as commands, or `order words'. `Participation' and `appropriate technology' are discussed as examples of development jargon which, through unquestioning usage, becomes `so entrenched that no NGO could dare contest' them. The result of continuing to use these words without allowing their meanings and implications to be contested will be the deterioration of these terms until they are no longer of analytical use.
  • Since the 1960s, `partnership' has been a stated aim of NGOs, and the authors discuss how the concept of partnership has developed over the last 30 years. The type of relationship partners should have and the type of institution, government or group that Northern NGOs should seek to foster as partners, the authors argue, may be different in each specific instance. Both partners should agree on what they wish to gain from and can contribute to the relationship, building the mutual trust essential if partnerships are to flourish, be useful, and last.
  • The paper addresses two issues: what are the type of organization needed in order to face the challenge posed by the complexity and uncertainty of development problems; and how can such organizations be designed. A flat organizational structure is proposed allowing the organization to be flexible and to respond to the needs of those who it aims to serve. Instead of a hierarchy of positions, a hierarchy of programmes should form the basis of organization for development agencies. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Sixty per cent of Peru's urban workforce is employed within the small and micro enterprises (SMEs) which account for 95 per cent of all business in the country's manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors. But in spite of credit needs of some US$ 1,250 million, in 1994 the combined input from the formal financial sector, international development agencies, and NGOs met only five per cent of this demand. The author examines the six principal mechanisms through which credit is available to SMEs, and describes the work of a Peruvian NGO network - IDESI - which specialises in providing credit and related services to small businesses, and in making strategic linkages between the popular sector and the conventional banking system.
  • The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has promoted the so-called `Tobin Tax' as a major mechanism for generating a substantial increase in global resources for tackling human-development priorities. Such a levy, on largely speculative and unproductive international transactions, may be capable of generating over US$300 billion per year: several times higher than existing levels of bilateral aid. However, given the muted dialogue at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development, and in order to secure the necessary support of key developed countries and global financial institutions, it may be inevitable that the Tobin Tax, if adopted, would ultimately serve the interests of the wealthier economies. There is, therefore, an urgent need for the development sector to engage in debate on how, and how much of, such funds would be directed to priority human-development purposes.
  • This article suggests that gender-oriented policies tend to evaporate within the bureaucracy of the typical international development agency. An agency is here interpreted as a `patriarchal cooking pot', in which gender policies are likely to evaporate because they threaten the internal patriarchal tradition of the agency, and also because such policies would upset the cosy and `brotherly' relationship with recipient governments of developing countries. The article aims to illuminate this process of policy evaporation. The reader is invited to peer into the patriarchal cooking pot. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • The post-election period in South Africa has been marked by trials for the NGO sector, in spite of its pivotal role in the anti-apartheid struggle. The article explores certain developments within the NGO sector, and between the NGOs and the government, to present tentative interpretations of these processes. A schematic background to the NGO sector firstly contextualises the problems now confronting these organisations. The second part provides an overview of the internal difficulties which confront NGOs. A description of how relations between the NGO sector and the government are unfolding is complemented by a discussion of NGOs and the prevailing `funding crises'. The final part is more speculative, postulating the challenges which will confront NGOs in the coming years.
  • In English only
  • With specific reference to the BCCI, the author argues that equating sustainability with financial self-sufficiency can lead development organisations to sacrifice or compromise their development work in order to generate revenue. The BCCI was funded by USAID for seven years and, to compensate for the loss of that funding and ostensibly in order to continue their development activities, set up and ran a national Lotto which consumed resources and ultimately became the sole raison d'être for the organisation. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • The paper discusses some of the innovative ways in which the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) has generated space for alternative critical feminist knowledge and analysis, which it sees as an essential basis for equitable development. The objectives of ZWRCN are briefly: to promote and strengthen inter-organizational networking activities for the exchange of information; to promote greater gender-awareness through information; to promote the adoption of gender-sensitive information systems; to repackage information in forms appropriate to relevant users; and to fill information gaps in both formal and non-formal ways. Strategies used by the ZWRCN include: documentation centre, thematic debates, talks on Gender and Development (GAD), gender training, a linkage programme, lobbying and advocacy, the GAD database, and book fairs. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Increasing numbers of local development organisations are approaching banks seeking credit. Their success has often been limited, due in part to the organisations' unfamiliarity with banking concepts and lack of investment resources, and also to banks' attitudes towards lending to `self-help' groups, and small returns on small loans. In 1985, a group of development practitioners set up RAFAD (Research and Applications of Alternative Financing for Development), a Swiss-based organisation, which provides guarantees, underwriting loans to finance local economic activities in the South. The author discusses the difficulties faced, successes achieved and ways to expand the service.
  • The author reports on this conference, held in Bradford, England in May 1996. Consultants, planners, activists, geographers, ecologists, and economists attended, presenting papers on diverse topics but with the intention of understanding different methodological approaches to choosing development options. Focussing on environmental impact-assessment, the report highlights the participants' fruitful discussion of the interaction between various methodologies, but the author argues that `progress towards more environment-friendly development paths remains problematic.'
  • Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques (REFLECT) is an approach to adult literacy programmes which borrows from Paolo Freire's `active dialogue' method and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques. Developed by ACTIONAID, the authors describe and assess the use of REFLECT in pilot studies in Uganda and in Bangladesh, providing very positive feedback on this learning methodology; they argue that it allows for a synthesis of empowerment and literacy, although its flexibility - whether it will work in urban areas, with refugees etc - needs to be tested.

  • The authors assess the 1995 CAS for Mexico, arguing that it fails to provide any coherent poverty-reduction strategies and maintains, incorrectly, that increased economic growth can alleviate poverty in and of itself. Also attacked is the way the CAS is developed without any consultation with civil society organisations in Mexico. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • The British Overseas Development Administration (ODA) commissioned studies to look at the increasingly common practice of the British government directly funding Southern NGOs, rather than going through Northern NGOs. British development NGOs' (BINGOs') attitudes to this practice were assessed, and the author discusses the hypocrisy revealed. BINGOs believed that Southern NGOs were not capable of managing and evaluating projects, would become `donor-driven', would become more concerned with the availability of money than meeting needs, and would be susceptible to manipulation by donors and governments. The author argues that Northern NGOs need to re-examine the nature of their relationship with Southern counterparts. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Readers [13]Development and Patronage and [14]Development, NGOs, and Civil Society.
  • The Habitat International Coalition conducted research in 22 countries in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia, investigating public policy in housing and services since the 1950s. The findings are summarised here. Rural and urban development policies are considered, including housing shortages and types of housing, the consequences of relying on aid, and discussion of the different actors designing social policy. Finally, the author lists ingredients that seem to contribute to the success of housing and service provision.
  • This article reviews trends in poverty, hunger and food security in the Americas; examines some of the principal processes, institutions and policies which generate unsustainable development; and speculates on reforms required at all levels in order to improve food security. While food aid offers opportunities for alleviating poverty and hunger, it may contribute to intensifying rather than resolving livelihood crises. Since the World Food Programme is a major player in the context of food aid, some issues crucial for WFP policies in the Americas are considered.
  • It is noted that while multilateral development banks (MDBs) have significantly increased their lending for 'targeted' anti-poverty projects since the early 1990s, there are few systematic, independent, field-based assessments of their effectiveness; as such monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is necessary to provide feedback to development decision-makers and stakeholders regarding what kinds of anti-poverty programme work and why. Pro-accountability actors in civil society in both donor countries and developing countries share a common interest in greater transparency as a path towards greater accountability and more effective MDB anti-poverty investments. Issues discussed are: bringing in civil society; learning from below; building networks; producing reliable generalizations; building credibility both above and below; making findings public; institution building; and cost effectiveness. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • In English only
  • The problem of inadequate housing and living conditions facing one quarter of the world's population is situated in this article within the framework of human rights, and of international recognition of the basic rights to a place to live, and to gain and sustain an adequate standard of living. The nature and scale of the housing crisis points to a failure of governance that leads to exclusion, dispossession, and violence becoming endemic to societies: the institutionalisation of insecure and inadequate housing and living conditions. The author draws on the experience of Habitat International Coalition (HIC) in developing and supporting a comprehensive range of actions at local, national, regional, and international levels; and suggests some of the elements required if changes are not only to be promoted and campaigned for, but also sustained.
  • The results and discussions are presented of a participatory rural appraisal workshop held at the Sothuparai Reservoir Project, Tamil Nadu, India. The workshop was held at the heart of the dam site in the dense mango groves with farmers from two different categories. The first group was of those who would benefit from the irrigation, the second of those who would have to give up their land. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.

  • Financial accountability is as important in development agencies as in other organisations, although providing expenses statements, keeping accurate accounts, and setting and monitoring budgets are often seen by development workers as excessively bureaucratic tasks. The author argues that a small amount of training in simple, workable accounting procedures can enable people to obtain useful data from their accounts, and help with planning future expenditure.
  • Drawing from the experiences of BRAC in Bangladesh, the author highlights some of the major areas of controversy around micro-credit organisations, specifically criticising points made by Ben Rogaly (in Development in Practice 6(2)). Arguing that further research is needed to determine cost-benefit ratios when providing specialised credit systems for use by specific sub-sections of society, he maintains that trade-offs occur between accountability and flexibility, and that to ignore such complexities leads to too narrow a view of micro-credit and its potential.
  • The author replies to Hasan Zaman's comments (in the same issue of the journal) about micro-credit organisations.
  • The author reports on the `International Conference on Scientific Research Partnership for Sustainable Development - North-South and South-South Dimensions', held in Berne in March 1996. Over 400 people from a wide range of fields attended, and while the author concerns herself with points of relevance to NGOs, NGOs were not widely represented nor specifically considered at the conference. Subjects discussed include the propensity for inequality in partnerships and the need to draw up guidelines for co-operation to ensure fruitful (fair and trusting) relationships, and, for a rejected partner, an amicable divorce.
  • In 1994, the authors conducted research in the Iasi district of Romania, and present here findings about institutionalised children's aspirations, education, level of family contact and their assessment of the problems they face. The research provides some interesting pointers for those involved in programme planning, suggesting that better education and encouraging familial contact, where possible, throughout institutionalisation are more effective than strategies which seek to help the children when they leave. The article also questions the validity of the use of the term `orphans', when 80 percent of those questioned appeared to know the whereabouts of a family member.
  • It is increasingly being recognised that many survivors of trauma are not best helped by psychological intervention based on the common Western patient/analyst relationship. Radda Barnen commissioned research into a variety of approaches to working with children who have been victims of conflict and/or displacement. The principal findings highlight the need for treatment which bases its rationale and methods on the specific circumstances of communities, including their cultural norms, coping mechanisms, and the wider social circumstances of those affected, as well as the central role of families, schools and teachers in assisting recovery.
  • This article describes the activities of an indigenous NGO in Ahmedabad, India in attempting to prevent communal violence. It attempts to explain why the use of religious symbols seems to be particularly potent in causing slum riots. Finally, it discusses various lessons learned for international and indigenous NGOs which are attempting to counteract communal violence. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • In the context of economic and technological change in the late twentieth century, the World Bank's World Development Report 1995 combines the themes of labour and the global market, celebrating the triumph of the market in efficient labour allocation worldwide. The World Bank's emphasis on boosting Africa's agricultural export capacity ignores the prevailing hostile conditions which African products encounter on the world market, and the current tendency towards agricultural labour displacement. `Labour flight', particularly of youth, signals African farmers' own disenchantment with farming under present liberalised market conditions. The narrowness of the World Bank's policy vision for Africa avoids the social and political implications of rural labour displacement as well as the need for human-capital investment in rural areas. This article argues that the alternative to human-capital investment now may be war and expensive disaster relief for decades to come.
  • A notable absentee from the ten-point action plan set out by the 1990 World Summit for Children was the issue of street children. Yet such children are a common sight in cities of the developing world, and live in some of the most extreme conditions of poverty. The article looks at the experience of street children in the Mexican city of Puebla. It argues that current research neglects the moral and geographic dimension of work with street children. This has led to practice that regards street children as a welfare concern (as children), and pays less attention to their geographic context (the street). By contrast, the work of an NGO, JUCONI, indicates that a sensitivity to this distinction can offer critical insights. The article outlines JUCONI's approach and evaluates the implications for `best practice'.
  • This two-part article explores the experience of living and working for poverty-focused NGOs in a civil war whose roots lay in the chronically inequitable distribution of power and access to resources. Drawing on 12 years' work in Central America, the author reflects on the demands and constraints placed on international aid workers in the context of civil conflict; and on the ways in which relationships with local counterpart organisations and NGOs are affected. Empowerment and participation are examined from the perspective of those who refuse to play the role of war victims. Part Two explores the immediate and longer-term impacts of war and political violence both on those who survive, and on local and international workers who are concerned to address its causes and consequences.
  • A review is presented of the different principles and characteristics embodied in the two development philosophies (as briefly differentiated in the phrases 'top-down approach', and the 'bottom-up', or people-centered approach). Evaluation is discussed in terms of the two approaches: the subjective and the objective. Each one is examined, and whether they are mutually exclusive or compatible is discussed, and indeed whether evaluating project outcomes is worthwhile. It is concluded that the evaluation of each type f project can learn from each other, and that an amalgamation of objective and subjective approaches can lead to a more informed evaluation outcome, and an enhanced development project or process. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
  • It is argued that the central role of rural grassroots organizations (RGOs) in Haitian rural development is of considerable importance. The Haitian Emergency Economic Recovery Programme has excluded the involvement of RGOs, and it is suggested that this will render the EERP largely impotent in confronting the extreme poverty and environmental degradation of the country. The paper describes some of the ways in which Haitian RGOs ought to be involved in the development process. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The authors describe how late rainfall, and the subsequent drought-recovery Food-For-Work (FFW) programme, undermined a long-term environment-protection project in Lesotho, South Africa. They argue emergency relief should be coordinated to complement disaster-prevention and capacity-building programmes - the FFW programme set a precedent for `payment' for essential conservation work - and the authors discuss how food distribution can be done as `developmentally as possible'.
  • When the civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992, the Spanish government put forward money for a resettlement project (the ASPA project) which was designed and implemented by a Northern NGO for which the author worked as a construction adviser. The project, constructing a settlement for and with refugees returning from Honduras, faced difficulties due to a lack of local participation and the adoption of a discordant `professional' mindset in the planning and early stages of building work. The author discusses how the reconstruction process was altered to enable more effective participation and community ownership of the settlement.
  • In English only
  • The article examines the problems facing African scholars and publishers, in the context of rapid developments in information technology and a deepening economic gulf between industrialised and Third World countries. Many of these problems, and conventional responses to them from libraries, publishers, and donors, are themselves a legacy of colonial relations; the most significant of which is the deepening dependence on western forms of knowledge and systems for its validation. Questioning the terms `information-rich' and `information-poor', the author stresses the need for Africans to develop the means to generate, value, and disseminate their own forms of knowledge.
  • The need for a comprehensive information service based at the rural level in Bangladesh is discussed, noting the demands of NGO activists who require reading materials, particularly in their own language, for updating their knowledge, developing skills, analysing social issues, and motivating communities. The establishment of the Community Development Library (CDL) in 1980 whose role is to cater to the information needs of development agencies and social workers, through an institution which would provide development workers with resource materials and up-to-date information on a variety of issues is discussed. The organization of the CDL is described, and additional services are noted: press clippings; current-awareness services; a reading circle; action research and publication; audio-visual programme; and development resource promotion. The CDL also maintains 30 regional, district, and local Rural Information Resource Centres (RIRCS). The impact and some restraints of the RIRCS are noted. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author reports on the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), working actively in Argentina to discover the whereabouts of the desaparacidos, the children who were abducted by the military regime of the 1970s to early `80s. Their achievements include tracing over 50 children, successfully lobbying for the creation of a genetic databank on the families of the disappeared, and campaigning for action from the government.
  • The author researched women's experiences of domestic violence and abuse in Calcutta, India. She reports on their strategies for coping with and resisting this violence, noting that the majority of the women developed resistance strategies, and that in many cases these worked. A pragmatic approach is taken, since, the author argues, it is unhelpful to assume that the best course of action for these women would be to leave their partners. The women who were most successful in resisting violence were those who were least isolated; who had access to other family members, or other women through a variety of organisations.
  • An unnecessary polarisation has arisen between `relief' and `development' work and agencies are looking to bridge the gap, moving towards an integrated response to disasters which promotes sustainable development. Effective rehabilitation may provide a way forward, and the author discusses this concept, arguing that development agencies will need to foster relevant capacities in recipients as well as shift their planning, programming, implementation and evaluation approaches, in order to enable rehabilitation to work as a strategy in its own right, rather than as a stop-gap between continuing relief and development work.
  • Kishore Saint, one of Development in Practice's founding Editorial Advisers, shares his thoughts on the way forward for the journal as he prepares to stand down from his position.
  • The European Commission (EC) and other OECD countries would like a foreign investment treaty (or `multilateral investment agreement') within the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This would allow foreign companies to establish themselves with 100 per cent equity in all sectors (except security) in any WTO country; and receive `national treatment' on a par with local firms. National policies favouring local enterprises or facilities would be deemed discriminatory, and thus illegal under WTO rules. The penalties for non-compliance with WTO agreements are extensive. This article explores the grave implications of such a treaty for developing countries, and suggests alternatives that are available to them.
  • Agrarian reform or land reform has virtually disappeared from the international development agenda since the 1980s. However, many people's organisations (POs) and NGOs in Third World countries are attempting to restore it as a development priority and policy imperative. The Philippines provides an example of agrarian reform that is currently being implemented within a democratic political framework which, while not without problems, presents an opportunity for a meaningful change for small farmers and landless peasants. In 1989, PhilDhrra, a network of NGOs in the Philippines, initiated a tripartite mechanism and programme among POs, NGOs, and government to facilitate the land reform process, which is showing encouraging results in several provinces.
  • This two-part article explores the experience of living and working for a poverty-focused NGO in a civil war whose roots lay in the chronically inequitable distribution of power and access to resources. Based on 12 years' work in Central America, principally with refugees from El Salvador, the article reflects on the demands and constraints placed on international aid workers in the context of counter-insurgency; and on the ways in which relationships with local organisations and NGOs are affected. Empowerment and participation are examined from the perspective of those who reject their role as war victims.
  • The author discusses her involvement, as a member of the Indian Women's Movement (IWM), in campaigning for increased protection under Indian law for women, and children, from sexual assault of any kind. The law at present has large gaps in it, and is formulated with the joint aims of protecting `virginal' women and protecting men at risk from the false allegations of low caste, impoverished, sexually-aware women. The evolution of the current law is presented, with examples of injustices, suggested areas for future lobbying, and pleas to ensure that victims are not revictimised by lobbyists themselves. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Rights.
  • The author examines the effect of forced evictions and homelessness on children, in the long and short-term, psychologically and physically. Housing, land, and legal rights fail to protect children, she argues, and poor people need greater access to legal advice on how evictions can be resisted. There is rarely coherent policy about the status of street children, resulting in their further marginalisation and criminalisation. Slums and squatter camps are symptomatic of urban development and acknowledging this is the first step towards providing the infrastructure necessary to prevent damaging millions of children and their families in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The insecurity of land tenure in Uganda has been a critical issue in the economic development of the country. The development of an equitable land distribution policy is discussed. Information is presented on: the historical background of land tenure systems (noting the difference in land tenure systems: Mailo, freehold, leasehold, the Busulu (ground rent) and Envujo (commodity rents) law, and the 1975 Land Decree); the work of the Technical Committee; and issues raised by the proposed reform (land as a technical question, over-riding economic considerations, avoidance of social issues, the sale of land, compensation, the plight of rural pastoralists, a ceiling on land acquisition, a uniform land tenure system, and the timing of implementation). It is concluded that the proposed land reform in Uganda does not promise to balance technical, economic, social, and political criteria. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The authors describe the extent of the trade in mainly rural Nepalese women, sold into prostitution and bonded labour in Asia and the Middle East, often by their families, because of poverty. The organisation Women Acting Together for Change (WATCH) works for and with these women, aiming to empower victims and to change the way women are perceived in Nepalese society and law. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • The development of an unionized work force in the north-east of Brazil is described. The area has seen considerable growth in the export markets for grapes and mangoes which provides significant employment; other areas of employment are in labour-intensive crops, for example tomatoes and onions. The paper discusses: some new union strategies, improvements for wage labourers, and some of the limited victories that have been achieved with the work of the NGO, Oxfam. It is argued that there are limits to this kind of development model given the low value of the wages earned by the workers. The conclusion proposes considerable networking amongst unions and NGOs with the aim of providing information that may allow them to define and implement new directions for development. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Social Action.
  • In English only
  • Afghan NGOs have been a major provider of humanitarian aid throughout the Afghan conflict. They remained operational during this period by `dancing' with and between the various parties to the conflict, their survival contingent on their ability to build ad hoc patterns of alliance and Cupertino. This article explores the nature of `the dance' between NGOs, the warring parties, and the NGOs' constituencies. It asks whether `dancing with the prince' represents an accommodation with violence or is a necessary compromise which will ultimately contribute to resolving the conflict. It concludes by drawing out key lessons for donors who support indigenous NGOs operating in complex political emergencies. An updated version of this article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • An analysis is presented of research carried out in 1995, focusing on programmes funded by an NGO, Oxfam, as the basis of a case study of the Ugandan health sector. The involvement of NGOs in service provision for the state in Uganda is discussed together with the changing trends in aid distribution and what they mean for NGOs, the state and for their relationship with each other. Sections consider whose responsibility it is to provide a viable health service, and the importance of NGO support for the health service in Uganda. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • In 1994, the UN Volunteers programme (UNV) and UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) collaborated on a research project, Volunteer Contributions to Social Integration at the Grassroots: the Urban or `Pavement Dimension'. The author describes how the researchers hope to contribute to understanding of how global forces erode community structures, including the way governments increasingly privatise public services, and highlights the challenges and potential rewards for communities which voluntarily pull together to change their circumstances.
  • 40 participants from 24 countries took part in this workshop, organised by the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC) in Oxford, UK. Much of the workshop was spent trying to reach agreement on what civil society means, and the degree to which it can be conceptually separated from the State, and reinforced by NGOs. Another concern was that Northern and Southern NGOs' understandings of civil society were often different; the Northern interpretation was accused of being donor-driven and neo-imperialist, and there were general concerns that less powerful groups could be assimilated by stronger organisations attempting to impose `togetherness' and `co-operation'.
  • The Kebkabiya project was the first of Oxfam's operational development projects instigated during the 1980s to initiate a handover to community management. It therefore offers a possible model to other operational projects considering their eventual future. This article analyses the processes of handover into those affecting operational control of service delivery, management control, and the project's financial base. It argues that a handover, if it is to be successful and sustainable, must be treated as a complex set of activities requiring a long time framework, much like any other developmental process.
  • There is growing interest in organisational and institutional development, or capacity-building, but little understanding of what these involve in practice. This article provides a case-study of a successful long-term programme of institutional development, which built the capacities of the Tibetan refugee community in development planning. The primary focus is on key features for adaptation by development practitioners. The authors also clarify some of the confusions in the debate on organisational and institutional development.
  • New communication technologies may be a mixed blessing for tropical African states. They could foster development, by promoting health, education, agriculture, entertainment, business and tourism; and also enhance international trade and regional Cupertino. However, these technologies might accentuate the gap between the rich and poor, creating a society characterised by an information-rich elite and an information-poor underclass. In an age when information is power, this could devastate countries that are facing the problems of poverty, disease, hunger, and political instability. Ultimately, these technologies might also jeopardise the sovereignty, security, human rights and, consequently, the development of countries in tropical Africa.
  • NGOs are using `civil society' to mean different things: the author argues that the wide definition means that any potential partner organisation becomes a civil-society organisation, and that consideration of the conditions that are central to a community organisation becoming a civil organisation may be useful in helping NGOs focus on the quality of the associations they choose. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • An examination is presented of an NGO project in Zambia, focusing on its approach, its specific consequences for local participation, potential for sustainability and its ability to hold the government accountable for how its uses public resources. Sections focus on: channeling food aid; and food for work programmes. It is concluded that unless aid projects make it a priority to establish or reinforce mechanisms by which existing, locally available resources are mobilized and used effectively in resolving the problems of the poor, they cannot contribute to laying a basis for further development. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development, NGOs, and Civil Society. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • A description is presented of the development of NGOs in Brazil from small grassroots movements into over a 1000 specialized and consolidated organizations in 1996. NGOs generally operate through one or more of six inter-related activities: applied research; grassroots organizations; training and technical assistance; information sharing; public policy advocacy; and networking. The important role they play in promoting debate on public policy at the grassroots level is highlighted. The growth of the Anti-Poverty Campaign started in 1993 through the efforts of several leading NGOs is an illustration of the influential role NGOs now hold in Brazilian society. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • An analysis is presented of the expansion of the NGO, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in Gujarat, India following the approval of a #10 million grant for rural development from the European Union. The challenge facing the NGO is to scale up the kind of community based development which it has been successful at to a size that has an impact on a larger number of people. The grassroots approach adopted by the AKRSP is examined and the need to maintain this approach despite the increase in programme size highlighted and the problems this creates are outlined. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The authors report on a neighbourhood-based sanitation service set up in Dar es Salaam using appropriate technology for emptying pit latrines; the Manual Pit Latrine Emptying Technology (MAPET) project. The participatory development process and use of technology fitting the localised scale of the project contributed to its success, while notable lessons learned include the need for the cooperation of a local agency (whether an NGO or local government) in purchasing and replacing equipment.
  • The author briefly discusses the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, negotiated and adopted by 189 countries at the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995, and how it promises that governments will take responsibility for its implementation, while recognising the roles NGOs have to play.
  • In English only
  • This article challenges the recent uncritical enthusiasm for the potential of micro-finance institutions to reduce poverty. It is argued that, although understanding about how to design anti-poverty financial intermediation has improved, the current campaign to increase resource allocation in this sector may undermine the very sustainability that is being sought. Further, studies of the impact of micro-enterprise credit suggest that it is not necessarily beneficial to very poor people. Interventions in the provision of financial services should not be made without locally specific analysis of the functions of existing savings and credit facilities. An emphasis on scale acts as a disincentive to such analysis, and increases the risk of the re-emergence of a `blueprint' approach to anti-poverty action.
  • Mala milk is a cultured dairy beverage of consistent quality that can keep for four days without refrigeration, and up to three weeks with refrigeration. It offers important nutritional benefits for rural consumers, can be produced in simple facilities with a capacity of 500 litres per day or more, and is less complicated than cheesemaking. The production of mala milk in Kenya is discussed, and the equity trust approach is described. An innovative approach to the provision of financing, technical and managerial assistance proved successful for the establishment of small, community-owned mala milk plants in Kenya. Implemented by Techno-Serve-Kenya, this activity received core financial and technical assistance from Appropriate Technology International and enterprise finance from several other donors. The benefits of operating mala milk production in this way are noted. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author comments on research into poor urban women's survival strategies done in Zambia in 1994, funded by the Natural Resources Department of the British government's Overseas Development Administration. Chilimba is an informal savings and credit system, one variation of the ROSCAs (Rotating Savings and Credit Associations) successfully in use throughout Africa and elsewhere. The author discusses the potential for intervention designed to enable those with no capital or regular income to participate, and to increase and widen the benefits gained from participation.
  • As markets are increasingly deregulated and government control over public service provision loosens, so the importance of effective urban management is growing. No longer directly providing urban services, governments should now, the author argues, perform an `enabling' role, planning and co-ordinating provision. Werna reports on case studies from Bangladesh, Kenya and Brazil, and discusses the common problems faced in these very different urban environments and how local government authorities can work to close the growing gulf between service management and provision.
  • In Bangladesh, government organisations and non-governmental organisations are implementing programmes and energy-saving projects in an effort to save the environment. This article examines such programmes in the specific area of improved stove technology. It shows that inadequate assessment of the environment by environmentalists and development practitioners has led them to select inappropriate technology that has resulted in the failure to incorporate women in the energy-saving movement. It identifies the reasons behind women's rejection of a technology that was imposed rather than based on an appreciation of their distinct problems, culture, and ecology.
  • Rehabilitation involves re-establishing livelihood security among the poorest households in order to reduce vulnerability to future disasters, re-start the local economy in a sustainable fashion, and avoid dependency. This article discusses experiences of post-war rehabilitation in Mozambique and suggests that, although many households rapidly re-started crop production, they remain vulnerable because they have not been able to rebuild reserves. The author cautions against over-rapid withdrawal from relief programmes, and suggests that distributing cash and allowing households to buy what they need most is sometimes more appropriate than distributing food, seeds, tools, and selected household goods.
  • The policies of the apartheid regime prematurely destroyed the peasantry in South Africa, leaving millions of people without land or jobs. The abrogation of racial laws that reserved 87 per cent of the land for whites makes it possible to launch policies addressing the needs of black farmers. Efforts to promote the emergence of black commercial farmers risk worsening conditions for much of the rural population. While it cannot neglect commercial agriculture and food security, South Africa also needs to revive peasant agriculture, which can play a role similar to that of the informal sector in urban areas.
  • The author expands on the four ingredients `feminist-flavoured gender-sensitive development' should have: Strategic needs of women; Agenda-setting direction to mainstreaming; Flexibility; and Empowerment philosophy (`SAFE').
  • The paper defines financial sustainability; why financial sustainability is a valid objective; how it can be measured; and what can be done to improve levels of financial sustainability. The discussion is situated within the context of NGOs managed credit schemes, operating in developing countries. The following issues are considered: importance of savings; gender; appropriate loan size; realistic interest rates; repayment periods and intervals; security and collateral; group loans versus group businesses; separation of finance from other support; systems; measurement; incentives; and scale. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The indigenous informal credit market within Sri Lanka encompasses a wide range of financial arrangements, including: direct money-lending (professional and semi-professional money-lenders); indirect money-lending (trade financing, commission agencies, and credit related to mortgages on crops); and voluntary credit groups (single purpose and multi-purpose credit assistance and cheetu/ROSCAs). The paper focuses on: the Hatton National Bank; 'barefoot banking'; the extension of irrigation; and, the role of NGOs. Aspects are listed in which outside agencies could assist the banking systems in reaching the small- and micro-enterprise sector: preferential interest rates; risk sharing; awareness of banking; identifying potential entrepreneurs; entrepreneur development; monitoring; encouraging savings habits; and group lending. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • A case study is presented of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in Gujarat, India, which has taken on responsibility for providing marketing support to the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas groups in the Banaskantha district. It is the first time a voluntary organisation has been involved directly in business activities in an open market environment. A brief introduction of the SEWA experiment is presented, followed by a discussion of the group process in marketing; links with external agencies are presented, and some lessons are noted. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The authors discuss the feelings, status, and working conditions of women in factories making garments for export. Many legal requirements under the 1965 Factory Act (child care facilities, maternity leave, length of working hours, holiday entitlement) are rarely observed, workers are often unaware of their legal rights, and factory owners argue that such provisions would involve expenses which would nullify Bangladesh's low-wage advantage over other exporters.
  • In English only
  • Participation must be seen as political. There are always tensions underlying issues about who is involved, how and on whose terms. While participation has the potential to challenge patterns of dominance, it may also be the means through which existing power relations are entrenched and reproduced. The arenas in which people perceive their interests and judge whether they can express them are not neutral. Participation may take place for a whole range of unfree reasons. It is important to see participation as a dynamic process, and to understand that its own form and function can become a focus for struggle. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • The paper argues that education should be a crucial part of relief operations which respond to emergencies in developing countries. In practice, however, educational needs in emergencies have been neglected in competition with the demand for more conventional relief. An example from southern Sudan demonstrates how the need for education can be addressed in an emergency. Indigenous initiatives for the re-establishment and improvement of educational provision have been supported by a group of agencies working as part of the emergency operation. A flexible system of teacher education is the focus of a programme which invests in people rather than buildings. It emphasizes the crucial importance of the involvement of local communities, on whom the success of rural primary school education depends. The scheme has also recognized the importance of schools for conveying information and stimulating discussion on topics such as health, psycho-social needs, and girls' education, and integrating these cross-cutting issues into teacher education. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development in States of War. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Academic urban development training programs tend to either train in town planning, where the focus is on the production of plans, or in urban studies, where the focus is on the development of urban areas; there is a need, the author argues, for training that produces `working planners' with knowledge of both. He advocates `for-the-job training', in which trainees use the real problems they face in their working environment as study material, allowing trainees to produce useful outputs while being trained, and ensuring the relevance of training.
  • Against a background of reduced government funding of African universities, the International African Institute in London co-ordinated a study in 1995 to evaluate university libraries, in terms of their sustainability, now that many survive on (usually short-term) funding from donors. Through structured interviews and questionnaires, the researchers discovered libraries are becoming marginalised and decentralised within universities, and many are not providing the most basic services for students and staff.
  • Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) emerged in the context of working with rural communities in developing countries. But the principles of participation and of action-oriented research are equally valid for development work in the urban sector, and in industrialised countries. This article describes the use of participatory appraisal techniques in disadvantaged communities in the UK, in the fields of health and social welfare. Drawing on a case-study of her work, the author looks at the practical, organisational, and political difficulties inherent in bringing together multi-agency professionals and public-sector workers, and members of local communities, and in developing a functional consensus between them. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • This article reviews the extent to which the educational system has acknowledged the importance to women of the informal sector of the economy, and the extent to which it has sought to prepare them for employment or self-employment within it. It assesses the record of both formal and non-formal education in providing women with the necessary skills to compete with men for employment, and concludes that both have generally failed to assist women to obtain skilled, well paid, and secure jobs, leaving them in overwhelming numbers in subsistence-level activities in the informal sector. Within the non-formal approach to education, the article examines training in income-generating projects, which are a major conduit for assistance to poor women in developing countries. Some recommendations for improved strategies of education and training provision are presented. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • Although well placed to render assistance to refugees, indigenous NGOs usually play only a marginal role, compared with the Northern NGOs which dominate most humanitarian aid programmes. The unbalanced power relations between Northern agencies and donors and Southern NGOs in the delivery of refugee assistance are reviewed. Using data from the assistance programmes for Mozambican refugees in Malawi and Zimbabwe, the strategies and conditions by which some indigenous NGOs successfully challenged this prevailing situation are examined. Factors considered to be significant are institution building; diversifying the donor base; project design and development; and the skills and expertise of field directors. The broader applicability of these experiences is considered.
  • The paper notes that there are substantial differences between women's studies/women in development and gender studies/gender and development. It suggests that the differences between women in development, and gender and development is such that the focus changes from one of equity to one of efficiency. Within gender and development, there are a number of different loci: gender studies (the conceptual part of the process, during which models are developed and refined through research, debate and networking); gender training (a technical part of the process which involves passing on practical skills for implementing gender-sensitive policy, planning, and training in specific circumstances); and gender planning (the practical application of the skills that have been acquired through gender studies and gender training). The paper examines some of the specific problems encountered in each of these areas, the need to develop effective courses within Africa, the scope of training currently available and the impact of gender studies and gender training as a positive change in the lives of marginalised groups of women. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) is a non-profit NGO, established in 1987 to build the capacity of organizations engaged in development and social transformation in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. It aims to do this by providing organizational development (OD) consultancy services, offering OD training and programmes, and through the programme, Action Learning: Education for Development. Since inception, the NGO has worked with 164 client organizations in South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, and Tanzania. Although consultancy services and appropriate development interventions are helpful in building organizational capacity, the NGO perceives fieldwork as the most important aspect of development. The paper discusses the need for field work, within the needs of South Africa, and the importance of promoting good field work including some of the reasons why good field work is not attained. It also considers the qualities found in good field workers, using consultants appropriately, and the necessity to prioritize field work. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Recent years have seen development NGOs making significant efforts to show how they are performing, a trend impelled by three factors: stricter requirements attached to official aid, which is a fast-growing proportion of NGO funds; doubts about NGOs claims to be more effective than governments; post-Cold War shifts in the role of NGOs, which increase their own needs to know what is being achieved, in order to manage the processes of organisational reorientation and transformation. Almost without exception, NGOs are finding it very difficult to come up with sound, cost-effective methods to show the results of their development activities, or even to demonstrate their effectiveness as organizations. These difficulties arise from both key features of the aid system, and from the nature of 'non-profits'. The paper summarizes the difficulties in each of these two areas, and considers solutions that are emerging from recent experience. A concluding section explores the link between accountability and performance, and speculates on the range of approaches which NGOs might use in the future to prove that they are valuable and effective agents of development. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The World Bank claims to have become the defender of women's rights, urging national governments to 'invest more in women in order to reduce gender inequality and boost economic development'. Through its Women in Development Programme (WID), adopted throughout the developing world, the Bank defines the ground rules on gender policy. A market oriented approach is prescribed, with a monetary value attached to gender equality: women's programmes are to be framed in relation to the opportunity cost and efficiency of women's rights. The Bank determines the concepts, methodological categories, and database for analysing gender issues. The paper critically analyses the World Bank's approach to women and gender issues, and concludes that the neo-liberal gender perspective (under the trusteeship of international donors, such as the World Bank and IMF) is largely intent upon creating divisions within national societies, and demobilising the struggle of women and men against the macroeconomic model. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The UK Development Studies Association is a voluntary body of academics and practitioners concerned with economic and social development. The author highlights the `added value' of academics and practitioners sharing their expertise, and discusses the climate of mutual respect in which Cupertino can be most productive.
  • The discrepancy between the goals of political policies and in beneficiaries is apparent in rural development. One reason is the lack of political clout by rural people themselves to influence policy decisions that affect their livelihoods. If rural development is to benefit these people, upward influence in policy decisions should go hand in hand with development policies. Ideally, both government agents and politicians should commit themselves to support the people's agenda, and any government intervention should reflect political response to grassroots demands.
  • The position and contribution of NGOs to the health sector has changed over recent years. Their profile and sector size have increased, and their activities are often different from those previously carried out. In many quarters NGOs are viewed as the means of taking the health sector forward, regarded, amongst other things, as being more efficient and accountable than many developing country governments. This article explores these developments and examines in particular one aspect that has been relatively ignored - the relationship between governments and the NGO sector within the health field. It concludes by looking at practical steps that can be taken to improve such relationships.
  • In English only
  • There is a recognised tension between the development practitioner's need for timely intelligence on key topics, and the normal routines of academic development studies. Closing that gap involves, amongst other things, elaborating new ways of organising and doing research. This article, by an academic, is concerned especially with how to combine interactive rapid-appraisal methods with inputs from more conventional styles of research in ways that bridge the `macro-micro' divide; that is, shed light on national policy trends by exploring community and household responses. It describes two pieces of team research carried out in Tanzania and Zambia at the instigation of the Swedish official agency, SIDA.
  • Rapid population growth and its effect on the environment is one of the main concerns of development practitioners. Computer modelling tools have been used to explore the effects of proposed interventions, allowing agencies to quickly see where methods might be incompatible or have adverse or unexpected effects. The GIS is one such system, and is open to abuse if used to legitimise existing policy. The author sets out a two-process Policy and Decision Support System, which he feels is more context specific and less open to abuse since it involves the end-users in the development of the exploratory models. Using Operational Research techniques in combination with Complex Systems Modelling, he argues, should ensure that the design and implementation of programmes can be carefully explored and mutually agreed.
  • The author considers the coping strategies used by the newly poor households of the now-independent nation-state Kyrgyzstan. Like other former members of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan has fared badly economically since the disintegration of both the Union and complex economic links with it. In 1994, Save the Children Fund (SCF) carried out research into these coping strategies, the findings of which are briefly presented here. Full details can be obtained from SCF in a report entitled `Coping with the Transition: Household Coping Strategies in Kyrgyzstan' (SCF, December 1994).
  • This conference, held in Lanzarote in April 1995, attracted delegates from NGOs, academic institutions, governments and the private sector, although representatives from the largest airlines, holiday companies and hotel groups were conspicuous by their absence. NGO-workers were concerned with shifting governments et al away from so-called nature tourism and towards the promotion of ecotourism. The final day of the conference was used to draft the Charter for Sustainable Tourism, for presentation to the UN.
  • The author responds to Mike Powell's article in Development in Practice 5(3), and argues that it is not only those interfering in cultures as 'outsiders' who face difficulties and accusations of cultural subjectivity, but also those challenging norms as a member of that culture. Those presenting views which go against traditional social structures, such as the author's views about the treatment of women in South Asia, should not allow accusations of cultural relativism to dissuade them - rather, development practitioners should 'use culture to open up intractable areas of gender relations'. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • The author argues that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), rather than NGOs, are the most cost-effective and efficient ways of developing and distributing new technology to end users (the poor).
  • What opportunities are there, within Primary Health Care (PHC) programmes, for village communities to become involved with the process of conceiving, constructing and maintaining their own health facilities? This paper looks at three PHC projects in Sierra Leone and Uganda involving NGOs, governments and host communities in the construction of health buildings; one each from those supported by Save the Children Fund, Action Aid and Oxfam. These examples are used to draw out issues which require monitoring and evaluation within those PHC programmes aiming to promote community involvement in the process of producing and sustaining village level health buildings.
  • In 1992, UNICEF and the Organisation of African States (OAU) jointly proposed that 1994-2003 should be the Decade of the African Child. The author identifies nine challenges for Africa, and the rest of the world, if African children are to have an improved quality of life. These include promoting true empowerment, including health and nutrition policies in development policies, recognising that poverty may preclude people from adopting best practice e.g. in health, combating the erosion of mothers' ability to provide adequate child care, continuing to finance primary and adult literacy education, decentralising and democratising primary health care (PHC) and providing early warnings against predictable climactic disasters.
  • In 1978 at Alma Ata, the date was set for achieving `Health for All by the Year 2000'. Achieving this seems more remote than it did then, due in part to Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the author argues. In Nicaragua, as elsewhere, structural adjustment provoked the redirection of resources away from public sector spending, including health care spending, and towards exports. The author advocates reasserting and implementing the Alma Ata recommendations in order to counteract this continuing erosion of health care. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development for Health.
  • NGOs have recently become a favoured mechanism for official development assistance: in 1994, half of all projects approved by the World Bank made provision for NGO involvement for implementing them; 75 per cent of these NGOs were Southern. Such flattery means that NGOs are in danger of seeing themselves as essential to development. Here, the author reflects on the rise of what he calls the `EN-GE-OH'. While some donor agency and NGO staff might find this Viewpoint somewhat caustic, most will recognise more than a grain of truth. The article is reprinted from the journal Chasqui, translated and adapted by the Editor. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • A survey in the Rakai District in 1989 put the number of orphans at 25,000; by 1991 a population census counted 44,000, a growth the author attributes to the AIDS pandemic. The Child Social Care Project (CSCP) in Rakai works with widows and orphans to address their property rights, seeking to reduce the vulnerability of women and children under both customary and statutory law. The author discusses the work of the Project, and advocates continued processes of education and sensitisation to change attitudes, accompanied by legal reform. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development for Health.
  • NGOs are receiving and distributing increasing funding for projects attempting to help traumatised victims of political violence. The author argues that many of these projects are ill conceived, failing to recognise that one aim of modern warfare is the dissolution of the social fabric and that survivors will be trying to manage their distress in damaged social environments. Also, the Western conception of mental trauma does not provide an adequate model for understanding the complex and evolving experiences of those in war-affected areas. Social development should be foremost in NGOs' efforts, as opposed to the conception of the traumatised simply as patients who need to be treated. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development in States of War.
  • In English only
  • This article deals with certain themes concerning religion, culture, and development, in part to help to set the context for the rest of this edition. It considers the religious and/or cultural background of many Northern agencies and individuals, and its effect on their development agenda. Arguing that local cultural values define what development means, it looks at some of the cultural issues -- political and moral, thematic and practical -- which arise in North-South development interaction. It concludes that the history of intervention, whatever its motives, has been a sorry one. It is time to play a supporting role, as people in the South make development part of their own history.
  • From 1989, an attempt to improve agriculture by directly addressing ignorance and fatalism has been developed in Benin by an Italian NGO, Mani Tese, based on attempts to provide traditional peasant farmers with better qualifications and greater motivation. The approach consists of funding a network of school-farms, or Centres of Rural Promotion (CRPs) dedicated to teaching modern agricultural techniques in an appropriate and local context. The main aim of the strategy is to create a new kind of peasant farmer: one who has a good technological/cultural background, and is able to exploit all the locally available resources in a sustainable way. The paper discusses the importance of employing local personnel, and some of the problems that still need to be met (such as developing effective post-training assistance). It is concluded that this form of development aid allows the NGO to entrust the ultimate beneficiaries with as much responsibility as possible, and therefore allow the project to become autonomous. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The paper notes that in India, even when a village or household level survey is carried out for water-resource development, the usual standards of data collection are applied, and women's central importance in water use is thus not reflected. However, women are likely to be more visible in local planning exercises; and the active and effective roles of women in water management are impossible without such planning. The paper is an outcome of the Foundation for Public Interest's experience in community-based water-resource development and management projects, particularly within the areas of Mahesana, Banaskantha, and Sabarkantha in Gujarat and, to a lesser extent, some involvement in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. It emphasizes the need for increased recognition of women's capacity for water management, the shift in policies resulting from FPI's involvement in this area, problems with neglecting local initiatives and resource limitations, and the importance of building local capacity to ensure good operation and maintenance, and the generation of local investment. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In 1992 and 1993 fieldwork was done in the Eastern Region of Ghana to examine why hybrid cocoa, introduced by cocoa institutions, was adopted by some farmers and not others. This report discusses the problems encountered when collecting data, including the low-level of farmers' education, and the lack of official records and sampling possibilities.
  • The author presents a personal view of an international conference on the use of financial services in the reduction of poverty, held at Reading University in the UK, with participants from NGOs, academic institutions, and Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), as well as donors. The conference, according to the author, paid insufficient attention to the nature of poverty, measuring it in economic terms only, and failed to make clear potential difficulties with subsidised credit schemes, as well as putting forward a simplistic conception of financial technology transfer.
  • Most of the socio-economic changes taking place in Africa and much of the South are externally driven. External agencies, often in league with the State, bypass working people and do not involve them in the decision-making processes. Their economic approaches ignore people's cultures and their worldview. This denies working people a creative capacity to adapt new techniques and knowledge to their own concrete reality. This article argues for the importance of the historical frame of reference and for the centrality of culture in socio-economic processes. The author argues against approaches which are not culturally familiar to working people. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • Mental illness is an important cause of disability in sub-Saharan African countries and is rarely covered in health-related development activity. This article examines the close relationship between mental illness, religion, and culture, referring to the authors' experiences in Zimbabwe as an example. They emphasise the importance of gaining a sympathetic understanding of the religious beliefs and social contexts of psycho-social distress states, rather than simply translating concepts and ideas developed in the societies of Europe and North America. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • Until the early 1980s, despite paying lip-service to the central role of `human capital', most decision makers were obsessed by physical development and the rate of increase of Gross National Product. Like other Third World countries, Egypt followed suit. Ten years ago, however, with accumulating external debts and social disintegration, it became clear that the returns on investments in these infrastructural schemes were meagre or even negative. Culture, community, and organic leadership were rediscovered as the missing links in the development process. These and other forms of associational life are sometimes subsumed under the concept of 'civil society'. Development has come to be defined as a process in which human potentialities are optimised at the individual and collective levels. This article illustrates the interaction among these variables by reference to examples of community-based development.
  • This is an account of the author's experience as an adviser in the Education Ministry of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The article looks critically at the role of the foreign `expert', the contexts in which such expertise is provided or even imposed, and the barriers to effective communication which exist. It also looks positively at what is of value once these issues have been addressed.
  • The paper presents two brief case studies to illustrate the potential problems that exist for 'outside' experts who attempt to change a society's values and reality without, in advance, understanding what already exists, or what the community wants, or is prepared to accept. Both case studies are based in Tanzania. The first examines a situation in which an NGO agent attempted to change the gender relations of a village by introducing new styles of mills for the women to grind millet and sorghum. The second case study is of a foreign-NGO implemented water provision project. The project failed to carry out a cultural feasibility study prior to implementation, with the result that many of the (male) newly-trained water attendants immediately left the village to obtain jobs in the town, resulting in more training having to be provided to women, who were willing to stay in the village. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The paper discusses the Restaurant Programme started for women in 1991 by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). A restaurant may be opened under individual ownership with a maximum loan of Taka 6500, after which a current account for the individual is opened with BRAC. This money is withdrawn in installments according to the entrepreneur's needs and repayment is collected in daily or weekly installments, with an interest rate of 20%. Like most rural restaurants, these enterprises sell tea, snacks, and meals. By January 1993, there were 273 'Shuruchi Restaurants' (restaurants for good food) all over the country. The paper reports on an exploratory study undertaken by BRAC's Research and Evaluation Division, involving five restaurants selected from Manikganj, Jamalpur, and Sherpur districts. The main focus was to examine how far women's entrepreneurial capacity has developed, and to assess whether women have control over their business. Rapid rural appraisal and participatory rural appraisal techniques were used for data collection. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • The Nilgiris Adivasi Welfare Association (NAWA) was founded in 1958, in Tamil Nadu, India, to work for the integrated welfare of the six Nilgiri tribes, all displaced and dispersed by the invasion of their forest homelands by incoming non-tribal peoples. The paper describes the original founding of the Paniya Rehabilitation Farm colony for 25 families who were bought out of bonded labour by the founder. After initial hope that the project would succeed in becoming self-reliant, the paper discusses the areas of the project which lost momentum, the lack of outside funding, the increased involvement of NAWA in supporting the Paniyas, and their seeming long-term dependency on NAWA. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Oxfam in Ethiopia has long been concerned that community-based development programmes should reflect local felt needs and priorities. Particularly where there has been a long history of engagement in a given area, a diagnostic survey has proved to be a valuable and flexible self-monitoring tool to re-assess development objectives with community groups. A diagnostic survey uses rapid rural appraisal techniques in a series of dialogues and interactions. The intention of the survey described in the paper was to determine whether the development programmes of Dubbo Catholic Mission (mother and child health services and water supply) were appropriate development activities for communities which had not previously been involved. The paper notes the constraints on agricultural production, as identified by groups of men and women, problems associated with health, and mother and child health care. Problems were ranked and collated from two peasant associations. The priority needs were: clean water, a health clinic, and fertilizers. In response to this, the Dubbo Catholic Mission was able to implement projects to address some of these problems. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Social Diversity. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In English only
  • 'Empowerment' is a term often used in development work, but rarely defined. This article explores the meaning of empowerment, in the context of its root-concept, power. Different understandings of what constitutes power lead to a variety of interpretations of empowerment, and hence to a range of implications for development policy and practice. 'Empowerment' terminology makes it possible to analyse power, inequality and oppression; but to be of value in illuminating development practice, the concept requires precise and deliberate definition and use. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • This Note reports on research into differences in the contractual agreements made by workers and employers, offering insights into the working of markets (particularly for labour and credit) and, using case studies, showing the constraints on the free movement of rural workers because of indebtedness to employers. The researchers use socio-economic analysis frameworks and the author argues their use of local conceptualisations and their concentration on workers rather than employers makes their work more useful than conventional economic analysis.
  • While gender asymmetries have long been recognised in formal development policies, poverty-alleviation schemes generally display a discrepancy in incorporating the insights of gender analysis. This article explores the experience of NGOs which have successfully incorporated gender-awareness into the formulation of anti-poverty interventions. It shows that increasing poor women's organisational experience is critical to ensuring that their needs and perspectives inform the planning process. The article concludes that unless women are empowered to move beyond the `project-trap', and to take part in formulating policy and allocating resources, they will continue to be a marginalised category in development. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.
  • Ageing populations, already a well-established phenomenon in the countries of the North, are also a growing issue in the South. This demographic transition is, however, occurring in the South without of the rising affluence which accompanied industrialisation in the North. This article examines a variety of dimensions of the problem in the South, including older people's socio-economic and health situations, and their roles in family and community. It questions whether changes in the status of older people are due to modernising forces, or to structural inequalities (differences in wealth and social position) which exist in all societies, but are particularly prevalent in the poorer countries of the South.
  • Technological capability underpins economic development, but analysis of interviews with workers in international, UK-based NGOs suggests that it is rarely addressed explicitly when considering support for development work. Instead, the core values of these NGOs tend to determine their attitudes towards technology, with the result that their impact on the development of technological capability can be contradictory. This is borne out by analysis of 11 small-scale enterprises in Zimbabwe which receive NGO support. Some do have a high potential to develop technological capabilities, but others appear trapped in a vicious circle of low skills, poor entrepreneurial qualities and an overwhelmingly hostile economic environment. NGOs need to develop appropriate technological criteria in order to exert a positive impact on the development projects they support.
  • The author presents his views on the essential ingredients of development, comparing the development ideal with its reality. Development is about change for the better, which must be appropriate (culturally, economically, technologically etc.) if change is to take root, and gain the participation of beneficiaries. Equity and justice are at the heart of any change for the better, as is sustainability. True development cannot be measured in solely economic terms, but must also include changes in the quality of lives, which are less tangible. Development as a process is not just a `Third World' issue but a universal concern, encompassing responses to over-development as well as under-development. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Social Diversity.
  • The Peasant Road, or La Via Campesina (LVC) as it is officially named, is being improved. It started at the initiative of a number of farmers' organizations during the 1992 Second Congress of the Nicaraguan Farmers' Union, UNAG. In the face of structural adjustment programmes and increasingly laissez-faire economic policies, bound to ruin many small farmers, they called for a programme of cooperation between farmers' organizations. The general objective of LVC's programme is the search for alternatives to current neo-liberal policies. It is more than a protest movement against farmer-hostile policies. Proposals for a truly democratic rural development are necessary, based on research carried out in cooperation with scientific research institutes and public authorities. Contrary to past experience, the research agenda should be determined by the farmers and their organizations, and not by scientists and policy makers. Farmers are tired of being research objects: they want to do the research by themselves, because they know what they are talking about when they draw up their own development proposals. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The phenomenon of Mozambican refugees in Malawi dates back to the time of Portuguese colonial rule. However, it is the spectacular magnitude of today's influx which has attracted national and international attention. By the close of 1992, Malawi was hosting over one million Mozambican refugees in 12 of the 24 districts. The paper grew out of an ethnographic study, with the overall objective of examining the motives for and the impact of the provision of humanitarian assistance on the refugees and host-country populations. The central argument of the paper is that by applying traditional ideas about men's and women's roles to the recruitment of trainees for income-generating activities, women's development potential remains largely untapped. Alternative approaches to working with women have to be actively sought, to ensure that the process of development is fruitful as well as gender-fair. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Social Diversity. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The paper presents a brief account of a development programme in southern Mexico. DESMI AC, a Mexican NGO based in the southern state of Chiapas, provides and encourages economic and educational assistance to groups of marginalised indigenous Indians, in order to help them improve their quality of life. In the early days, DESMI's efforts were focused on health and training in cooperatives. As ideas on social development themselves changed, so DESMI gave increasing emphasis to education and production, stressing the need for collectively organized productive activities to be underpinned by a shared understanding of and commitment to the broader objective of social transformation, as well as being backed up with administrative skills. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author discusses Alan Gibson's article of the same name (Development in Practice 3(3)). Nyamugasira expands on Gibson's discussion (limited, according to the author) of the problems faced by practitioners forced to balance the adoption of more business-like operations with continuing to benefit the greatest possible number of people.
  • In English only
  • This article explores the prospects for indigenous and foreign NGOs in post-Mao China. The structural complexity of the emerging NGO sector in China is illustrated by a typology of the new social organisations which have flourished in the last ten years. The author considers the factors favouring the expansion of this intermediary sector of quasi- and non-governmental activity, but also analyses the factors constraining the emergence in the near future of a vibrant NGO sector. Foreign NGOs eager to develop links at the forthcoming UN International Conference on Women should be prepared to work in conjunction with the Party/State and semi-official social organisations.
  • The author charts the progress of the United Nations (UN) in moving towards a more holistic view of human rights, specifically drawing examples from their resolutions about the phenomenon of forced eviction. He argues that campaigners, organisations and trade unions should use the strong UN resolutions on this issue to protect the right to housing, since most governments are not likely to publicise or necessarily comply with UN pronouncements. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development in States of War.
  • The accountability, performance, programming and legitimacy of NGOs in the so-called New Political Agenda of economic privatisation and `democratisation' was the subject of a conference in June 1994, jointly organised by Save the Children Fund (SCF) and the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester. The author discusses participants' attitudes towards the best targets for NGO resources and effort, the problem of NGOs' increasing concern to be accountable to donors at the expense of their accountability to beneficiaries, the pressure (often State pressure) on NGOs to become service-providers, and the difficulties of relying on official donors. The lack of reference to gender-based inequalities in the formal sessions was an area of concern.
  • This workshop was hosted by the Open University (OU), inviting development practitioners, academics and OU associates to share ideas about the design of a new OU Diploma/Master's Programme in Development Management. The author reports on the participants' views about issues the course should cover, including discussion of the nature and scope of development management in general, how North-South relations are best considered, and the importance of promoting institutional development.
  • Reporting on a large gathering of international and Cuban NGOs and other agencies, this article explores the issues faced by Cuban society in undergoing rapid economic change; and examines why the New World Order has not led to any significant involvement with Cuba, either by the inter-governmental agencies, or by independent NGOs. It describes the roles of State-sponsored bodies in maintaining the major development gains of the last 30 years; and argues that NGOs that see their role as promoting `democratisation' must avoid falling into simplistic and inappropriate assumptions about the distinction between the State and `civil society'.
  • The article summarises issues identified in a study undertaken on behalf of the HIVOS Foundation of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs Development Division, which included a field study of 45 environmental NGOs in seven African countries. This generated an institutional database to support the aid strategies of the agencies commissioning the research, and forms the basis of an analysis of some of the broader issues concerning the role and behaviour of various types of NGO.
  • As the wars in Central America have subsided, the region is undergoing extensive and far-reaching changes in its economies, and in the role of the State, in particular in the growth of the maquila (assembly plant) industry, and the reduction of the public sector. However, poverty has increased, and has been associated with high levels of violence and delinquency, as well as with a decline in food security. The challenge facing the social forces within the region, as well as NGOs such as Oxfam, is to develop a self-sustaining alternative, while also responding to the needs of the present.
  • An aid programme's potential contribution to social development is increased if those designing and administering it are informed about the social context in which aid is provided. A key factor in the British government's aid programme is the Overseas Development Association's (ODA's) understanding of social development. The author gives her views on ODA policy and basic questions that should be asked when undertaking a social-impact analysis of a proposed aid activity, including questions around issues of participation.
  • The World Bank's reliance on market forces when trying to achieve economic growth produces problems when implementing the Bank's strategies. The author puts forward his view that poverty should not merely be defined in terms of income, and that the struggle against poverty should respect the culture and views of the poor themselves, building into programmes the flexibility to respond to their views and enhance their political influence.
  • The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) believe that the increase in poverty as a result of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) is a short-term consequence and that the benefits of SAPs filter down, in the longer term, to the least privileged members of society. Emergency Social Funds (ESFs) are designed to protect vulnerable people from the worst of this impact. ESFs try to ensure income through infrastructural and income-generating schemes, as well as feeding and nutrition programmes. The author criticises the use of ESFs as temporary safety nets, and discusses the role of NGOs in the ESF system.
  • The use of the `development limited liability company' (LLC) is expanding. There are important differences between the broad social goals of development and the narrow economic ones of the LLC: they are concerned with people and profit respectively. The author discusses the problems likely to arise when NGOs attempt to use LLCs directly, as part of their administrative or funding arrangements.
  • `Social integration' is one of the three main agenda items for the World Summit for Social Development (to be held in Copenhagen, March 1995), as identified by the General Assembly of the United Nations. This term is ambiguous and can be understood in a variety of ways, not all of which are equally useful. The author describes trends of social integration, encompassing issues around globalisation and insecurity, marginalisation and identity, and democracy, representation, and accountability.
  • This paper surveys street publications that are members of the International Network of Street Papers. Street publications can empower the homeless though numerous endeavours that can lead to social change. Empowerment can be achieved by being employed, such as magazine vendors and/or as workers in socially oriented companies. It can also occur by recovering self-esteem and acquiring knowledge and abilities though training courses, rehabilitation therapy, and other endeavours such as the university of the homeless. Empowerment also comes by giving ‘voice to the voiceless’, allowing the homeless to publish their experiences, ideas, and opinions in street magazines. Collective empowerment occurs by creating local networks in solidarity with the magazines and building an international homeless community that strengthens these endeavours and encourages social-change activities

  • In English only
  • What are the implications for NGOs of the increasingly unpredictable environment in which they work? This article highlights lessons from the natural sciences and from private-sector management. If development is about the process of change, then we need a more refined analysis of what change is. Food crises and conflicts are about struggles over power and rights and are, therefore, but moments in continuing processes of change. Strategic intervention demands an understanding of such change if it is to trigger wider transformations. It also demands a different style of management and an increased degree of collaboration with other agencies.
  • This article reports on the findings of the International Study of Spontaneous Voluntary Repatriation, begun by the authors in 1986, and involving case studies on return to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It discusses the lack of recognition in both policy and practice of the pervasiveness of refugee-induced repatriation, and of repatriation during conflict; and offers new assumptions regarding the pattern and process of contemporary repatriation and of refugee decision-making. Lastly, it examines some repatriation issues for the 1990s: fragile peace and tenuous security; protection of the voluntary nature of return; dealing with non-recognised entities; and post-return assistance, particularly the need to focus on rehabilitation before development and to provide refugee-centred aid.
  • The last few years have seen a major rethinking of some of the hallowed assumptions of range ecology and range-management practice. The usefulness of terms such as 'vegetation succession', 'carrying capacity', and 'desertification' is being reassessed, particularly for the dry rangelands which are dominated by highly variable rainfall and episodic, chance events such as drought. This article examines the management and policy implications of this thinking for pastoral development in dryland areas. It briefly examines the consequences of environmental variability for pastoral development planning, range and fodder management, drought responses, livestock marketing, resource tenure, institutional development, and pastoral administration. By offering new directions for development workers, researchers, and policy planners, the article illustrates, in practical terms, a future for pastoral development in dryland Africa that recognises both the importance of pastoral livelihoods and the significance of environmental variability.
  • It can be argued that immigration restrictions constitute a form of 'global apartheid', ensuring that poorer sections of world society are prevented, by legal and physical force, from sharing in the world's sum of riches. This article seeks to develop this theme, by arguing that immigration controls are based on dubious ethical and practical foundations, and that development NGOs should be willing, in their educational and advocacy work, to challenge their validity.
  • In 1979, the Government of Norway pledged financial support to launch an Integrated Rural Development Programme in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, which aimed to increase income, employment and production as well as improvement of social conditions and living standards of the people in the area, with special emphasis on the poorest groups. The process involved data collection, establishment of target groups, definition of the problem, project identification, project formulation and project implementation. Staff attempted to involve local people in all these stages. The projects fell into three categories: community social development; individual social development; and income/employment generation. Local-level participation helped the project staff to identify the problems and real needs of the people and to formulate appropriate projects. This helped certain socially deprived groups to highlight their needs. Social development projects benefited the people most. But they did not contribute directly to alleviating poverty through income-generation, because such work was done with voluntary labour. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • This article is based on research commissioned by Save the Children Fund (SCF) into five family-tracing programmes in five African countries. The author describes the stages involved in tracing the families of children, and highlights the efforts that must be made at each stage to ensure the interests of each child are paramount, and are being considered on an individual, case-by-case basis. This article also appears in Development in States of War.
  • The article consists of a consensus document, The Rio Statement, produced at `Reproductive Health and Justice: International Women's Health Conference for Cairo `94'. This conference was held in Rio de Janeiro in January 1994, in preparation for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) to be held in Cairo in September of the same year.
  • The 1994 World University Service annual conference, held at the London School of Economics in March 1994, discussed the role of northern NGOs in the processes of democratisation and reconstruction in developing societies. The participants considered the function of NGOs as advocates of policy (something the opening speaker, Lynda Chalker, then British Minister for Overseas Development, failed to recognise), and the importance of gender in human rights abuse issues.
  • Peter Coleridge discusses issues raised by Brian O'Toole and Geraldine Maison-Halls ([12]Development in Practice 4(1)) outlining the use of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) in providing services to disabled people in low-income countries. The author outlines his own experiences researching the use of CBR, consisting of interviews with disabled people living in various circumstances and ranging from leaders of disability movements to mothers of children with mental impairments, in Zimbabwe, Zanzibar, India, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Jonathon Benthall also replies to criticism of his book Disasters, Relief and the Media.
  • In English only
  • In Southern Africa, a major drought during 1992-3 threatened devastating consequences for poor rural populations in the region. The article describes the unconventional approach to disaster mitigation undertaken by Oxfam in Zambia. This both enabled people at the local level, with little prior organisational experience, to establish effective dialogue with government officials in the country; and laid the foundations for longer-term development activities. The role of local lobbying, as well as campaigning on an international level, was crucial. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Development and Social Action.
  • The annual international conference of the Catholic Institute for International Relations took place in London in December 1993, and was concerned with problems arising when countries emerge from experiencing gross human rights violations. The delegates agreed that the `right to truth' was central to human development and democracy, and that Truth Commissions had played a part in establishing this right. Development agencies should make this right central to their understanding of justice.
  • While there is considerable documented experience of decentralisation of health services in rural areas of developing countries, the decentralisation of health services in the urban context is rarely analysed. Urban development literature usually fails to address health issues, while the literature on decentralisation of health services tends to ignore the urban sector. This article addresses the relationship between a Ministry of Health and a City Council and identifies key issues to consider in the decentralisation of urban health activities: roles and responsibilities; legislation; co-ordination and communication; and resource constraints. The case study from Maseru, Lesotho highlights aspects of planning which need to be considered by national and local governments which are trying to strengthen urban health activities by decentralisation.
  • In many less developed countries (LDCs) that are undergoing economic adjustment the promotion of the agricultural sector is constrained by resource limitations that include finance, and human and institutional capacity. The inability of the state to provide essential agricultural services, for example, agricultural extension and research, leaves a void that could be filled by specialised organisations within the non-governmental sector (NGOs). NGOs as a whole need not fear the loss of other advantages but rather welcome the contracting out to specialist agencies of those activities that hitherto have been the domain of inefficient and ineffective government services.
  • This paper develops issues raised in Hans Buwalda's article `Children of war in the Philippines'. It examines issues in training ethnic workers in areas of recent or on-going armed conflict, in mental health work. It explores the possibilities of combining Western therapeutic techniques with the local and culturally appropriate ways of working. It stresses the need to acknowledge and address the emotional impact of the work and participants' own concerns, and discusses the kind of support workers need. It looks at teaching methods and course content, with a view to creating a safe atmosphere and an interesting programme, taking into account cultural considerations. Finally it suggests ways of developing models of training for the future. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • Land distribution in South Africa has always favoured white farmers. This article examines lessons from the history of land reform policies in Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, looking at problems of rural poverty, landlessness and dispossession. Political developments in South Africa may limit the scope for land reform. In October 1993, the World Bank presented its first main proposal for land reform in South Africa, in which it is advocated that the primary mechanism of land reform should be redistribution through the market with significant state support. The guiding principle of the Bank's proposal is political and economic liberalization, making agriculture more efficient through changes in pricing and marketing. Land reform is only one economic strategy to address the needs of the rural poor. If land distribution is not followed and supported by technical and financial support and services, the new owners or users might be unable to use the land effectively. The different categories of people that agrarian reform aims to benefit are also mentioned. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In 1989, Save the Children Fund (UK) began an experimental project to plant mangroves along a coastal estuary in the Thach Ha district of Ha Tinh province in northern central Vietnam. It was designed and managed by the district forestry and water management officials and implemented through the commune People's Committees. This article looks at the project's goals, with environmental and production oriented views. Its sustainability is judged and the longer-term issues of sustainability, including financial support, ownership rights and enforcement of protection are also addressed. The project has been a basis for a sustainable model of environmental protection and income generation. There are both economic and general benefits, including: protection against salination of fields through flooding; a reduction in time spent on dyke repairs; increased potential for aquaculture in the area; protection against the wind for houses and boats; increased fishing activities; sale or use of seedlings; and increased availability of wood for fuel. It is hoped that this project will promote similar work in other parts of Vietnam. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • This article examines the Christian Service Committee (CSC) Agricultural Pilot Programme in Malawi, funded by Christian Aid (UK) and ICFID of Canada. It aims to address some of the constraints faced by the poorest farmers and to demonstrate to the government better ways of supporting the small-holder sector. Two key objectives were to demonstrate that the churches are effective channels for disseminating agricultural messages to farmers, in particular to poor women farmers, and to produce a simple but effective package of agricultural improvements which are appropriate and popular. Evaluation showed that working through church groups was an effective strategy with more women being reached than through the farmers' club system. In general, such a package needs to be viewed with caution as it is potentially a top-down approach. Its success here is attributed to the fact that it meets the pressing needs of poorer farmers in Malawi, allows attainable targets to be achieved, and that the development workers have built up real expertise and are respected by farmers. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In real development, information can sometimes be more important than funding, but has to be accessible and appropriate for it to work. Field-level development can be frustrating and difficult; the mass of information may be overwhelming as well as limited in practical detail or real application. There is often a limited institutional memory and therefore a lack of history. This article seeks ways of dealing with the problem and examines information flows to the south and suggests that they should be traded rather than given as overseas aid. Ways of passing information to development workers are suggested. It is the responsibility of those working in development to promote change in the south and to organize flows of information in such a way that meets needs. Examples given include: co-publishing, creating a market for books, improving communication between development workers and use of non-print media. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Institutional care for children separated from their family (for whatever reason) continues to be the first choice of governments of developing countries. The long-term consequences of institutionalisation can be severe and in 1991, Save the Children Fund (UK) (SCFUK) initiated a research programme to examine the experience SCF and its partners have had of working with such children throughout Africa and Asia. The author cautiously advocates adoption, where possible, as a viable alternative to residential care.
  • In English only
  • Political armed conflict has important ramifications in the lives of children as individuals and in terms of social development more generally. However, the emotional problems faced by children during and after war or political violence are rarely considered in development literature and practice. This article recounts the experience of working with severely traumatised children in the Philippines, using the methods of Creative Process Therapy. The report shows how a Western therapeutic model was successfully modified for application in a Filipino children's rehabilitation centre and suggests that this experience offers possibilities for appropriate replication in other settings.
  • This article discusses the difficulties of reaching relatively poor populations with labour saving technologies. Taking the case of milling and dehulling technologies in Senegal and The Gambia, it presents a simple analytic model that helps to explain why the vast majority of these labour saving machines are under-utilised in rural areas. Though donors continue to widely support such projects, in few cases do they provide significant benefits to the broad population in the short term, and neither are they sustainable in the longer term. The key constraint is the lack of effective demand due to rural women's limited income-generating opportunities. In the time saved using a machine to dehull or mill their coarse grains, they are unable to earn enough money even to pay the fees to use the machine, much less to gain a surplus.
  • This article examines the challenge facing the rehabilitation of disabled persons, particularly children, as we approach the end of the twentieth century. The potential of a community-based model of rehabilitation is considered in the light of experience gained in five districts of Guyana. Rehabilitation is conceived as part of a wider perspective on community development, in which rural people take on key roles in the process.
  • In 1981, Nicaragua was awarded UNESCO's Nadezhda K Krupskaya prize in recognition of the success of the 1980 National Literacy Crusade (CNA) through which, it was claimed, three quarters of the country's illiterate had been taught to read and write. This article reports the follow-up of several hundred female CNA graduates. It finds that, a decade later, a significant proportion of them are no longer able to read or write; and that of those who can, many had previously attended formal schooling as a child for several years. An assessment of national census and survey figures suggests that about 9 percent of the population became literate solely as a consequence of Nicaragua's ambitious adult education interventions in the l980s. Other benefits, such as its impact on child health and survival, have yet to be quantified.
  • This article discusses the intermediaries between donor and beneficiary; the southern NGOs and other groups and institutions who are the recipients of grants and who carry responsibility for delivering the project to the intended population. The role of southern NGOs has changed, and so has the northern donor context; thus agencies like Oxfam have to reconcile pressures and priorities in which southern partners' interests figure less prominently than before. The article proves the value of partners, also to challenge donors to demonstrate that they are adding as much value as possible in the donor/intermediary/beneficiary relationship. It is suggested that the principal contribution of donors such as Oxfam should be in more imaginative use of their comparative advantages. Northern funding for NGO partners is much affected by the way in which Southern NGOs vary, according to their many different national contexts and histories. In the 1990s, northern development NGO donors are moving away from some of the assumptions of development practice in the last two decades. This has led to questioning of relationships with southern NGOs and to re-examination of the comparative advantages and distinctive contributions of different donors. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • From December 1987 to January 1988, a team of medical personnel from the Korle-Bu teaching hospital undertook an epidemiological study in the Krobo district to study the efficiency and potency of a Korean and Zairean herbal preparation. Findings showed that: more people with HIV/AIDS remained undetected in their homes than the number who reported in the hospitals; the disease was recognized as one for those who traveled outside the country; some related HIV infection to evil spirits; and certain hospitals were afraid of being labeled as having AIDS in the hospitals. Community, church and NGO involvement in case-identification, mobilization, education, treatment and support was stressed. St. Martins clinic at Agomanya took in many of the HIV/AIDS sufferers in the area. The clinic tried to involve the community in the education and support of sufferers, to provide home-based nursing care, counseling services, social and pastoral support and provide income-generating activities for young people in the area. The services provided were: outpatient care; home care; pastoral care and social services. The programme was evaluated to judge whether the needs of the community and patients were met by the services provided and to draw lessons for the future. Between 1988 and 1991, there was an increase in the number of people living with HIV/AIDS and receiving home-based care. Some recommendations were put forward, including: the importance of political involvement to support in the areas of personnel, finance and material from the national, regional and district levels; employment opportunities for young people in rural areas; and educational programmes on HIV/AIDS in existing activities. It is also suggested that churches and Christian families should play a leading role in promoting sex education and moral values. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Cooperatives in general are considered to be in crisis, dominated by self-centered and short-sighted outsiders seeking power. The Primary Agricultural Cooperatives (PACs) in India, which were considered to be the nucleus of rural life, have lost their values and character and appear to have nothing to do with the people whom they were intended to benefit. This is due to: the PACs' failure to recycle credit effectively; their failure to become self-supporting; and intervention and interference in the form of State partnership. The three factors are closely interrelated. The failure to recycle funds results in excessive dependence or loss of self-reliance, leading to a gradual increase in State intervention. Members become isolated from their own organisations. This paper looks at PACs in India and whether financial intervention through state partnership and questions whether it could solve the problems of PACs. The concept of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is examined and suggested as a possible approach to sort out the problems of PACs. PRA may be appropriate for revitalising primary agricultural credit co-operatives. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • In English only
  • Most UK development NGOs engage in advocacy work at the international level in an attempt to reduce the constraints imposed on grassroots development by global economics and the actions of the official aid agencies. Thus far, their record has been disappointing, and this paper explores some of the reasons which lie behind the failure of NGOs to fulfil their potential in this field. Four strategic weaknesses are identified: an overall absence of clear strategy, a failure to build strong alliances, a failure to develop alternatives to current orthodoxies, and the dilemma of relations with donors. Each weakness is analysed with reference to practical examples, and appropriate conclusions drawn. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.
  • Two debates dominated the WCHR: whether human rights are universal or can be culture-specific, and whether respect for human rights is a factor in economic development. The author concentrates particularly on Oxfam's contribution to the Conference, organising two workshops about economic and social rights. The Conference was a qualified success, the final document taking forward some crucial issues, most notably recognising the importance of gender in human rights abuses.
  • The author discusses issues about the role of NGOs and their relations with the state and the community. The term NGO does not help us to distinguish between grassroots groups, intermediary organisations, and international organisations and the author feels such distinctions would be useful. Claims are currently being made about the potential of NGOs to bring about social change, and focus is often placed on NGOs as if they all have a common role and common characteristics. The author advocates development `from below', and argues that the real development challenge is more about building sustainable processes than about influencing international policy. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • Empowerment of poor people is the declared aim of many NGOs and official development agencies. However, the failure to recognise the culture of poor people, and to use their own forms of organisation as a point of departure, means that many such programmes are in fact counter-productive. NGOs which wish to support people's empowerment need to demonstrate their faith in poor people by respecting and supporting their own decisions.
  • A visit to a number of small enterprise and income generation projects supported under the ODA's Joint Funding Scheme in Zimbabwe and Kenya has raised a series of key points which have wider implications for practitioners and donors. The paper discusses each point and makes nine `recommendations' for NGOs and donors who support them. While the general benefits of NGOs - such as their relatively low cost, ability to reach the poor and innovativeness - is affirmed, the challenge facing NGOs is to progress further from this base. In particular, the paper argues that NGOs need to develop more business-like operations, focusing on the most practicable forms of enterprise structure but without losing their priority of seeking to benefit the poor and other disadvantaged groups. Technology-orientated projects need to ensure that they concentrate on the application of technology in a market context rather than its development per se. NGOs with donors need also to strive for a realistic definition of sustainability, to work towards a more credible project planning process and to be aware of the dangers of very visible and expensive investment in project transport undermining NGOs' efficiency.
  • There was a split between North and South over environmental issues at the 1992 Earth Summit. A similar rift may re-emerge as British ODA opens management of its training programmes to competition in 1993. Emerging environmental training institutions in Asia have the advantages of similar environments, relevance and lower costs. As these increasingly realise that ODA funding for third country training is not tied to British Universities, they will compete with UK training institutions. The existing one way student traffic to UK institutions can benefit from competition. Modern information communication systems now allow training networks to interlink among institutions in both the North and the South. The UNCED commitment to increased training on environmental issues provides an opportunity for a major new environmental training project managed by an independent academic - development institute or NGO.
  • The author gives a personal view describing the inequalities inherent in current global socio-economic and political arrangements. He identifies training, employment and allocation of development funds as issues fostering inequality between North and South, and discusses prospects for the future of their relationship. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • The MOC (Movement for Community Organisation) is an advisory centre for community organisations in the Feira de Santana region of north-east Brazil. Oxfam (UK and Ireland) has provided funds towards their work since 1972, and in 1990/91 commissioned a Brazilian institution to conduct an evaluation. This Note describes how it felt to be evaluated, and suggests lessons to be learned for all those involved in an evaluation process, which the MOC felt should involve greater mutual understanding between evaluators and those they evaluate, especially when agreeing assessment methodologies and objectives. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • The Institute of Rural Management at Anand (IRMA) in Gujarat, India, convened a workshop in April 1993 involving social scientists, environmentalists and gender experts, from India and the UK. Discussions centred on the application of gender analysis to the relationship between women, men, and the environment, and its implications for development and environment practice. Participants felt that NGOs working on gender-aware development must first analyse their own internal structures.
  • The Annual General Assembly of Women in Development Europe (WIDE) took place in Madrid in March 1993. WIDE has members from 13 countries, mainly EC member states. The conference focused on `Women, Human Rights and Development' and the author briefly describes how the main speakers were concerned with the lack of international protection for the human rights of women, from the rise of fundamentalism in Magreb and wars in Eastern Europe through prostitution and trafficking in Asia.
  • The first British conference to bring together practitioners and academics from both education and development fields was held in May 1993 at the University of Central Lancashire, England. Organised by Thorn Development Services, with support from Christian Aid, the conference explored what development education is, what its assumptions are, and what happens in other countries. Participants established that the primary need in the field was for greater communication and information-sharing between the various people practising and thinking about development education.
  • In English only
  • As the development agenda becomes more and more led by the preoccupations of Southern non-government organisations (NGOs) it becomes increasingly crucial that good communications flows are encouraged and maintained between development practitioners. Project staff have frequently been the underclass of the development world, often isolated, left to execute decisions made by others, poorly serviced in terms of training and information and none more so than the women amongst them. Yet they are the very people on whom the implementation of good development practice rests. The Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) was established in 1988 specifically to address some of the needs of this group. Using a number of methods, it has sought to encourage and facilitate the sharing of information and ideas between development workers at village/project level and to build confidence and provide a platform for their concerns and views. The ultimate aim is not to increase membership of the ALIN `club', but rather to foster the desire to communicate and share experience, and to take control of the process of networking.
  • This paper makes the case that emergency relief programs to pastoral areas of Africa do little to relieve the fundamental effect of famine, which is destitution. It argues that traditional mechanisms of coping with drought are often disrupted by food aid programs especially Food-For-Work. Three case studies from Sudan and Kenya are used to support the argument. The paper concludes by making policy recommendations for emergency programs to be more effective in meeting the primary need of pastoralists following severe drought, which is to rebuild herds and therefore their livelihoods.
  • Although Zambia's deteriorating macroeconomic situation has created a difficult environment for business, it also creates opportunities for the emergence of small- and micro-enterprises. Recent government policy reforms affecting these firms are discussed along with existing programs for credit, training, technical assistance, and common-site facilities/business incubators. The current programs are limited in scope relative to the potential demand and qualitative improvements are needed. Time-phased options for assisting small- and micro-enterprises are discussed.
  • In September 1992, women's health advocates representing women's networks in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Western Europe met to discuss how women's voices might best be heard during preparations for the 1994 Conference on Population and Development and in the conference itself. The group suggested that a strong positive statement from women around the world would make a unique contribution to reshaping the population agenda to better ensure reproductive health and rights. The group drafted a `Women's Declaration on Population Policies,' which was reviewed, modified and finalised by over 100 women's organisations across the globe. The Declaration calls for a fundamental revision in the design, structure and implementation of population policies, to foster the empowerment and well-being of all women. It lists minimum program requirements and ten ethical principles which should underpin population policies so that they are responsive to women's needs and rights.
  • This paper looks at a project funded by the Intermediate Technology Development Group aimed at allowing more households in Western Kenya to have access to improved wood-burning stoves, while at the same time benefiting the women who produce them. The basic concept behind the project is to develop a commercial market for the stove. The paper looks at the difficulties facing the organizations involved in this venture, as the provision of stoves moves from a subsidized to a commercialized approach. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • Release of the Poor Through Education (ROPE) is a small development organization operating in a rural area of Tamil Nadu, Southern India. ROPE has chosen to focus and concentrate its efforts on upgrading the education, health and quality of life of the 5000 people resident in six small villages, as well as a nearby refugee village. This paper considers the rationale for the project, noting the central aim of using indigenous knowledge and skills to develop a self-reliant socioeconomic system. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The author reports on a workshop on `Construction sans Bois' (woodless construction) jointly run by Development Workshop and IUCN (The World Conservation Union) and held in Agadez, northern Niger, in December 1991. After giving a brief history of these `Nubian' vault-and-dome architectural techniques, the author charts the growth in the use of woodless construction in the Sahel over the last 15 years. Unstabilised earth-brick buildings are relatively cheap and simple to construct, the skills, once learned, are easily replicated, and with increased local training there is this sustainable form of housing can continue to spread in usage in the region and elsewhere.
  • In September 1992 a workshop was held in Oxford, bringing together activists, researchers and academics with the joint aims of sharing diverse perspectives on South Asia's population policies as well as revising a research proposal on all aspects of women's reproductive health. The most tangible outcome of the workshop was a proposal for a project addressing the question of how women are taking decisions about reproduction, and providing a forum designed to facilitate exchanges between activists, NGOs and academics.
  • The author reports on a conference held in London, England in November 1992 as part of Global Partnership '92 which considered the alarming increase in forced migration. Participants argued that immigration controls do not tackle the causes of migration, and international law is inadequate, failing to satisfactorily distinguish between immigration and asylum issues. The particular concerns of economic migrants and guest workers are discussed. The majority of discussion was from the Western European perspective.
  • In English only
  • Studies on resistance often overlook its gendered nature. This article looks at everyday resistance put up by village women against the Forest Department in Western India, within a historical context. It then examines recent attempts at organised resistance in the region. Analysing how both everyday resistance and marginalisation are connected to the gender-determined roles of women, the article argues that more conscious and deliberate efforts will have to be made if women are to organise for change. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • The Nicaraguan National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG) in 1992, alongside local and international delegates, put together a document that was later called the Managua Declaration. The author highlights the general content of the declaration and the initial process proposed to gain international Cupertino for the agrarian model of development put forward in the document. The document endeavours to foster worldwide networks of farmers working to develop practical alternatives to neo-liberalism, from the perspective of both established farmers and the landless rural population.
  • In September 1990 we became involved with the Centre for the Defence of the Child (CDM) in Brazil, with a view to participating in a survey into the lives of streetchildren that was being conducted by the group. The CDM is a branch of its parent organisation The Young Streetvendors' Association and takes on individual cases of streetchildren providing crisis management with social, psychological and legal support. It was decided to start a project of regularly taking a team of staff out of the building, onto the streets and into the areas where the streetchildren, were with the aim of providing a programme of support and self-esteem building, principally for the streetgirls. This project proved a success with the streetchildren and remains so following our departure from Brazil.
  • As part of the global drive to achieve Universal Child Immunisation by l990 (UCI9O), Somalia launched a national immunisation programme for women and children. While access to it improved, actual demand for immunisation remained low. This paper reports the findings of a study to identify the factors influencing acceptance of immunisation in two Somali communities. A retrospective, qualitative approach was adopted to assess individual and community experience both with immunisation and with the immunisation programme. Data were derived from focus group discussions, informal interviews and observation. The research findings provided programme managers and health workers with information for redesigning both the overall approach of the immunisation programme; and the content and style of health messages.
  • The article identifies some of the problems in information technology in developing countries, and is based on field research into the use of computers in health programmes in East Africa and Nepal. The visits were part of an ODA-funded project to design guidelines on the selection, use and maintenance of computers in a developing country. The article focuses on the current state of the technology, problems of selecting hardware and software, the training and retention of staff and access to information and support services. It suggests reasons for the current situation and offers some practical solutions.
  • This paper examines the importance of culture and participation in development efforts. In this regard, it looks at the problems which have arisen as the result of those receiving aid, being regarded as objects rather than subjects with their own culture and behavioural patterns. The paper looks at why research into culture is important, and examines the relevance of participatory development. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.
  • This paper introduces the PAEM, a programme working with Christian women in the rural parishes of Santa Barbara, Colon, Comayagua, Intibuca, and Lempira, all departments of Honduras. PAEM has a number of overall aims, which include to bringing together the women of each area as well as other less privileged women from nearby regions. The paper looks at PAEM's methodological contribution; women, communication and culture; challenges and perspectives; and the oral tradition and gender. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Social Diversity. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI.
  • The ultimate objective of any AIDS/HIV intervention project is to reduce the spread of AIDS by promoting safer sexual behaviour. It is misleading to evaluate individual projects in terms of their success in achieving this because behavioural changes are influenced by a range of external factors. When measuring success, then, indicators should be carefully chosen to assess real changes in attitude; for example, measuring the likelihood that sex-workers make use of condoms, rather than simply monitoring the number of contraceptives distributed. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • The main purpose of extension work is to assist and encourage learning, and current thinking on the way adults learn suggests that the social context in which the learning takes place and the attitudes of the target group are as integral to their learning capacity as effective communication. The importance of learners' capacity for engagement with the subject matter, and the ability to draw out this capacity, should be more prominent when training extension workers.
  • A conference of health-rights activists was held in Nicaragua in 1991, the theme of which was `Health Care in Societies in Transition'. The participants, in response to concerns that health care is being eroded by the widening gap between rich and poor, decided to launch the IPHC `to contribute to the fight for health and social justice'. The Council is an informal network of groups and movements committed to this goal.
  • Dr Elizabeth Lira, Director of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos (the Latin American Institute for Mental Health and Human Rights) responds to articles by Linda Agerbak and Derek Summerfield, drawing on her extensive experience of working with the victims of trauma and political repression.
  • In English only
  • Many NGOs around the world are moving beyond conventional project work with its emphasis on `doing' and are attempting to enhance their impact through `influencing'. There are four inter-connected approaches: project replication, grassroots mobilisation, influencing policy reform and international advocacy. Each of these calls for a more strategic relationship between NGOs and governments. For NGOs to move to an effective `influencing' mode requires new skills and a new relationship between Northern and Southern NGOs. The Technological Age, with its emphasis on physical projects, must give way to an Information Age whose `software' comprises access to official information, decision makers and networks; and to skills in communication, lobbying and research. Northern NGOs must be aware that these requirements are becoming more important to their Southern counterparts than funds. If they do not, they will find their relationships will become out-dated, and their erstwhile counterparts will seek new, more appropriate allies - for example, amongst pressure groups in the North.
  • Population-control programmes can violate basic human rights and be a form of violence against women. The author presents her views on family planning as a form of social control arising from a neo-Malthusian world view which blames poverty and environmental degradation on population growth while obscuring the real causes: the increasing control of economic, political and environmental resources by a growing international elite. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • This article examines the growth in relations that have occurred between Multilateral Agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations during the past decade. It identifies three substantive debates in the MLAs on participatory development, value for money and the role of the public sector in social service delivery that have served to promote greater interest in NGOs for efficiency reasons. The article reviews the experience of NGOs in the Bolivian Emergency Social Fund and the first attempt to create a Social Investment Fund in Guatemala. It concludes by identifying some of the obstacles that prevent the full integration of NGOs into MLA projects, even when good will exists to do so.
  • This article is written from the perspective of a health activist engaged in research on women's health. It lays out a methodological framework for studying issues concerning women's health, and goes on to describe a range of tools for collection of qualitative and quantitative information from the field. The article ends with a call for activist involvement in research to generate information that genuinely reflects women's needs and concerns, and could facilitate women's informed involvement in changing the circumstances that contribute to their poor health status. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • The implementation of health programmes by external health professionals (`givers') in disadvantaged communities (`receivers') faces a variety of interactional barriers, some of which can be appreciated within the framework of the doctor-patient relationship. This paper identifies the problems of cultural dissonance, unrealistic expectations, hostility, and non-Cupertino that sometimes arise within the giver-receiver relationship and outlines strategies to deal with them. The recognition and resolution of these issues are important to ensure the success of health programmes.
  • Literacy gives people a framework for critical thinking and informed action. A number of peasant farmers' organisations have developed in the wake of economic restructuring in Honduras, Central America. The authors describe and assess the Literacy Programme of the National Office of Agricultural Workers (Central Nacional de Trabajadores del Campo, CNTC), which aims to provide farmers with the tools to have a say in their own futures in the changing social and economic climate of the country.
  • The UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. This report covers the main areas of international agreement and also discusses what was not achieved, from the point of view of development NGOs in attendance. There was evidence, among the 107 heads of State and Government present, of increased concern and awareness of the links between the environment and development. Failures to agree on certain issues were treated optimistically by participants since it was felt the `road from Rio' - what happens next - is what is important.
  • The author reports on a conference organised by Intermediate Technology and The New Economics Foundation held in London, England in April 1992. The conference was convened in response to concerns over the decrease in worldwide biodiversity, to examine the threat to food security and develop strategies for NGOs to contribute to solutions. Participants were primarily concerned with trade, from the perspective of international politics and at the community level.
  • Outside Europe and North America, the Caribbean region has the highest percentage of elderly people in its population, yet few policy makers there cater for the elderly in their development strategies. In February 1992, HelpAge International's Caribbean Regional Office and the Barbados National Council on Ageing convened a workshop on ageing and development. The author highlights the recommendations resulting from the workshop, oriented towards enabling older people to continue to be productive members of society.
  • The 1992 International Workshop on the Evaluation of Social Development took place in Amersfoorst, the Netherlands. Representatives from international NGOs, academics, and planners sought clearer guidelines on methods NGOs can use to evaluate programmes and their impact. The first half of the workshop was based on case-studies, the second on drawing up guidelines based upon these concrete experiences. Customised methods of evaluation are needed for development NGOs to ensure the interests of the organisations, their `clients' and their donors are all considered.
  • In English only
  • Despite their increasing numbers and size, the impact of NGO activity on development is usually localised and often transitory. In consequence, NGOs need to analyse the strategies by which they may be able to `scale up' their contribution to development. This article summarises the proceedings of a recent Workshop at the University of Manchester which explored such strategies through a large number of case studies. While it is not feasible to produce prescriptions from these materials a number of lessons and key issues can be identified and are highlighted in the paper. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.
  • This paper describes the evolution of WaterAid's programme of work in Nepal, based on the author's experiences while working as WaterAid's Representative Engineer in Nepal from January 1987 to April 1991. It examines how WaterAid's philosophy of working in partnership with local organisations was actually put into practice. Various problems and constraints are identified and discussed, and certain points are highlighted which may be of general interest to other external support agencies working in similar ways in other countries and sectors. The overall conclusion is that this programme represents a viable methodology for an international NGO to achieve useful results in supporting local NGOs working in development.
  • The Peace Agreement signed between the Government and FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador marks the end of a decade of civil war. As both sides of the conflict and the international donor community begin to add up the costs of reconstruction, the human, social, and psychological costs are carried mainly by the poor of El Salvador. Social organisations and NGOs who became strategists of survival today face the challenge of transforming their accumulated experience into alternative proposals for the building of a more just society and a prosperous nation. This article explores the practical complexities of transition from war to peace; and from emergency aid to sustainable development based on the participation of communities, social organisations, NGOs and international agencies and building on their experience.

  • This article describes the need for non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) to examine and so enhance their role if they are to take an active part in the shaping of a structurally different society - a silent revolution. It is argued that mainstream NGDOs belong to a broader alternative movement (see Appendix) which is involved in the search for equitable and sustainable forms of social organisation. In understanding development as a process of empowerment, NGDOs are bound to encounter both internal and external resistance. However, to be effective and to have credibility, it is argued that Northern NGDOs must challenge inequality in their own societies as well as internationally and through the work they support in developing countries.
  • The work of international non-profit-making NGOs challenges them to adopt a decentralised structure. We know little, however, about how this decentralisation is organised, and even less about its impacts on NGO performance. Based on studies southern Africa, this article identifies the gains and loses associated with the choice to decentralise. It goes on to pose questions about decentralisation as a critical variable for the organisational design of NGOs which need to be answered by more systematic comparative study.
  • These Notes provide a brief report of the early stages of a project providing open and distance training to people working with children in residential-care institutions; the Child Care Open Learning Programme in Uganda, developed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare and Save the Children Fund (UK). The author discusses the outcomes and lessons learned. The Programme demonstrates that distance learning can be a cost-effective way of building skills among those traditionally disadvantaged in this respect, and hence improve child-care.
  • In the Dindigul district of Tamil Nadir, southern India, the number of leather tanneries is increasing. Effluent from existing tanneries has polluted water supplies used for agriculture and drinking, contributing to drought, crop failure, and illness and birthing problems in the local population. The author argues that no more licences should be granted for new tanneries, and that those already running be forced to adhere to pollution-control regulations. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage.
  • In English only
  • It is now two years since the Government of President Fernando Collor de Mello took office in Brazil. This article assesses its effectiveness in implementing its environmental policies and resolving social conflicts in the Amazon in the run-up to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development. It examines some of the political and economic problems which have beset the new environmental programme, and gives an account of the response of Brazilian NGOs to some of the Government's main initiatives.
  • A growing debate about gender and the environment highlights women's roles in the use and management of natural resources, opening up important opportunities for development analysis and action. But there are traps in conceiving of women's roles in relation to the environment in a partial, narrow or static way; of isolating them from men's roles; and of assuming a close link between women and `nature'. An alternative approach examines dynamic gender-differentiated activities, rights and responsibilities in the processes of natural resource management. A case study from the Gola forest, Sierra Leone shows how this can assist aspects of both sustainability and equity in the design of projects concerned with the environment.
  • Evaluation is now recognised as an essential component in planning and implementing projects, and is one important means by which recipients can participate in the design process. In Vietnam, the liberalisation of the economic and social life of the country in the last few years has allowed Oxfam the scope to consider long-term development plans. As a first stage, a review was undertaken of the impact of an Oxfam project on the community, paying particular attention to the situation of women. Parts of the findings are explored in this paper to show that one infrastructural input, in this case a pumping station, will have a broad range of consequences for the community concerned. Contrary to expectations, increased production is tending to encourage co-operation between men and women, out of shared interest in strengthening the stability of the household, now recognised, in place of the collective, as the prime economic unit in Vietnam.
  • Mozambique during the 1980s and 1990s has provided a challenging context for non-governmental organisations seeking to collaborate with its government in national development. One British NGO, Save the Children Fund, has set out to work in partnership with the government on a range of programmes at central level and in Zambezia province. Longer-term and emergency inputs form part of a conscious strategy aimed at securing sustainability. Institutional and practical constraints however make the achievement of this goal difficult, particularly in relief and rehabilitation projects. Changes in donor policies and in the Mozamibican government's own evolving political priorities make it imperative to review this strategy on a regular basis. Lessons are drawn from Save the Children Fund's practical experience of development in Mozambique during the last eight years.
  • The Fundacion El Taller organised a third Think Tank in November 1991, held in a village near Santiago, Chile, and attended by representatives of over 50 development NGOs from around the globe. It was agreed that NGOs should maintain their autonomy from governments but work closely with civil society to best further NGOs' aims. Strong South-South dialogue is vital, and North-South relations should be founded on equality in the process of development.
  • The author reports on the Latin America and Caribbean Women and Health Network of Isis International's working meeting in October 1991, held in Santiago, Chile. The meeting produced guidelines for the women's health movement on abortion, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, birth planning, and population policies.
  • A brief report of a conference held in Kenya in July 1991 bringing together specialists from a UNRISD research programme examining the national and regional implications of deforestation for the livelihood and living conditions of the poor in rural and urban areas. The preliminary findings include identifying the major role that public policies have played in the deforestation, the way weaker sections of the population have been disproportionately affected, and how official measures to rectify the spiralling situation have been inadequate.
  • In English only
  • During the 1980s, armed conflict devastated an increasing number of the world's poorest countries. NGOs engaged in relief and development were hard-pressed to determine their most effective response to situations where normal development became meaningless, and yet short-term projects failed to deal with these `permanent emergencies'. This article describes the nature of these conflicts, their impact on the poor, and the evolution of NGO programmes in response. It explains why some NGOs have attempted to do development in the face of on-going violence, sometimes employing risky strategies and desperate measures. It argues the need for NGOs to play a part in building a civil society which can help break the cycle of violence.
  • In current armed conflicts around the world, over 90 per cent of casualties are civilians. This article reviews medical and anthropological evidence of the psychosocial effects of extreme experiences such as torture, mutilation, rape, and the violent displacement of communities. The consequences for women and children are considered in particular. The author argues that the social development programmes of NGOs should be extended to support social networks and institutions in areas of conflict, and ends by giving guidelines for mental health promoters working in traumatised communities. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • The nature of the Mozambique `emergency' and its institutional context pose a significant challenge to NGO aid strategies, as these organisations seek to reconcile objectives of short-term effectiveness and accountability with goals of long-term capacity-building and sustainability. The increasing emphasis on the former within the Zambezia Province Emergency Programme may be prejudicing the government's capacity to stimulate economic and social rehabilitation once the Emergency Programme aid declines. Many NGOs working within the Province have shifted from a strategy of executing relief and rehabilitation programmes through existing institutional channels to one which relies heavily on the development of their own parallel structures. The shift has been motivated by the perceived weak executional capacity of the government institutions; however, it is unclear whether the modest gains in aid effectiveness and efficiency offset the lost opportunities for institutional change and learning necessary for programme sustainability and for the longer-term rehabilitation of the economic and social infrastructure in the province.
  • Several decades of development experience have yielded a wealth of findings about the key assumptions, procedures, and practices by which women have been marginalised in development planning. The value of these insights lies not only in highlighting flawed planning procedures, but also in helping to formulate alternative frameworks for thinking about development. This article discusses ways in which such findings can be used in gender-awareness training for development practitioners, and sketches out the main elements of an analytical framework for reconceptualising development from a gender perspective.
  • These Notes are based on research carried out as part of a World Bank/World Food Programme study into food aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors use economic analyses to establish a framework for considering the cost-effectiveness of food aid compared to financial aid, and they apply this framework to the Wollaita food aid project. Food aid is shown to be less cost-effective than financial aid if the cost/benefit analysis is confined to monetary considerations. Problems arise when trying to quantify other variables that may affect the analysis, for example nutritional costs/benefits and increased/decreased production (the Wolliata project is a food-for-work (FFW) scheme).
  • The author describes two income-generation weaving projects, in Thailand and in Indonesia, both of which have had involvement with Oxfam Trading. She attributes the success of the former to sound marketing, confirming demand for reasonably priced quality products. The Indonesian project has failed primarily due to a lack of investigation of potential commercial markets.
  • In English only
  • Famine is clearly and undeniably a terrible wrong, and famine is preventable. The occurrence of famine is an indictment of the ethics of the country in which it has occurred. Despite this, those claiming to represent ethical concerns in general and human rights in particular have had little impact on either understanding famine or dealing with it. This paper is an attempt to develop an agenda whereby human rights concerns can be brought to bear on the problem of famine.
  • The purpose of this paper is to review the experience of social action groups in the Indian sub-continent over the past fifteen years or so. There are tensions between their stated objectives and their actual practice, and conflicts arising from their role in the political sphere. The author considers the practical problems and some philosophical and conceptual issues arising from these tensions, and concludes with some recommendations for non-governmental funding agencies.
  • Private development organisations have emerged rapidly and forcefully in Peru, amid a turbulent national context of change and acute social and economic instability over the last two decades. While no official statistics exist on the number of such organisations (there is no single entity that oversees or registers their activity), independent studies and surveys indicate that almost 350 groups of diverse objectives and coverage, and currently operating throughout the country. The forces and influences that have shaped this sector are complex, and this article does not attempt to address each individually. Rather, it focuses on those deemed most relevant: the factors that have left their mark on the sector of private development institutions as a whole.
  • Drought-induced inflation of cereal prices and the consequent turning of the terms of trade against livestock upset existing exchange entitlements and contributed to higher than normal mortality rates among the rural Beja population in Red Sea Province in the early to mid-1980s. The Beja are agropastoralists who raise goats and sheep, and sow some sorghum. Their staples of consumption are goat milk and a prepared dish made with sorghum called asayda. They do not grow enough sorghum for household consumption, but they sell male goats in local markets in order to purchase sorghum. They also engage in a variety of minor activities to generate income for the purchase of sorghum. In this article, data from two markets on cereal and livestock prices for the years 1980 to 1989 are examined. The objectives of the study were to examine market performance, especially that associated with drought and famine in the mid-1980s in Red Sea Province, and to examine how the inflationary period from 1988 to 1990 differed or resembled the early to mid-1980s.
  • The author describes the work of PIRATTES (Projet Intégré´de Recherches sur l'Améioration des Techniques Traditionelles d'Extraction de Sel), a project jointly directed by the Co-operative of Salt Producers in Guande (France), the Scientific And Technological Centre (Benin), and the French Volunteer Association (AFVP). The project, linking communities involved in salt-production in the North and the South, introduced new processes to Benin to avoid the major ecological and workers' health problems caused by traditional processes. Two years into the project, and it has expanded. The results obtained are encouraging, though marred slightly by the continued use of artificial materials.
  • In November 1990 the South-North International Conference on Linking For Development was held in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, involving 100 participants from local authorities and NGOs from 21 countries. The representatives unanimously agreed on an Appeal, `From Dependency To Justice', and insisted on greater initiative from agencies and authorities in the South. The conference identified four priorities for future linking initiatives: development education, training, mutual development Cupertino, and working for change.
  • In English only
  • The number of NGOs involved in development in the North and the South has increased dramatically over the last ten years, provoking calls for new partnerships between them. But Southern NGOs have often been disadvantaged in the search for true NGO partnerships, because they know too little about their Northern counterparts. This article therefore describes some important features of Northern NGOs. It then goes on to identify critical issues involved in negotiating partnerships with them. Finally, the need for equitable NGO partnerships is considered in the broader context of strengthening the third sector in civil society.
  • This article examines a UNICEF/Ministry of Health primary health care programme in Ecuador from a community perspective. It contributes to the debate concerning the way in which the relative `success' or `failure' of participatory projects is measured. It argues for evaluators to distinguish between the perceptions of the different actors involved, and to extend their enquiries beyond the actual lifespan of the project. It also provides lessons for the future by discussing the contribution the technical projects can make to capacity building and the empowerment of community-level organisations.
  • Pastoralism in Sudan has produced complex and varied livestock management systems, finely adapted to local environmental conditions. The isolation of pastoral communities has made it difficult for development agencies to form working relationships with them, and mistakes have been made when donors attempted to introduce unsuitable breeds and crops. The author advocates post-drought restocking with camels because of their high tolerance of drought and low susceptibility to disease, and with goats, which are not labour-intensive and reproduce at a fast rate. This article traces the social consequences of evicting pastoralists from range lands to make ways for cash crops like cotton, and the environmental consequences of overgrazing. It describes Oxfam's programme of rehabilitation among pastoralists, with its emphasis on the use of locally-trained para-vets, and community participation in the management of animal health services.
  • How is primary health care (PHC) to be funded in a climate of economic recession? The authors survey the financial implications of the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 and the Bamako Initiative of 1987. They draw on a survey of over 100 Oxfam-funded health projects to assess four methods of PHC funding and their impact on the poorest users: charges for treatment, revolving drugs funds, personal insurance schemes, and income-generating projects. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development for Health.
  • The author provides an overview of a seminar on the promotion of small enterprises, organised by the Aga Khan Foundation (UK). Representatives from official agencies, the private sector and NGOs discussed barriers to NGOs working effectively in this sector, and how these can be overcome, as well as best practice in the provision of credit and technical assistance, and the potential support role of other public and private institutions.
  • In 1989 Oxfam approached the town council of N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, Africa, and set up a joint project to encourage community participation in improving sanitary conditions in Ambassatna. The author highlights the main problems and lessons to be learned from the project, three years into it, including issues around neglecting the role of women and their involvement in local committee structures. The nature of voluntary work in an urban environment is discussed in relation to the impact of the project, which is felt by the community to be a success but is a limited success by Oxfam's criteria.
  • Until now, most discussions on the place of LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) people in global civil society have focused on their access to citizenship, rather than their socioeconomic rights and role in development processes. This article argues that an alternative vision of development should challenge heteronormative family structures; build alternative, queer communities; wage activist, sexually emancipatory campaigns on concrete social issues (as the Treatment Action Campaign has done on HIV and AIDS in South Africa); and rethink existing models of democratic participation. It emphasises the paradoxes of LGBT organising in the context of neo-liberalism and globalisation, with an eye toward queering, or challenging heteronormativity in, global social justice movements.

  • With case studies on Millennium Development Goal (MDG)-oriented reform projects in Vietnam, this article focuses upon a persistent dilemma in attempting to turn worthy goals into implementable programmes and sustainable results. How to achieve these goals is uncertain but modern performance management, as expressed in Logical Frameworks, demands certainty. The article suggests how an open-management style can allow for pragmatic adaptation to circumstances or, more radically, how Log Frames could be redesigned to focus upon interpretation of contextual challenges. But such a dynamic requires a high degree of delegation and an acceptance that accountability must also be an interactive learning process.

  • This article arose from work undertaken on behalf of a UK-based NGO developing a policy response to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It looks at GATS as a key to locating development NGOs (NGDOs) within the broader field of development aims and practices, examining the long-term implications of GATS with respect to the idea of a ‘fourth position’ for such NGOs. It is argued that this theoretical position fails to take into account changing imbalances of power between NGDOs and their Southern counterparts that began under structural adjustment, as a consequence of which many NGDOs now occupy a position from which effective mediation between civil society, the state, and the market would be difficult if not impossible. In addition, GATS represents a step-change along the evolutionary path towards a market-oriented ideology whose verticalist worldview represents a profound contradiction to the avowedly progressive aims of most NGDOs.

  • The term ‘partnership’ has become a catch-cry for development organisations aiming to mobilise the resources and collaboration needed to achieve long-term goals such as poverty reduction and sustainable resource management. Achieving effective collaboration in practice, however, can be challenging. This article adds to recent discussions on what makes effective partnerships offering lessons from an ongoing partnership between RECOFTC (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific) and SNV (Netherlands Development Organisation). Key findings include: the role of individuals in maintaining partnerships often goes unrecognised and needs to be supported in appropriate ways; clearly defined and focused areas of collaboration are essential; a formal basis for the partnership needs to be backed with strong informal communication and collaboration processes; and, while partners bring distinctive knowledge and networks to a partnership, some evenness in the scale and type of resources committed to the partnership is important.

  • This article critically examines an HIV/AIDS development and research project in Mwanza, Tanzania. A group of women produce a type of probiotic yoghurt that has evidence of lowering the incidence of HIV infection. The yoghurt is consumed by the women, their family members, and local citizens living with HIV/AIDS; surplus is sold within the community. While the project’s multi-partner, multidisciplinary composition allows for varied expertise and insights, it also requires open and collaborative dialogue. This article discusses the project’s challenges, positive outcomes, and some of the socio-cultural issues that need to be addressed if it expands in size and/or scope.

  • Since the mid 1990s, squatter settlements in Fiji have been expanding at a phenomenal rate, largely due to the non-renewal of agricultural land leases and inadequate urban governance. In response to squatter growth, the Government of Fiji has implemented a squatter resettlement scheme. This scheme threatens the livelihoods of squatters engaged in urban agriculture, or ‘farming squatters’. In this article, interviews with key informants and squatter residents will reveal contrasting attitudes and approaches to the issue of ‘farming squatters’. The article suggests a more participatory process to address the needs of ‘farming squatters’.

  • The story of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the way women engaged with it, gaining from its overall liberatory calls, as well as its political independence from the UN and other multilateral agencies, is relatively unknown in the world of development and women; and yet it is an important multilateral space. This article argues that the NAM, and its engagement with women, has the historical and strategic potential to be the platform from which to launch an inclusive growth paradigm

  • This article argues that the integration of women in population development initiatives were largely the outcome of four overlapping historical events: the decolonisation of the South; the population ‘explosion’ following World War II; the momentous developments in contraceptive technology; and the re-emergence of women’s movements in the North. These developments pushed women to the forefront of development initiatives, in part because of lingering assumptions that population size is associated with poverty. As a result, policies heavily focused on reducing birth rates largely eclipsed those on improving women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights.

  • Development cooperation has traditionally been the playing field of governments, multilateral institutions, and established development NGOs. In the last decade however, other actors in Northern countries (such as businesses, migrants’ organisations, professional groups, and schools) have shown active interest in development-related activities Although they do not belong to the epistemic community of development specialists and are often overlooked in the discourse and literature on development cooperation, their number and importance are growing. These novel approaches to development cooperation give rise to some important reflections about their methodologies, potential impact, and fundraising. Based on the authors’ experiences and research in Belgium, the article raises some issues about what they term the fourth pillar of development cooperation with the aim of stimulating the academic and policy-oriented debate

  • This article presents a case study of an activity implemented under the FAO component of the Local Partnerships for Urban Poverty Alleviation Project funded by UNDP in Bangladesh. In Mymensingh city the project is linking poor urban dwellers with a niche market for oyster mushroom. This small enterprise activity appears to be sustainable in that it develops agricultural production to cater for the specific demand of an existing small marketing enterprise. As long as the trader finds a market for his mushroom, he has an incentive to collaborate with the project beneficiaries who supply the produce. This model is thus an example of mutual benefit between extremely small landholders and a trader through the catalytic effect of a development project.

  • In August 2007, the Government of Tanzania committed to doubling the number of training places for skilled midwives following a five-year campaign by the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood in Tanzania (WRATZ), which culminated in the first television screening of a participatory film, ‘Play Your Part’. With contributions from a range of health professionals, communities, a pop singer, and the Minister of Health, the message was that everyone at every level has a part to play in saving mothers’ lives. WRATZ was successful because it was able to champion its message in a way that provides a model for advocacy, combining the reactive creativity of journalism and the methodological rigour of participatory video that to bring about a tangible impact.

  • Editorial

    Deborah Eade

    The scale of the current economic crisis defies prediction, its many impacts unfurling in unexpected ways around the globe. Individual human beings, families, and entire communities, defined both by geography and by employment, face unprecedented levels of insecurity. If the best-laid plans can be dashed from one day to the next, there seems almost no point in developing projects for the future. The moral universe too has become topsy-turvy: the ‘casino capitalists’ continue to reap colossal profits, even as the many thousands of lives that have been ruined by such extravagant gambling go to the wall. Virtue may be its own reward, but it seems clear that for the powerful, profligacy often pays. A strange world, indeed, which rewards greed and consumerism, and turns a blind eye to spectacular corruption, while awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, whose very success hinges on the insistence that loans be repaid, however small and however poor the borrower.

    Two good things to come out of this are, first, a growing distaste for wasteful consumption among those able to afford it in the first place; and second, a greater openness to new ideas, as the realisation dawns that neo-liberal prescriptions helped to fuel the crisis, both polarising whole economies and reducing the capacity of governments to deal with the consequences. Interestingly, several of the contributions to this issue use the metaphor of ‘paths’, which evokes the idea of a relaxed stroll at a sustainable and human pace, rather than hurtling around at break-neck speed in a 4x4 vehicle.

    Peter Drucker argues that the global social-justice movement has embraced the non-economic dimensions of development but has generally treated sexual identities and sexuality as issues of citizenship, rather than relating to alternative development strategies. It is essential to challenge hetero-normative assumptions in order ‘to understand the role of gender and sexuality in the ways in which families and communities are structured and the ways in which family and community intersect with the state and economy’. Further, ‘queering’ often taken-for-granted concepts such as democracy, community, and empowerment will necessarily take development in new and potentially more nurturing directions.

    Donald Curtis and Yeow Poon consider the dissonance between the uncertainties that are inherent in any development process and the continuing obsession with management tools that seek to pin everything down from the outset. They call for an open management style that is at ease with adaptation to circumstance, arguing that this approach also enables accountability to be ‘an interactive learning process’, and not simply the upward reporting to donors that tools such as Log Frame encourage. Dissonance is also addressed by Jon Cloke in his critique of the potential for progressive development NGOs to mediate between civil society, the state, and the market in relation to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), given that so many have yielded to donor pressure to move away from engaging with grassroots mobilisation and towards poverty-alleviation and service-provision activities that complement the role of the diminished state. While it may be argued that ‘donor pressure’ is probably as much a convenient smokescreen as a concrete reality, the author’s message is that NGOs cannot have it all ways: opting for certain roles effectively rules out others.

    Other articles focus on various aspects of partnership, a recurrent theme in this journal. Sandra Smeltzer, Grace A. Flesher, and Ellena Andoniou describe a development and research partnership, ‘Western Heads East’, between the University of Western Ontario in Canada and a group of grassroots women in Tanzania who are living with HIV and AIDS. This revolved around the production and sale of probiotic yoghurt, whose properties include improved immunity to infection. The authors address the challenges inherent in such a multi-cultural and multi-level partnership, as well as the questions posed by its success, in particular the concerns about the potential role of a major commercial company in the venture. For Md. Farhad Zamil and Jean-Joseph Cadilhon, the role of a local entrepreneur in the Bangladeshi city of Mymensingh proved critical in providing family-level oyster-mushroom producers access to a reliable market. Their mutual interest in the success of this collaboration is also the surest guarantee of its sustainability.

    Emilie Flower and Brigid McConville illustrate how individuals can often inspire others to get engaged in ways that they might never have imagined, as an existing Tanzanian campaign on safe motherhood became involved in a transnational effort that culminated in the first television screening of a participatory film involving local health professionals, communities, a pop singer, and the Minister of Health. Not only was the production experience valuable in its own right, but the film also helped to persuade the government to commit itself to double the number of trained midwives. As the title indicates, a communication project became a living campaign.

    At another level, Sango Mahanty, Yurdi Yasmi, John Guernier, Rob Ukkerman, and Lucia Nass draw a number of useful conclusions about ways of making partnerships work in practice, based on long-term collaboration in Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, and Vietnam between a Dutch NGO and a regional forestry training centre. Among the lessons learned is the fact that partnership, like democracy, takes time: it is not simply a question of signing a Memorandum of Understanding and hoping for the best. They emphasise the informal communication that oils the wheels, as well as the need for clarity about any imbalance in the partners’ input into the relationship. Writing about ‘farmer squatters’ in peri-urban areas of Fiji, Alex Thornton illustrates that a more participatory approach to issues of re-settlement could potentially mitigate some of the threats to the ‘agri-hoods’ of the squatters, although this would not in itself address the underlying problem of land tenure.

    We also have three interesting shorter pieces in this issue. Patrick Develtere and Tom De Bruyn draw attention to an emerging trend for groupings that are not part of the development industry to become actively involved in what is termed ‘decentralised co-operation’. These are not embryonic NGOs, or inspired by a conventional North–South narrative, but ‘rather, they have become specialists in their own context, be it their company, school, union, health-care provider, or profession, and by gaining hands-on experience, and they are confident in sharing this with colleagues facing similar challenges’. Carolette Norwood argues that while women came to the fore in debates on population through a combination of factors, ranging from de-colonisation to technological advances in contraception, international policies on population and development have implicitly assumed a relationship between poverty and population growth as the basis for integrating women. Grounding these policies in women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights would shift the centre of gravity in the development of thinking about human fertility and population growth. Finally, Devaki Jain and Shubha Chacko outline the long history of engagement between the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the women’s movement, arguing that the NAM still has the potential to initiate an inclusive growth paradigm with a Southern feminist agenda at its core.
     

  •  By active citizenship, we [Oxfam] mean that combination of rights and obligations that link individuals to the state, including paying taxes, obeying laws, and exercising the full range of political, civil, and social rights. Active citizens use those rights to improve the quality of political or civic life, through involvement in the formal economy or formal politics, or through the sort of collective action that historically has allowed poor and excluded groups to make their voices heard. [….] 

    At an individual level, active citizenship means developing self-confidence and overcoming the insidious way in which the condition of being relatively powerless can become internalised. In relation to other people, it means developing the ability to negotiate and influence decisions. And when empowered individuals work together, it means involvement in collective action, be it at the neighbourhood level, or more broadly. Ultimately, active citizenship means engaging with the political system to build an effective state, and assuming some degree of responsibility for the public domain… (Green 2008:12,19)

    Introduction
    On 3 July 2007 over 120 people came together for a one-day conference at Monash University in Melbourne entitled ‘Active Citizenship: Making Bottom–Up Accountability Work’. The conference represented a partnership between the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) and several Melbourne-based universities, and aimed to create a forum for development workers, activists, academics, and postgraduate students to discuss and debate the very latest approaches to active citizenship and social accountability. This special issue presents some of the ‘cream of the crop’ from that conference.

    The quotes above from Duncan Green’s recent publication on Oxfam’s approach to development sum up the broad consensus on active citizenship at the conference. We see the concept of active citizenship as bringing together at least three domains of development theory and practice that have been very prominent during the last few decades. The first of these – participation, especially ‘bottom–up’ participation in the domain of civil society – features as a key theme in almost all of the articles here. Successful community development interventions that have sustained impact generally require a high-level of community participation. There has therefore been an important focus on incorporating community members into the decision-making process. Over time, this participation has increased from a passive attendance at ‘consultative’ meetings to an active engagement and ownership of the development intervention itself. Participation and ownership leads to relationships between community members and the intervening agency (most likely an NGO, but possibly government agency or other body charged with the task of working with the community) being built on trust and therefore being more robust and lasting.

    While ‘participation’ itself is considered to be best practice in terms of development, there is no wider consensus on what is the best practice in achieving this participation. It is known that the poor are the hardest to involve in participatory approaches, as these approaches are time-consuming and time is a precious commodity for those struggling to earn to a daily living. The intervening agency must allow all community stakeholders to be involved at times and locations that best suit their own circumstances. This usually means meeting in the evening and during times of the year when workloads are lower (after harvest and planting seasons, for example). Contention remains as to the benefits or otherwise of paying community members to participate (either directly with cash or in-kind in the guise of meals, etc.).

    Participatory development has been re-framed in terms of active citizenship in recent years in an attempt to explicitly address important critiques of participation as ‘tyranny’ (Cooke and Kothari 2001), that is, as severely constrained by the relations of power in which it is enabled, and its goals and terms of reference defined. The concept of active citizenship explicitly acknowledges unequal relations of power, especially the power of the state and state agencies. In so doing, the approach also acknowledges a long-standing critique of civil-society participation that, compared with state agencies, NGOs and community-based organisations (CGOs) have very limited access to material or economic resources; local development efforts, to be effective, need to able to mobilise the support and resources of state or multilateral agencies.

    This brings us to the second important influence on concepts and practices of active citizenship – rights-based development. ‘Citizenship’ explicitly invokes the idea that individuals and groups are members of national political communities with legally and morally enforceable rights in relation to the state. States, in this view, have a moral responsibility to protect the human rights and improve the well-being of their citizens, especially those who are poor and marginalised. ‘Active’ citizens are agents in such a process, enacting and claiming their legal and human rights as a pathway to social change and development.

    These rights-based approaches to development have often been closely linked with concepts of good governance as a necessary aspect of poverty alleviation and development. ‘Good governance’ as an approach and goal of development interventions is the third domain of development theory that strongly influences current thinking about active citizenship. It is a central theme in several of the articles here which explore and present case studies of ‘social accountability’ where citizens have engaged in local processes to try to make government officials more transparent, accountable, and responsive in the provision of services.

    Thus, active citizenship draws together ideas of participation, rights-based development, and recognition of the importance of good governance and the role of the state in responding to and supporting development programmes and interventions. It emphasises and seeks ways for citizens, especially poor and marginalised groups, to exercise their rights and engage with state and other agencies in doing development. Participation leads to active citizenship when communities begin to organise themselves out of the traditional ‘development project’ and look to influence local, national, or international policies or decision making. Active citizenship may be more effective at the local level where citizens make claims on ‘duty bearers’ as ‘rights holders’. Importantly, active citizenship, like participatory development, is a collective process implying citizens acting as part of a political community with human rights and political rights in relation to the state.

    This issue introduces the challenges in achieving active citizenship but also some of the benefits that success can bring in improving the lives of the poor. Three broad areas are explored using various case studies and reviews of innovative NGO practice:
    · giving poor communities a real voice in shaping their development priorities
    · monitoring the effective delivery of public services and development projects at the grassroots level
    · enhancing local participation in government processes, beyond just taking part in elections.

    Active citizenship in theory and practice has implications in both developing and developed countries. This issue of Development in Practice on active citizenship and social accountability therefore includes case studies from both poorer and wealthier countries, including Asia, the Pacific, and Australia.

    Overview
    This issue contains eight papers that consider various aspects of active citizenship and social accountability. The papers can be broken into three broad sections. The first section contains three articles (Cox, George, and Malik) that discuss and develop the concept of active citizenship. They do this by situating the discussion in three geographical locations and political settings. The second section (with articles by Schultz et al., Roche, and Walker) provides case studies of the experience of three international NGOs of active citizenship and social accountability. The two articles (Matthews and Missingham, and Clarke) in section three present a cautionary tale of the difficulties of achieving active citizenship. One is based one experience in a developed country, while the second reflects on experiences in a developing country.

    Solomon Islands is the context for John Cox’s discussion of active citizens. Solomon Islands is located in the Pacific Ocean and comprises approximately 1000 islands. While 300 of these islands are populated, 80 per cent of the country’s 533,000 people live on a small number of larger islands (including Guadalcanal, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, Malaita, San Cristobal, and New Georgia). These larger islands are mountainous, and thickly forested, occasionally skirted by thin coastal plains that provide fertile but limited agricultural land (less than one per cent of land is presently under cultivation). The total land area is 28,370 km2 whereas the total sea area of Solomon Islands is 1.35 million km2. The Solomon Islands is the third largest archipelago in the South Pacific. The vast majority of the population are Melanesian who settled the islands over 3000 years ago, but over 100 languages are spoken throughout the country. Progress in Solomon Islands has stalled in recent years due to recent civil unrest. This civil strife, roughly drawn along ethnic lines, has disrupted the achievement of the MDGs quite considerably with the government being unable to function in an effective manner during this time, thereby disrupting the provision of education, health and other social services throughout the country. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Solomon Islands have played an important role as alternative providers of social services in the absence of a functioning public sector. Cox discusses the frustrations faced though in these circumstances of achieving a level of participation. He notes that within Solomon Islands, it is not appropriate to assume that there exists a ‘untapped’ sense of citizenship nor that traditional leadership structures can be relied upon to seek out egalitarian redistribution of resources. Cox argues that the power dynamics within Solomon Island communities is more complicated than this. To better understand how citizenship might be understood within Solomon Islands, Cox firstly considers clientelism and patronage networks. He demonstrates how the system of clientelism is direct conflict with the notion of citizenship. In contrast to citizenship, clientelism requires ‘deference and submissiveness’ of those without power to those with power. Cox argues that it is unlikely that within the dominant system of clientelism that demand for good governance (which underpins citizenship) will naturally emerge. It is more likely that individuals will seek to gain personal advantage over community benefits. Cox notes that Solomon Island is a unique country with its own particular circumstances. There is very little sense of nationhood or nationalism, with most basic allegiances remaining to the family and clan, not to the nation. Cox argues therefore that there are limited opportunities for active citizenship to flourish in a society in which access to basic services is less dependent upon the state and more contingent upon relationships with patrons. This is not necessary cultural but a simple artefact of the prevailing political dynamics. Cox suggests that attempts by NGOs to support participation or citizenship will not flourish until the experience of the state is stronger and directly challenges the dominance of clientelism.

    Nicole George explores issues of active citizenship through an account of women’s organising and activism in Fiji from the 1960s to the present. For George, ‘active citizenship’ means women’s activism, popular mobilisation and organising within the realm of civil society. In her account of the vibrant recent history of Fiji’s women’s movement, George emphasises two themes that are very relevant to the nature and scope of active citizenship more broadly. First, as George writes, ‘the politics of ethnicity or race overlays many debates taking place in the public domain’ and has had a deep and lasting impact on gender-based activism and organising in Fiji. Many women’s organisations remain based in ethnic and religious constituencies and pursue the ethnically-defined, locally-based interests of their members. George shows how some women’s organisations, in particular the Fiji YWCA, have challenged such ethnically-based divisions and promoted a more inclusive notion of citizenship and gender solidarity. Second, George shows that both the national and international political contexts have influenced women activists’ understandings and purposes of their gender-based advocacy. Activists drew on international discourses of human rights, democracy, gender equality, and radical critiques of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the global causes of poverty, but have had to negotiate such discourses and find locally acceptable ‘paradigms’ to promote debate and mobilise women’s support. In the wake of each of the military coups women’s activists have often faced oppressive responses by the state and the military to their criticisms and campaigns, and have found the opportunities for civil society activity and active citizenship to be severely limited.

    George’s contribution shows how active citizenship needs to be understood within the specific historical circumstances in which citizens act, and the political economic context shaping both opportunities and constraints. Nadeem Malik also sets out to highlight significant constraints to active citizenship, but in this case those inherited from colonial and pre-colonial pasts. Malik’s critique has particular importance to the recent promotion of decentralisation throughout the developing world as a way of improving and democratising local governance and the provision of public services, especially in rural and regional areas. His argument is based on a finely detailed, ethnographic study of the day-to-day practices of local government in a community in rural Pakistan. The policy of decentralisation initiated by the Musharif government in 1999 aimed to make local government more democratic and accountable to local people, bring women into local government in significant numbers, and make local elected officials subject to depersonalised, bureaucratic rules and procedures. Malik shows how powerful local landowners have subverted these intentions in a number of ways. For instance, the new laws mandated that 33 per cent of local seats would be reserved for women, what often happens is that elected women are represented by a male family member and local elite justify the practice in terms of local cultural and family values. Powerful landowners gain elected office through local patronage, and legitimate their position through ‘traditional’, personalised cultural practices, which further and strengthen their power. Ultimately, Malik vividly demonstrates how economically powerful groups can mobilise culture and manipulate invented traditions to severely limit opportunities for active citizenship and social accountability.

    In the first of the case studies, Oxfam Australia’s Director of Development Effectiveness, Chris Roche, presents a broad-ranging discussion of Oxfam’s experience with ‘bottom–up’ accountability as a way of empowering local people in relation to state bureaucracies and development agencies. Roche grounds his discussion in two case studies of Oxfam-supported social accountability projects. The first describes a project in rural Vietnam where Oxfam worked with villagers to use participatory video to make the local school and its teachers more accountable to the local community. In the second case study, Roche presents the Gender Watch action group in Sri Lanka. Gender Watch was a group of local women, who collaborated with NGOs working on post-Tsunami recovery, to monitor problems affecting women, such as sexual harassment, rape, and discrimination, and address the problems they identified through social accountability. Roche draws out a number of lessons from his case studies, broader Oxfam experience, and the literature. He emphasises issues such as the importance of people knowing their entitlements and rights to be able to even assess if these are being met, the need for safe and effective mechanisms for people to express their grievances, and people’s need for certain skills and capacities to voice their grievances effectively and take appropriate measures to pursue them. Roche then proposes changes that he argues need to take place at individual, organisational, and sectoral level in order to make social accountability happen effectively.

    Lisa Schultz, José Roberto Guevara, Samantha Ratnam, Ani Wieringa, Johanna Wyn, and Charlotte Sowerby provide an interest reflection of how young people can be engaged as active citizens within both a developing and developed country (Indonesia and Australia). They note that the simultaneous conversion of two long-term events – globalisation and changing technologies – have resulted in young people becoming increasingly required to engage with the broader world beyond their local and national communities. This increased engagement raises pertinent questions as to the ways, spaces, and tools, and resources young people require in order to engage in as active citizens. This article reflects on these questions and evaluates a schools-based programme implemented by Plan Australia in both Indonesia and Australia. The Global Connections Program is a youth-led global learning initiative developed to provide opportunities for young people in those two countries to connect with one another. The programme had a number of explicit objectives, including to: 1) assist young people form personal bonds with other young people from another country; 2) increase their understanding of issues faced by young people in other countries; 3) develop certain planning and leadership skills; 4) disseminate information about issues faced in other countries, in their own country; 5) develop solutions to joints issues of concern; and 6) assist Plan to work more closely with young people. Scultz et al. report that the programme was considered successful as it largely achieved these goals. Young people reported they felt more engaged with the global community and saw themselves has having a great role in finding solutions to common problems. A key to its success was its cross-country aspect, allowing young people in very different circumstances communicate on a more personal level and find similarities in their own lives. While Schultz et al. note some difficulties with the project’s implementation, none of these difficulties could not be overcome. Schultz et al. conclude that it is possible to develop notions of active citizenship within young people by combining exposure to counterparts in another country (developed to developing and developing to developed) with skill building and knowledge about global issues. Those that participated reported increased self-esteem and a desire to be participants rather than disinterested observers in the new global community.

    Bill Walker provides a case study of work being undertaken by the international World Vision of assisting communities to hold their local political elites to account through Community-Based Performance Monitoring (CBPM). Walker takes as his starting point the notion of accountability, which has become increasingly popular in recent times. CBPM is underpinned by two principles – the principle of ownership and the principle of affected rights. The first principle involves ‘rights of prior authority based on relevant ownership by citizens and is thus linked to concepts of democracy’. The second principle ‘involves the principle that those whose rights have been adversely affected by the actions of someone else have right to hold that person to account for the way they have been treated’. Walker argues that these two principles are the basis for active citizens holding political leaders to account. Moreover, these principles also give authority to citizens to hold the state accountable. Citizens must call those in political authority to account for the decisions they make and the activities they implement. Further, citizens must hold to account these same decision makers and make them responsible for their decisions. Finally, if citizens deem decisions have been made inappropriately, they must seek redress (in varying forms). Indeed, it is this final action that largely determines how successful active citizens are in their community. If they are actually able to successfully demand redress, they have achieved a high level of accountability. Walker argues further that active citizens, particularly the most marginalised in society need a ‘voice’ in order to express their empowerment. The second half of Walker’s article sets out in more detail precisely what the CBPM is and how it is established within a community. Walker first notes that CBPM is a hybrid community-based monitoring tool. It combines selected elements from three other social-accountability approaches: social audit, community monitoring, and citizen report cards. The purpose of the CBPM is to facilitate and support ‘constructive dialogue’ between the political decision makers and citizens at a local level. The local level is purposely chosen as it is an intimate pace that allows a variety of voices to be heard around issues that are mutually understood and where it is deemed reasonable to claim that a social contract exists. Walker further explains that the central pillar o the CBPM is a planned gathering of the community that encompasses all key stakeholder groups, especially the poor and marginalised. These gathers are facilitated and seek to assess the quality of services being delivered by the state or should be delivered. These gatherings also then set out plans as to how services can be better provided often with the assistance of the communities themselves. This latent citizenship is contrasted with the political system of clientelism found in Solomon Islands as discussed by Cox. Walker concludes by stating that World Vision’s experience of CBPM has had five positive outcomes in terms of enhancing active citizenships. First, the focus on the local allows those involved to feel an immediacy of issues being discussed. Secondl it assists citizens appreciate the rights they have and opens channels for claiming these rights. Third, it assists in diagnosing what is failing in local service delivery and how this can be overcome. Fourth, it emphasises immediate response and joint decision making by both citizens and political decision makers. Finally, it supports and unifies communities delivering a sense of solidarity and mutual support.

    In the third section, the difficulties of achieving active citizenship are explored in two articles. Popular participation in natural resources management has been a leading area in the theory and practice of active citizenship. Community Forest Management (CFM) has become a global movement promoting and enabling local people to take active roles in the decision-making and management of their forest resources. While CFM has been most influential in less-developed countries it has also influenced forest policy in industrialised nations in Europe and North America. In their contribution, Nathanial Matthews and Bruce Missingham examine the Wombat Community Forest Management initiative that was launched in the Australian state of Victoria in 2003. The Wombat CFM was the first official effort to develop and support a CFM processes in Australia, with real efforts to mobilise active citizens to participate in developing policy and managing the forest. Despite a highly optimistic start, the trial fell apart by the end of 2006. Matthews and Missingham describe in detail the community development and organising processes through which the Wombat CFM initiative was developed, and analyse the causes of its failure. In particular, they examine how ‘community’ was represented and constructed – who participated. In this case, the community was able to define itself and local people, as well as a diverse range of ‘outside’ interest groups, got involved. Consequently a sense of community or common purpose that could overcome entrenched ideological and socio-economic conflict over the sustainable use of the forest was never established. Matthews and Missingham also draw attention to power relationships within the newly formed CFM governing body, and between the CFM body and the government forestry department – the terms of participation. They show that the purpose and goals of CFM remained ambiguous in government directives and policy statements. The CFM governing body was not empowered to make legal decisions about Wombat forest management or use and power remained largely in the hands of forestry department officials. These unequal power relationships exacerbated conflict and inequalities within the CFM governing body, and ultimately lead to it being disbanded. The case study holds some important implications for participation in natural resources management and sustainable development throughout the world, notably that popular participation and active citizenship are often enacted in highly unequal relations of power may severely limit the terms of citizens’ participation.

    Matthew Clarke calls for some caution in seeking all communities to assume the role of active citizens. Clarke agrees in his article that active citizens can become a powerful driver of development by holding to popular account those that traditionally hold decision-making power at the local and national levels. He notes that active citizenship draws from a long history of understanding the importance of community participation and ownership of development interventions. But at this point Clarke departs from the rest of the contributions to this special issue by arguing that spite of its inherent strengths, active citizenship may not be a possible or optimal outcome in all circumstances. Clarke argues that participation has been fetishised within the development sector, blinding some to the potential hazards of seeking all to become active citizens. Clarke focuses his argument on one specific sub-population within Thailand – illegal Burmese migrants – and argues for the realistic expectation of active citizenship and indeed participation for these migrants. Clarke notes that the estimates of the number of illegal migrants within Thailand vary between 800,000 to 1.5 million but that the overwhelming majority of these migrants are Burmese seeking to escape the political regime in Burma and improve their material standard of living. NGOs working with these illegal Burmese migrants face many challenges that exacerbate the normal development needs that would be expected in any poor community, such as limited access to health services, economic insecurity, inadequate housing, etc. The complexity of working with these communities are exacerbated by the precarious existence these migrants have in Thailand, which in turn hinders their ability to actively engage in the development process. Clarke draws on his work with one specific NGO that has worked with illegal Burmese communities for over 15 years. He discusses the unique strengths and weakness of these illegal communities before exploring the appropriateness of seeking to engage such communities as active citizens. The major implication for NGOs working with such communities is that they may have to assume a new role when working with these communities. Clarke introduces a new typology describing the unique role NGOs must play in these circumstances: advocate–guardians. He argues that within this typology, NGOs must assume the role of active citizen on behalf of the community in question and simultaneously provide development interventions and advocate on their behalf. Clarke cautions against the blanket expectation of participation from these communities as it actually endangers the lives of community members and is therefore an inappropriate expectation or requirement. The extent to which the circumstances of illegal Burmese migrants are mirrored by other illegal migrant groups will determine how widespread the adoption of Clarke’s new typology will be.

    Conclusion
    Active citizenship is an important concept that brings together three well established principles of best-practice within development, namely the importance of participation; rights-based approaches to development; and good governance. There is little doubt that active citizens are a powerful force for ‘good’ change, and the focus on active citizenship will affect future development at the local, national and regional levels.

    The 2007 conference in Melbourne demonstrates the importance which community representatives, development practitioners, researchers, and donors assign to this notion. Moreover, it is a concept that traverses both developed and developing countries. We believe the contributions presented in this special issue of Development in Practice will go some way in adding to the current debate and practice around active citizenship.

    References
    Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books.
    Green, D. (2008) From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World, Oxford: Oxfam International.
     

  • Active citizenship and participatory community development approaches have evolved partly in response to perceived aid dependency among rural communities. In Solomon Islands these methods have met with mixed success. This article reflects on the frustration often felt by local and international development workers when working with rural communities and questions some of the assumptions that shape the way development workers and programmes understand the types of communities which make up Solomon Islands.

  • This article examines a 40-year history of women’s organising in Fiji in order to show how the political goals pursued by active citizens can be shaped by an interplay of domestic and international political contingencies. This approach challenges the common and somewhat idealised definitions of active citizenship that focus upon actors’ capacity to mobilise collectively behind political goals independent of those that motivate the state or the market. Rather, active citizenship is viewed as a realm of political activity constituted in ways that both reflect and contest contingent factors prevailing globally and locally.

  • The 1980s saw an increasing enthusiasm for decentralisation and good governance in developing countries. Through an ethnographic study of the office of Tehsil Mayor in Kharalpur, Pakistan, it is argued that decentralisation, instead of creating opportunities for people for democratic participation and empowerment through modern local government institutions, has itself being subverted by the traditional norms and rules of patronage-based personalised governance. Rather than modernity influencing tradition it is the other way around. This has further strengthened the power and prestige of the rural elite.

  • Oxfam’s experience suggests that ‘bottom–up’ accountability can be an important mechanism whereby men and women living in poverty can hold others to account. The first section of this article illustrates this with two examples of Oxfam experience in Vietnam and Sri Lanka. The second section draws out some of the lessons from these, and attempts to situate them within the broader debate about approaches to accountability. In the third section some suggestions are put forward about what would need to change if active citizenship and ‘speaking truth to power’ were to become the renewed focus of accountability.

  • As a result of globalisation and changing technologies, young people are increasingly required to engage with the broader world beyond their local and national communities. This raises significant questions about the ways and spaces young people will need to engage as active citizens, and the new tools and resources young people will need to equip them for their futures. The Global Connections Program has been developed to address these identified needs. It is a youth-led global learning initiative that aims to provide an opportunity for connection and learning among young people in Australia and Indonesia. This article explores Plan’s youth-led approach to global learning, with a focus on the implementation and evaluation findings of the Global Connections Program as well as the challenges faced thus far.

  • Amid growing interest in forms of participatory and decentralised governance, increasing efforts are being made to increase the accountability, responsiveness, and relevance of the state through active citizenship. Drawing on the theoretical basis for social accountability, this article explores bottom–up views of active citizenship which highlight the importance of the intrinsic as well as the instrumental value of participatory social accountability and thus of active citizenship. One approach to social accountability, Community-Based Performance Monitoring (CBPM), is used to demonstrate these instrumental and intrinsic values in practice, in relation to local public service delivery.

  • This article presents a critical analysis of what caused Australia’s first Community Forest Management (CFM) trial to fail. We explore how ‘community’ was conceptualised and represented through the dynamic CFM process, leading to contradictions and conflicts that could not be resolved. Closely linked to these issues we examine the governance structures and institutions that were created to try to enable community participation in forest management. Ambiguity and uncertainty in the power and purpose of the CFM organisation, as well as power relationships within the organisation, all contributed to conflicts that eventually tore the CFM process apart.

  • Active citizens can become a powerful driver of development by holding to popular account those who traditionally hold decision-making power at the local and national levels. Active citizenship draws from a long history of understanding the importance of community participation and ownership of development interventions. However, in spite of its inherent strengths, active citizenship may not be a possible (or optimal) outcome in all circumstances. This article argues for the realistic expectation of active citizenship (and indeed participation) of one specific sub-population in Thailand, where of the estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million illegal migrants, the overwhelming majority are Burmese. Their precarious existence as illegal migrants compounds the development needs that face any poor community. This in turn hinders their ability to actively engage in the development process. This article reviews the lessons learned by a Thai-based NGO that has worked with illegal Burmese migrants for over 15 years. It discusses the unique strengths and weakness of these illegal communities, the appropriateness of seeking to engage them as active citizens, and the implications for NGOs working with such communities. It suggests that the unique role NGOs must play in cases where their public participation could endanger the lives of community members, is that of advocate-guardians, whereby they assume the role of active citizen on behalf of the community in question and simultaneously provide development interventions and advocate on its behalf.

  • 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. Will such momentous factors affect the practice of development? As European leaders step down (Greece and Italy already at the time of writing), changes in economic balances of power between countries take place, downwards readjustment of the standards of living in ‘developed countries’ become the norm, and new powers emerge, it is inevitable that these will change the way we think about development in the future. Many of the articles in this issue have drilled down into the daily lives of people, looking at some very empirically based experiences of lived reality. Such experiences can continue to inform practice, but we must be aware that many key factors in development may change and indeed are already changing.

    Craig Thorburn provides an appraisal of the ‘farmer field schools’ and how they have evolved since the 1980s in Indonesia, and going on to be adapted in 70 countries. Developments in the model are explored using recent examples of watershed management in Indonesia. Jan Servaes et al outline a model for testing the sustainability of development programmes in light of continuing concerns over their lack of sustainability. The sustainability model was piloted through a sample of communications programmes. Sustainability should be given far more priority in light of shrinking resources and the need to learn from programmes, rather than the obsession with value for money which tends to focus only on the short term.

    Marcela Gonzalez Rivas asks why indigenous communities in Mexico have worse water supplies than other groups. She notes the lower levels of capital investment in these communities, which links to a long-term concern that state services often end up subsidising middle-class communities rather than the poorest.

    Rebecca Tiessen and Barbara Heron look at issues around volunteering. At a time when many official volunteering programmes are being closed down elsewhere, volunteering seems to be alive and well in Canada. The article looks at the continuing demand from would-be volunteers and their perspectives of their experiences. It notes some of the returnees' reservations about the value of volunteering for the host community rather than for the volunteers themselves. Volunteering appears to be moving back away from an expert-based technical transfer model to one of providing young people with experience of another country. The debate is clearly going to continue whether volunteering can still be justified in developmental terms or should be regarded as a system for increasing global understanding across cultures through exposure visits.

    Shai Dixon and Cassandra Bergstrom review the unintended consequences of development interventions through the example of a millennium village and the contribution of some of these programmes to increased diarrheal diseases. It concludes that simplistic views of what is possible hide a complexity of technical, behavioural and practical issues which may lead to very different results than those envisaged. Soumyadip Chattopadhyay's article focuses on the attempts to decentralise the delivery of urban services in West Bengal. A process of collating citizen feedback on the services provided illustrated the very different results being obtained in the decentralised service delivery.

    The issue's Viewpoint is a review by Nombasa Williams of the history of child welfare/protection offered by UNHCR and notes areas of continuing concern. Glen Wright's review essay tackles a difficult and controversial area of NGOs and their roles by reflecting on the ‘western hegemony’ over the way they have developed, as portrayed in the literature on NGOs over the past decade. The essay leaves us with several key questions as to the future roles of NGOs and whether they are still valid in a changing environment.

    We also have several interesting Practical Notes. Michael Rimmer et al review an experience around cooperation regarding rehabilitation of aqua culture in Aceh. Given consistent criticism of the lack of coordination in such humanitarian contexts, it is useful to see how this case managed to avoid some of the usual problems by bringing together a considerable number of disparate agencies working on aqua cultural programmes in the post-Tsunami rehabilitation.

    A second note by Victor Asiedu looks at community approaches to the reintegration of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. This provides us with some of the detailed approaches used to ensure a community rather than combatant-focussed reintegration programme. Finally, Ronnie Vernooy describes an inspirational use of new mobile technology with participation from herders to monitor and inform of changing weather conditions in the extreme environment of the Mongolian Gobi desert.

    Later this year we will focus on two major topics which we feel have not received the exposure they deserve. The first issue is a major review of approaches to child protection. Childhood has long been a neglected field of research given the demographic weighting in so many developing countries towards children and young people. A set of critical and often controversial issues will be aired in this guest-edited issue. The second is the roles and experience of religion in development, with a special guest-edited issue which will contribute to a lively and sometimes contested debate about religious groups and their contribution to development globally.

    As an editorial team always open to carrying special issues on particular topics. We are now planning for 2013 and would welcome suggestions and proposals for other special thematically based issues. The topic should fit our overall mandate of being academically rigorous, presenting a subject which is wide enough to be of interest to our international readership, and have a value for policymakers and practitioners.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.634690

     

  • 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 present article provides a sympathetic appraisal of some recent developments.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.634176

  • The term sustainability has grown increasingly popular as development experts seek to measure the long-term impacts of their projects. Although there is no commonly agreed definition of sustainability, the word has become a common catchphrase. It is often used to describe the desired goal of lasting change within institutions, communities, and projects. We provide a tool to aid in the evaluation of the sustainability of development projects. We have applied our indicators to two specific projects to demonstrate their utility.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.634177

  • This paper examines Congolese children's experiences of war and displacement in the context of the material, social, and relational aspects of their lives in Dar es Salaam. It argues that the challenges, privations and indignities of daily life in urban Tanzania were characterised by feelings of loss, deprivation and hardship so intense they were felt by many to be as or more devastating in their brutality than was life in the midst of war. In so doing, the paper raises profound questions about what kind of ‘protection’ we are providing to children in these circumstances, and for what purpose.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672958

  • Access to piped water is highly unequal in Mexico, and indigenous municipalities are particularly disadvantaged. The present article identifies the different factors that contribute to the unequal access to piped water across Mexican municipalities for the period 2000–2005, using regression analyses. The findings show that indigenous populations experience lower piped water coverage than non-indigenous populations, even when one accounts for population density (the main explanation that the government provides for indigenous populations' lack of progress) and other relevant factors. The present findings also show that one of the reasons for this lack of progress is that indigenous municipalities receive fewer per capita transfers from the central government non-indigenous municipalities, all else being equal.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630983

     

  • Volunteers who travel abroad on short-term (three- to six-month) assignments represent a growing trend in international development work. Many of the short-term volunteers abroad employ funds earmarked for poverty alleviation and development. This article examines the perceived impacts of international volunteering in the developing world of 50 Canadian youth. The findings demonstrate an awareness of modest and, at times, negative effects in international development. The primary focus in the youth reflections was on personal growth as a positive impact; thus raising questions about the goals and desired outcomes for international development funding for volunteer abroad programmes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630982

     

  • One of the major promises of decentralisation is that it brings popular participation and accountability to local governance, making local government more responsive to citizens' desires and more effective in delivering services. Acknowledging the potential of decentralisation in improving delivery of basic services, the present article uses primary data to demonstrate that higher availability of urban basic services (UBSs) is associated with higher levels of citizen dissatisfaction. Policymakers need to adopt a comprehensive set of reform policies – strengthening the organic link between urban residents and municipalities, exploring alternative service delivery options, etc. – to improve the delivery of UBSs.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.634175

     

  • 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. Most importantly, in an environment where numerous agencies are undertaking rehabilitation activities across a broad geographic area, this approach enables the provision of a consistent and standardised technical message to farmers.

    The full article is available here:

     http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630984
     

  • Many reintegration programmes focus on ex-combatants rather than communities, and this limited focus has created divisions among community members and strained reintegration processes in many post-war environments. In view of this limited approach to reintegration, more and more academics and practitioners are arguing for a community-based (CB) approach as a way of addressing resentment among community members for more effective peace-building. But how can CB integration programmes be planned and implemented in post-war environments? These recommendations are based on empirical research in Sierra Leone, which explores how community-based reintegration programmes can facilitate more effective peace-building.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630985

     

  • 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. Through collective action, the network is contributing to reduce risks and improve pastoral management practices.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630986

     

  • Very little is known about the ecology of the refugee parenting experience in pre-resettlement contexts. This article presents research that is part of a larger study seeking to explain why refugee parents are appearing in the South Australian child protection system. In particular, the research highlights the need for parenting education as an early intervention. The study's findings also point to the need for universal definitions of the terms ‘child welfare’, ‘child protection’ and ‘child maltreatment’ by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, its implementing partners, practitioners and researchers in order to reflect better the receiving nation systems of child welfare.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.630980

     

  • Since their rise to prominence in the post-World War II period, NGOs have grown exponentially in size and stature. This growth has occurred most notably under the New Policy Agenda, with Western donor states emphasising the role of NGOs in democratisation and service provision. Donors have gained the power to set the development agenda and NGOs have slowly become Trojan horses for global neo-liberalism. The present review surveys the principal ways in which NGOs have become a part of the promotion of Western hegemony in the developing world and presents some ideas for change.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.634230

     

  •  

    Since its inception, the editorial policy of Development in Practice has been guided by three principles. First, that any contribution that is clearly argued, authentic, and practice-relevant transcends the specificities of context sufficiently to resonate with a diverse international audience. Second, that some of the most creative thinking on the real-world issues of development and humanitarian practice takes place not in Northern universities or the Aid Industry, but in the daily struggles of ordinary people. I well recall a group of subsistence farmers who, at the height of the war in El Salvador, corrected the aid-agency assumption that their priorities stopped at meeting their basic needs, and that they would regard debates on human rights as a luxury. Quite the reverse! It was these non-literate peasants who said, decades before the 'invention' of Rights-Based Approaches: 'You can't talk about basic needs while our human rights are systematically abused: we have to stop the violations and secure peace with justice before we can do anything else.' The third principle is that of editorial independence - not merely in the restricted sense of peer review, but through an active commitment to fostering and giving space to the encounter between practices and ideas from whatever source, and however critical of established orthodoxies and mainstream opinions.

    The combination of these principles underpins our acceptance of submissions in French, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as English, and the provision of assistance for those who are writing in a second or even third language - on which score I am pleased to announce that we have resumed our earlier practice of including abstracts in these languages in the print journal, as well as on our multilingual website (developmentinpractice.org). In the words of Jenny Pearce, a long-standing Editorial Adviser: 'Development in Practice provides a place of encounter in the realm of the written word, which empowers the practitioner at the same time as it exposes him and her to the ideas of others. In a world where we do not have solutions to poverty and powerlessness, we have to communicate and talk to each other' (email communication, 18 November 2008). Hence the journal's strap-line: 'Stimulating Thought for Action'.

    With this issue of Development in Practice, the first in our twentieth anniversary volume, I have opted for a geographical focus, pulling together a range of articles on South and East Asia which illustrate concerns that are both specific to these regions and relevant to readers whose own background or area of interest lies elsewhere. The contributions to this collection weave around issues of political violence and armed conflict, livelihoods, migration, environment, gender equity, rights, and aid-mediated relationships - concerns that are common the world over. However, while the Aid Industry casts a long shadow over Development, we know that development and humanitarian action can and largely do take place without it.

    Two articles focus on Sri Lanka. Judith Shaw examines the experiences of young women who migrate to work as housemaids, and whose remittances are vital to the livelihoods of the recipient households. Unless their earnings are reliable and sufficient, however, the household may ultimately be worse off: there is a delicate balance here between economic and cultural survival, once the emotional and financial costs of migration are taken into account. Neavis Morais and Mokbul Morshed Ahmad examine the multiple factors that keep households in poverty in the areas of the country most affected by armed conflict, over and above the fact of being endangered by the war as such. They contend that the ways in which aid programmes such as microfinance are managed in the war zones are often based on an assumption of the victims' helplessness and thus, paradoxically, render them more vulnerable and less resilient than they might otherwise have been.

    Another pair of articles describes efforts to improve the earnings of very poor and marginalised workers. In her contribution, Bipasha Baruah examines the situation of women in the Indian construction industry, arguing that while they undeniably benefit from the training and certification provided by the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), these benefits will be sustainable only with simultaneous efforts to change social prejudices and labour policy on women's employment in non-traditional occupations, alongside an awareness of the links between local and global forces shaping the building sector. Subhojit Bannerjee turns his attention to rickshaw pullers who, with some organisational assistance from university students, were encouraged to carry packs of small retail items - toiletries, stationery, etc. - to sell to their passengers as a means of diversifying their income. The goods were bought centrally, and the more successful rickshaw pullers became familiar with the kinds of product that their clients were likely to purchase. The basic model can also be adapted to include advertising, or handcrafts such as bamboo fans manufactured in the rickshaw pullers' home regions - especially relevant for those who are seasonal migrant workers.

    The sheer scale of the 2004 Asian tsunami, and of the subsequent outpouring of assistance, has shaped ideas across much of the affected region about what today constitutes a secure and sustainable way of life. Jin Sato asks why, despite the huge influx of financial and material aid following the 2004 tsunami, and notwithstanding the best intentions of the aid agencies, communities in south Thailand complained that goods had been misappropriated, or that distribution was not equitable. He argues that the introduction of free goods will almost invariably reinforce differences in power and influence that are sometimes deeply rooted in histories and social relations that will not be immediately apparent to anyone without profound local knowledge. As he says, 'the secondary effects of relief efforts on resources and human identities endure for generations'. The onus is therefore on aid agencies to 'pay careful attention to the voices of victims in order to understand what people affected by disasters wish to defend, rather than blindly providing what we think they wish to obtain'.

    Kathleen O'Reilly describes the perverse outcomes of latrine-building projects in the Indian state of Rajasthan which were intended to empower women in a social context that dictates even the most intimate aspects of women's lives, including when and where they may attend to their personal hygiene needs. The project managers assumed that domestic latrines would provide women with the convenience and privacy they required, while those blessed with this facility would then spontaneously overcome the social mores governing where they may go, to whom they may talk, and what they may talk about, to extol to other village women the many virtues of having a household latrine. Not only did this not happen, but the conventions regarding women's personal hygiene meant that possessing a latrine conferred status on the household by increasing female seclusion. At the same time, however, the positioning of the latrines in the courtyard, used mainly by male household members and guests, made it impossible for women to use the toilet as and when they needed. The author's conclusion underlines once again that 'technical interventions will not work to resolve gendered relations of unequal power'; rather the power relations need to be understood and addressed before bringing in the resources. Jyotirmaya Tripathy argues that in focusing on the cultural construction of gender, the Gender and Development discourse tends to exaggerate the different interests of men and women in ways that emphasise women's victimhood rather than their agency; furthermore, that it tends to perpetuate exclusion rather than integration, and conflict rather than collaboration. He calls for a greater recognition that gender identities are not fixed entities, but are constantly adapting and redefined in response to shifting priorities.

    Notwithstanding their economic recovery, many parts of East Asia still carry the social scars of war and colonialism. John R. Owen uses the example of Lao-based national and international NGOs to explore how internalised assumptions of Western expertise are reinforced by the fact that most senior posts in aid agencies are held by expatriates, many of whom display little knowledge of Lao society. For many foreign aid workers, whose salaries are often way off the local scale, the international development community is where they feel at home and can socialise freely. While local staff may appear deferential, this apparent compliance can serve to mask their resentment at being assigned the inferior role of 'implementer', while the decision-making authority 'naturally' resides with the expatriate 'manager'. The quality of relationships is also of concern to Mneesha Gellman, whose article examines how externally driven peace-building initiatives play out in contemporary Cambodia. A central question concerns the definition of peace: whose definitions and priorities prevail when outsiders and insiders have different cultural values, or when local elites capture the neo-liberal international peace-building agenda to the exclusion of the majority? And what power dynamics do insiders internalise when they are in effect used to give local legitimacy to interventions whose cultural roots lie elsewhere?

    Three shorter pieces round off this issue. Irene I. Hadiprayitno argues that the right to adequate food means that food security needs to be at the heart of government policy. In the context of Indonesia, however, she finds serious shortcomings in the fulfilment of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. To focus on food security at the national level and to use it as a tool to stabilise domestic unrest is in practice privileging food production over universal access to adequate food on a sustainable basis. In his review essay, Shambhu Ghatak examines what the 2008 World Development Report (WDR) can contribute to agricultural policy in India, whose economy it defines as 'transforming' rather than agriculture-based. Although the WDR is found to make some valid observations, it tends to gloss over the monopolies and price rises associated with the rapid expansion of supermarkets as food outlets; and it is silent on the tragedy of the growing incidence of farmer suicides because of indebtedness. Mochamad Indrawan reports on the 2008 World Conservation Congress of the IUCN, which focused on the need to 'green' development, both conceptually and in the policies and initiatives that emanate from it. There is a pressing need to align conservation and the reduction of poverty, all too often cast as pulling in opposite directions. Actively engaging local communities in both shaping and supporting conservation initiatives is therefore paramount.

    Farewell and welcome
    With the publication of this issue, we extend our warm thanks to those Editorial Advisers who stood down at the end of 2009, some of whom had served for many more than the three years for which they initially signed up, and all of whom have shared with us their wisdom, humour, and goodwill. Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, Jaime Joseph, Elizabeth Lira, Warren Nyamugasira, and Issa Shivji also contributed articles; Rebecca Neaera Abers, Kumi Naidoo, Naomi Okada, Daniel Selener, Johan Saravanamuttu, and Fiona Wilson all helped with refereeing and in other ways; Haleh Afshar was a guest editor, and Maria Teresa Diokno Pascual and Miloon Kothari introduced our books Development and Advocacy and Development and Social Action respectively.

    Finally, we extend our welcome to the following new Advisers: Charles Buxton, Yaliwe Clarke, Kate Critchley, Sumi Dhanarajan, Jon Hellin, Islah Jad, Okello Okuli, Alina Rocha Menocal, Ricardo Wilson-Grau, Tina Wallace, and Sarah White.
     

  • This article examines the role of context-specific factors that help to perpetuate the vulnerability of conflict-affected people. The discussion revolves around key concepts of household livelihood security, resilience building, income diversification, market access, and armed non-state actors. It is argued that, while conflict-affected households develop adaptive strategies to sustain their livelihoods amid the commonly observed vulnerabilities, the governance arrangements of the parties to the conflict can place stress on local initiatives, confining them to subsistence level and so reinforcing their vulnerability. Deeper analysis of the sources of vulnerability and implications of policy processes could help to inform intervention strategies.

  • In rural Sri Lanka, remittances from housemaids working in the Middle East figure prominently in household livelihood strategies. This article examines the impact of housemaid remittances on living standards and suggests measures to maximise the benefits of remittances for recipient households while minimising the personal and financial costs of migration. The effectiveness of migration as a household strategy depends on a decent overseas job with a reliable income, a reduction in the costs of migrating and remitting, and the responsible management of household welfare and finances by recipients, including the maintenance of local income sources while the migrant is away.

  • This article identifies the opportunities and constraints faced by female construction workers in urban India, citing empirical research conducted in the city of Ahmedabad. The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) conducted three surveys in 1998, 2003, and 2007 to learn more about the needs and priorities of construction workers in the context of economic globalisation. While enthusiastically endorsing the role that training and certification can play in providing skilled women with opportunities for quality employment, the author emphasises the need for wider policy intervention at the state and national levels to ensure that such programmes have replicable, sustainable, and gender-equitable results.

  • Water supply and sanitation provision are key elements in progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Women's participation is considered integral to the sustainability of the projects created to meet these two MDGs. Bringing feminist and geographic critiques to bear on gendered approaches to improving sanitation coverage, the research reported on in this article indicates that latrine building and women's participation may be contradictory goals for sanitation projects, despite the fact that women are the target group for latrine-building interventions. The findings of the analysis suggest that attention must be given to latrine building as both a technical undertaking and a gendered political intervention.

  • Rickshaw pulling is a large, labour-intensive, unorganised sector in India, involving 8 million individuals belonging to the lowest social strata. The article describes an initiative to increase the daily earnings of rickshaw pullers by training them to retail branded products, on a 'bulk-buying retail-selling' model. The article reports on a project that began with 30 rickshaw pullers in Jaunpur, a semi-urban district of eastern India. Critical issues related to the sustainability and future of such projects on a large scale are discussed.

  • This article asks why, despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of various relief agencies, tsunami-relief efforts in Thailand after the Great Sumatra Earthquake of 2004 resulted in complaints and skewed aid distribution. Beginning with an analysis of how relief goods are distributed in practice, the focus of the article shifts to forces that cause certain types of goods to be concentrated in certain communities. It concludes by identifying the limits of the goods-based relief approach, introducing intangible resources and identity as more foundational dimensions in the study of distribution.

  • This article explores post-conflict reconstruction in Cambodia through an analysis of both the dangers of liberal peace building and the positive role that training in capacity building plays in war-torn societies. The central question addressed is how insider-outsider dynamics influence Cambodia's post-conflict reconstruction projects; and what assumptions do international workers and Cambodian NGO staff make about 'the good life' that will be constructed? The article offers an overview of Cambodia's history and cultural context to situate its analysis of liberal peace building and foreign donors, as well as the behavioural characteristics of international peace builders operating within Cambodia. It assesses the potency of elite capture of insider-outsider partnership, specific NGO management practices, and the role of gender to better illuminate the challenges for post-conflict reconstruction. The article concludes with recommendations for improving future partnerships between insiders and outsiders in Cambodian peace-building projects.

  • Generally speaking, NGO studies have focused their attention on the organisational unit and its role in shaping development outcomes. With few exceptions, the analysis of development partnerships, in which NGOs play a crucial role, has largely been confined to examination of 'donors' and 'receivers' and not the dynamics within organisational settings. This article is concerned with the interface between local and international staff operating within Lao-based international NGOs. The research relied on interviews with local and international staff and sought to examine how staff themselves interpreted the process of 'localisation' in the context of their own professional experience.

  • Gender studies in general, and Gender and Development (GAD) in particular, through their belief in a cultural conditioning of gender behaviour, use the idea of 'culture' in a restrictive sense which perpetuates a conceptual difference between men and women, and also between First World and Third World women. There is a tendency among gender experts to magnify the difference between men and women, and categorise them into two radically different realms. This article argues for a gender project based on the idea of culture as lived experience. It approaches gender not as a category of exclusion but as a problematic construct that is constantly restructuring itself.

  • Food is crucial to an adequate standard of living. The acknowledgement of the right to food in government policies is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, particularly in relation to food insecurity. It allows the right-holder to seek redress and hold government accountable for non-fulfilment. With reference to Indonesia, the article highlights deficits in meeting obligations to the right to food as stipulated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The state links food policy to the issue of national stability, with a resulting focus on the national rather than household or individual levels, and the inhibition at the grassroots of the right to food.

  • It has been two years since the World Bank launched its World Development Report (WDR) 2008. The Report made a number of observations, based on research papers and reports contributed by various economists and scholars. This review essay assesses the prospects and problems associated with Indian agriculture in the light of the Report.

  • The author participated in the IUCN World Conservation Congress (5-14 October 2008), both the Forum events and pre-selected Learning Sessions, including forest carbon inventory, and multilateral negotiations. The sessions highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary approaches and of treating indigenous knowledge as seriously as rigorous hard science. The gravity of climate change was fully recognised. Success stories gave important encouragement and knowledge-capital for conservation, while case studies showed that protected areas should be made as diverse and harmonious as the human landscape that they are affecting.

  • Over the past two decades Development in Practice has published a great many articles on approaches to and methods of managing development assistance, including two complete issues dedicated to the topic, as well as several titles in our book series (in particular Eade et al. 2000; Roper et al. 2003; Eade 2003). While conventional aid-management tools such as log frames have consistently earned contributors' disapproval, in particular for their formulaic view of causality, this is not to imply that participatory 'bottom-up' methods have remained immune from criticism. On the contrary, the critiques of 'participation' are too numerous to cite - 350 at the last count - although Anacleti (1993), Craig and Porter (1997), Jackson (1997), Leal (2007), Mompati and Prinsen (2000), Ngunjiri (1998), Simon et al. (2003), and White (1996) are worthy of particular note.

    For the most part, as one would expect, our contributors have focused on the practical implications flowing from the adoption of one or another orthodoxy or methodology. The current issue therefore represents something of a departure in focusing more on the theoretical frameworks and assumptions that underpin the ways in which 'aided development'1 is approached.

    Sarah C. White examines the concept of wellbeing, which, she argues, is a social process that is both material and subjective, but is most importantly embedded in people's relationships with each other and with the state. This view implies that, rather than being a simple target or an 'outcome to be sought', wellbeing is both a means and an end; and that if wellbeing shapes and is shaped by the ways in which people engage with the world, then it follows that working for the wellbeing of people who are poor and excluded is indeed a transformational project. Alexandre Apsan Frediani looks at the influential work of Amartya K. Sen on human capabilities, and in particular his emphasis on multi-dimensionality, agency, and empowerment, but he argues that this as yet lacks comprehensive application beyond the field of development economics. Compared with other approaches, namely the Rights-Based Approach and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, the Capability Approach does, however, have the potential to challenge existing paradigms and provide a grounded alternative to 'business as usual'. Adam Fforde also suggests that the 'one size fits all' orthodoxy has lost its authority, because the empirical failure of predictive policies - policy X will necessarily lead to outcome Y - has made their intellectual bankruptcy abundantly clear. At the same time, there is a need for development practice to understand inconsistency, to distinguish between the types and degrees of inconsistency that really matter, and by extension to organise itself around the insight that knowledges are socially constructed. Hans Peter Ulrich looks instead to Systems Thinking as a way to understand development as a kind of supra-system that both encompasses numerous layered sub-systems and is itself embedded in or affected by many dimensions that are outside what is conventionally considered to fall within the realm of development and international co-operation. He locates the shortcomings of the aid architecture in a lack of adequate mechanisms of control and accountability throughout the entire system.

    Other contributors examine the place of formal and informal learning in development practice. Karim-Aly Kassam describes the transformation of a university course of development studies from a reliance on book learning, or 'knowing that', to engagement with the socio-cultural and ecological contexts, or 'knowing how'. The linking of education to the social consequences of that learning entails understanding 'the consequences of action', and the students therefore become ethically engaged 'citizen-scholars'. As the author concludes: 'This type of learning may not achieve knowing how in the sense of the “development expert”, but it articulates a process for students who aspire to excellence in professional engagement and civil life'. Edward R. Carr recounts his own experience in Ghana to illustrate the tendency of 'formal' development to discount informal local narratives, different ways of knowing what is needed and of interpreting the meaning of aid interventions; and a corresponding tendency to treat them as a source of 'local colour' to enliven stolid reports, or as anecdotes to liven up the classroom (and in so doing to assert the teacher's global experience). He argues that genuinely listening to and reflecting on such narratives is an essential step towards decentring the ways in which development is defined, articulated, and practised. Using precisely such a narrative, Linje Manyozo illustrates his claim that when theory emerges from and is embedded in practice - praxis - it can be affirming and liberating; but that when development experts come in with their own ideas about how things should be done, it is time to 'start writing an obituary for that development intervention'. Oluwatoyin Dare Kolawole drives this point home in his article on the importance of drawing on a wide range of disciplines, not only in development studies but more importantly in shaping development practice. Yi-Lee Wong shows what can go wrong when well-intended donors and their operational partners attempt to import their own solutions to problems as they have defined them - in this case solutions from the West being applied to post-Soviet higher education systems - rather than taking the time to look, listen, and learn.

    Bejoy K. Thomas likens the emergence of the Free and Open Source Software movement, including developments such as wikis and Open Access, to participation 'at the top', as distinct from the development nostrums of bottom-up participation. A synthesis between the two could point to new ways to conceptualise development in the Knowledge Society. Claire Heffernan and Jun Yu introduce the example of a software programme designed to enable policy makers and researchers to envisage the specific impacts of particular interventions on poor farmers - vaccination against common livestock diseases, for instance. User-generated content means that information can be shared and therefore acted upon almost as soon as it is available. Simon Starling describes efforts to monitor and evaluate NGO advocacy in campaigning organisations that tend not to reward learning and reflection, concluding that to be useful these activities need to mirror the iterative and adaptive processes of the campaign, rather than being seen as rigid plans. All three of these contributors thus point to the need to see knowledges as emergent 'where people have seized upon spaces where things are not well defined, or where things can happen when someone else is not looking' (Craig and Porter 1997: 236).

    References

    1. Anacleti, Odhiambo (1993) Research into local culture: implications for participatory development. Development in Practice 3:1 , pp. 44-48. [informaworld]
    2. Craig, David andPorter, Doug (1997) Framing participation: development projects, professionals, and organisations. Development in Practice 7:3 , pp. 229-236.
    3. Eade, Deborah Eade, Deborah (ed) (2003) Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections Oxfam GB , Oxford
    4. Eade, Deborah , Hewitt, Tom andJohnson, Hazel Eade, Deborah , Hewitt, Tom andJohnson, Hazel (eds) (2000) Development and Management: Experiences in Value-based Conflict Oxfam GB, in association with The Open University , Oxford
    5. Ellerman, David (2005) Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance University of Michigan Press , Ann Arbor, MI
    6. Fernando Udan (2009) Review of Alan Fowler and Kees Biekart (2008) Civic Driven Change: Citizens' Imagination in Action, The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, Development and Change 40 (4): 804-6.
    7. Jackson, Cecile (1997) Sustainable development at the sharp end: field-worker agency in a participatory project. Development in Practice 7:3 , pp. 237-247. [informaworld]
    8. Kaplan, Allan (1996) The Development Practitioners' Handbook Pluto Press , London
    9. Leal, Pablo Alejandro (2007) Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era. Development in Practice 17:4&5 , pp. 539-548. [informaworld]
    10. Mompati, Tlamelo andPrinsen, Gerard (2000) Ethnicity and participatory methods in Botswana: some participants are to be seen and not heard. Development in Practice 10:5 , pp. 625-637. [informaworld]
    11. Ngunjiri, Eliud (1998) Participatory methodologies: double-edged swords. Development in Practice 8:4 , pp. 466-470. [informaworld]
    12. Roper, Laura , Pettit, Jethro andEade, Deborah Roper, Laura , Pettit, Jethro andEade, Deborah (eds) (2003) Development and the Learning Organisation Oxfam GB, in association with the Institute of Development Sudies and Oxfam America , Oxford
    13. Simon, David , McGregor, Duncan F. M. , Nsiah-Gyabaah, Kwasi andThompson, Donald A. (2003) Poverty elimination, North-South research collaboration, and the politics of participatory development. Development in Practice 13:1 , pp. 40-56. [informaworld]
    14. White, Sarah C. (1996) Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of participation. Development in Practice 6:1 , pp. 6-15. [informaworld]
     

    Notes

    I thank Udan Fernando (2009) for this useful term, which highlights the fact that, despite the dominant discourse, development (and indeed humanitarian assistance) is not defined by the aid industry. Indeed it has been argued, by commentators from grassroots practitioners to former World Bank political economists, that sustainable development takes place despite rather than thanks to external intervention (see for example Kaplan 1996; Ellerman 2005).
     

  • This article presents a framework for analysing wellbeing in development practice, drawing on the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group (WeD). Wellbeing is viewed as a social process with material, relational, and subjective dimensions. Wellbeing may be assessed at individual and collective levels, but at base is something that happens in relationship - between individual and collective; between local and global; between people and state. The article considers potential hazards in taking wellbeing as focus, and concludes by considering what real difference such a focus could make.

  • Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach is increasingly influential in the literature of development economics. It has contributed to development discourse by strengthening the multidimensional approach to poverty analysis and stressing the importance of focusing on agency and empowerment. Nevertheless, the Capability Approach has not yet been applied comprehensively beyond development economics. This article assesses the contribution of the Capability Approach to the field of development planning, by comparing it with the rights-based approach (RBA) and the sustainable-livelihoods framework (SLF). The article argues that by focusing on the capability space, power relations, and participation, the Capability Approach has the potential to become a normative framework to radicalise development practices.
     

  • Taking as its point of departure the failure of the ‘policy science’ project, the article discusses the declining authority of ‘one size fits all’ policy advice. It relates this to the absence of a robust empirical basis for such positions, as shown by the cross-country regressions literature, and relates it also to changes in a range of disciplines, including natural sciences and mathematics. It discusses the rising tolerance for inconsistency between implementation logics and argues that these issues, while of general importance, are most obvious in the context of development, where ‘one size fits all’ policy logics have been heavily contested.

  • Howis book-learning at university made relevant to societal needs?What pedagogical framework helps to transform students from those who know about major challenges of the twenty-first century to those who know how to respond to such challenges in a particular socio-cultural and ecological context? This narrative about the practical experience of Canadian students in two separate international-development classes shows that learning is ultimately about linking the education of students to its consequences for communities and society. The students’ maturation from a community of enquirers to a community of social practice is not just an intellectual transformation from ‘knowing that’ to ‘learning how’, but also the development of a heightened ethical awareness of the consequential link between freedom and responsibility.

  • The stories that we hear as we conduct development research or implement development projects are often relegated to the margins of development studies. This article argues that these stories require our attention, for they are windows on to indigenous narratives of development and our placement in those narratives. Examining these stories as efforts to emplot experiences of development and encounters with development professionals within particular narratives enables us to better understand our own positionality in the communities in which we work, and therefore better understand the opportunities and challenges that our research/interventions present to the emergence of a truly participatory development.

  • The article primarily seeks to show the interconnectedness of diverse academic disciplines and their crucial role in development practice. It sheds light on the meanings of developmentrelated concepts and seeks to delineate between the four inter-related concepts of multi-, inter-, trans-, and cross-disciplinarity. It argues that while inter-disciplinarity is desirable for a broad-based discipline such as Development Studies, the appropriateness of the concept when juxtaposed with trans-disciplinarity seems somewhat inadequate. Buttressing the importance of the contributions of all disciplines and of course development initiatives to Development Studies, case studies of failed water and agricultural projects – which never incorporated vital and cognate expertise – in the South are, thus, provided in the discourse.

  • The reliance of development NGOs on donor funding exposes them to the danger of formulating programmes geared to meeting the needs of the donors, rather than those of local beneficiaries. In the worst-case scenario, NGOs may exacerbate existing problems through interventions that reinforce their own dominance and undermine local empowerment. This article examines some of the practices of one international NGO which worked in the field of higher education in three former Soviet countries.

  • Every day 25,000 people die of hunger and hunger-related causes. While it is recognised that the international development system is not as effective as it should be, years of endeavours to achieve greater harmonisation of international aid and to create an effective architecture pass by without adequate results. The article introduces a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of the international development system, based on fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking. It discusses the complex systemic challenges to development and suggests that more effective control is a key precondition for greater effectiveness in development as a whole.

  • There is a certain kind of thinking prevailing among Western thinkers which sacrifices rich narratives for theory. Theory becomes a prison, limiting knowledge production to references to (largely Western) scholarship. However, theory is not inaccessible: theory is coherent, theory is liberating, theory is narrative, it is everyday. This post-colonist auto-ethnographic orality uses personal experiences as a theoretical tool for explaining that in development thinking the ‘experts’ are morally and ideologically distant from local people, knowledge, and places, and hence they are illegitimate representatives who should never be consulted in the first place.

  • The possibilities and limits of participation at the ‘bottom’ (represented, for example, by PRA and PLA) have been well articulated in development literature. However, the emergence of the Knowledge Society has opened up spaces for what we could call participation at the ‘top’ (free software, wiki, open access), the implications of which Development Studies is only beginning to grapple with. Building upon recent debates on the issue, we take the cases of the free software movement and participatory development, arguing that they share common ground in several ways. We aim to offer a few pointers on conceptualising development in the Knowledge Society.

  • This article examines Oxfam GB’s learning from its attempts to improve monitoring and evaluation (M&E) processes within a global advocacy campaign. It outlines the Climate Change campaign team’s practical experience of piloting different approaches to M&E, and the lessons emerging from the process. The experience suggests that while some ‘traditional’ elements of M&E are helpful in advocacy work, a greater focus on light, real-time monitoring systems is necessary. The findings highlight the organisational as well as methodological challenges of integrating M&E into advocacy campaigns: without a culture that rewards reflection and learning, improvements in staff capacities or data-collection systems will not be sustained. Indeed, the process of improving M&E practice mirrors that of an advocacy campaign itself, requiring analysis of power relations, opportunities, and constraints; monitoring of progress; and adapting plans on the basis of on-going learning. Finally, the article suggests possible ways forward, based on experience.

  • Pro-poor decision making depends on an understanding of the complexities and interrelationships between household livelihood, demographic, and economic factors. This article describes the design and implementation of the Poverty Assessor, a software programme to assist practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in visualising the direct impacts on poverty of specific livelihood factors and events among populations living in poverty. The software enables users to upload their own data and profile households in relation to the national poverty line, by selecting from a range of demographic and livelihood indicators. The authors present findings from the programme, using a dataset from Bolivia.

  • If only for their own organisational reasons, aid agencies tend to divide the world into large regions, a practice which encourages unhelpful generalisations and limits their ability to perceive gradual and sometimes significant changes. Policy and practice can be slow to catch up with slow-moving trends - for instance, the fact that although sub-Saharan Africa may be predominantly rural, it is nevertheless home to 10 per cent of the world's urban population. Or that Latin America was 'returning' to democratic rule, when many countries in the region had never really experienced it. Shorthand representations can tend to reduce a region to single issues, such as international debt, or conflict, or HIV and AIDS, or corruption, almost to the exclusion of a wider picture. This matters, given that the way in which a region is depicted will shape aid priorities. Clearly these depictions are themselves influenced by history - one will search in vain for articles in the British press about francophone Africa - but they also depend heavily on the most influential brokers. Adebayo Olukoshi illustrates the ways in which African intellectual production is rendered invisible in all the major reports of all the United Nations specialised agencies, and not merely those of the World Bank - which has re-cast itself as a Knowledge Bank. He points out that African perspectives are absent not only from the agencies' global reports, but even from those that are focused on sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that this 'knowledge' is at best imperfect and at worst based on a Northern ideological narrative does little to tarnish its veneer of authority.1

    It is with these caveats in mind, then, that this issue of Development in Practice presents articles from and about sub-Saharan Africa. Two of the contributions stand out, however, in revealing the limitations of geographical boundaries as defining shared interests. Nana Akua Anyidoho highlights the fact that if 'participation' is to have any real meaning, participants must be able to determine their own communities and connections in exercising agency; this is fundamentally different from being mobilised to join in X or Y pre-determined development project. Coming from a different perspective, Niamh Gaynor compares the PRSP process in Malawi with the Social Policy process in Ireland to argue not only that the similarities are important, but that drawing such trans-boundary connections may make 'another globalisation' possible, as the World Social Forum would express it. Mary Ssonko Nabacwa examines the various ways in which governments can silence inconvenient sources of knowledge, without needing to resort to heavy-handed tactics. With reference to NGO advocacy on gender-equity issues in Uganda, she illustrates the many ways in which NGOs can be tamed and may indeed comply with this process. Sally Reith, also focusing on Uganda, shows how the work of a small NGO can be distorted by Northern donors, who seldom hesitate to use their greater financial power as a Trojan Horse to impose their own agendas on their local 'partners'. In her article on efforts to combine current thinking about 'the learning organisation' with participatory practices in the field of rural development, Sarah Parkinson recounts the experience of the Ugandan National Agricultural Advisory Service. She concludes that when the two approaches complement each other effectively, some progress can be made towards placing the intended beneficiaries in the driving seat of development.

    In the context of Malawi, Pierson R. T. Ntata considers cash transfers via cash-for-work public-works programmes as a means of addressing hunger, arguing that it is the inability to purchase food, rather than food shortages as such, that is the underlying cause of the problem. Stephen Devereux and Katharine Vincent also focus on the issue of social protection via cash transfers in Malawi, reporting on pilot projects using technology such as smart cards, mobile (cell) phones, mobile ATMs, GPS devices, and biometrics as a relatively low-cost and secure means to reach dispersed or mobile populations.

    Another cluster of articles examines issues relating to ecology. Frik de Beer describes a medicinal-plant conservation project in South Africa which aimed to combine conservation with support for traditional healers as well as protection for national parkland. In practice the efforts to link sustainable livelihoods, community development, and conservation proved more complicated than expected. Thomas K. Erdmann presents a comparable attempt in Madagascar to protect biodiversity conservation, but in this case with too little attention paid initially to the needs of the local population to earn a living from agriculture and forest products. Mbne Diye Faye, John C. Weber, Bayo Mounkoro, and Joseph-Marie Dakouo report on a study of the use of parkland trees planted to ensure household security in Mali, and to earn some revenue from selling agroforestry produce, particularly during the 'hunger period' when grain stores are depleted and farmers await the next harvest. Paul Van Mele, Jonas Wanvoeke, and Esprance Zossou describe the impact of a series of videos produced by the African Rice Centre (WARDA), translated into 30 African languages and given open-air showings throughout the continent. These videos have not only been informative, but have unleashed farmers' creative potential and willingness to experiment, as well as encouraging greater participation by women and younger people.

    Noam Schimmel argues that international aid agencies have largely failed the survivors of genocide in Rwanda, many of whom remain traumatised and impoverished. He calls for assistance focused specifically on these populations, combined with more deliberate attention to their particular needs in mainstream projects. Paul W. K. Yankson reports on the extensive damage done by gold mining to local Ghanaian communities, who are barely compensated by the limited employment opportunities that the industry generates. Though welcome, the attempts at community development now being initiated as an expression of corporate social responsibility predictably leave something to be desired.

    References

    1. Bretton Woods Project (2007) Knowledge Bank-rupted: Evaluation says key World Bank research “not remotely reliable”. — available at http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-549070 (retrieved 22 December 2009)
    2. UNRISD (2004) Social Knowledge and International Policy Making: Exploring the Linkages. Report of the UNRISD Conference Geneva
    Notes

    '… although Africa has always been central to the work of the UN, the organization has tended to serve as a conveyor belt for ideas and perspectives from outside. There has also been serious underrepresentation and sometimes even complete absence of African researchers set up by the UN system. Only very limited use is made of African research, as illustrated in the UN flagship publications, in which an average of only 2 per cent of citations are to such literature. Most are to the UN's own literature, an incestuous dependence that gives only the illusion of debate. African scholars who are involved in the formulation of policy proposals are generally relegated to gathering data and producing case studies; within the division of intellectual labour, their work features in the textboxes while the theoretical frameworks and analysis come from institutions in the North. Furthermore, most input by African scholars is limited to matters concerning Africa, thus consigning their work to a ghetto while also failing to capitalize on the potential for comparative insights'. (UNRISD 2004: 11)
     

  • 'The myth of community' permeates both the understanding and the practice of participatory development. Yet the idea that communities exist as coherent units of people who inhabit bounded geographic spaces and are ready to be mobilised for development restricts the very agency that participation promises. This article offers an alternative model of community: one that is more compatible with the ideal of people-centred, participatory development. Using Etienne Wenger's concept of 'communities of practice', and drawing on narrative theory and cognitive approaches to policy analysis, the article argues that community should be created and sustained around shared meanings.

  • This article presents evidence from Uganda's National Agricultural Advisory Service to argue that the concept of 'the learning organisation' is a valuable complement to participatory development which may facilitate a shift towards more democratic development institutions in which target beneficiaries have a stronger voice in planning and managing development. The concept of 'the learning organisation' as developed within the literature of management studies cannot, however, be readily translated into anything as specific as a clear set of practical guidelines. Rather it acts as a seed that grows to take on characteristics specific to the rural development context.

  • Although global influences - in the form of international finance coupled with discourses of partnership, participation, good governance, and democracy - exercise an increasing influence on national and local governance arrangements worldwide, comparative studies across the traditional South/North divide remain extremely rare. Drawing on findings from a comparative study of Malawi's PRSP and Ireland's national Social Partnership process, this article demonstrates that a shifting of conceptual boundaries beyond traditionally delineated geographic borders is not just valid but essential, in that it helps to reveal new perspectives on the politics underlying globalised development processes and the transformative potential of those processes.

  • Despite a boom in gold mining in Ghana's Wassa West district (WWD), unemployment and poverty have deepened, partly due to loss of farmland to surface mining but more so because of the limited opportunities for wage employment in the district's 'revived' gold-mining industry. However, the large-scale mining companies are implementing some alternative livelihood programmes (ALPs) as part of their corporate social-responsibility (CSR) agenda. While the ALPs have provided some employment and income-earning opportunities and skills training, the prospects for their sustainability depend on how the challenges confronting the various programmes are addressed. This will require a well-coordinated approach involving all the key stakeholders.

  • Providing cash transfers to vulnerable groups reduces vulnerability and chronic poverty; but delivering cash to remote, rural locations can be expensive and insecure. Alternative delivery systems using technology are thus being piloted. This article uses examples from southern Africa to highlight the opportunities and risks involved in using technology to deliver social protection, with particular focus on two schemes in Malawi. It concludes that there is great potential for the use of technology in delivering social protection, especially if employed at a national scale and taking advantage of the full spectrum of uses to ensure cost-efficiency.

  • The need for eco-regional or landscape-scale conservation and development has been widely recognised in Madagascar, yet implementation remains problematic. The approach was initially driven by biodiversity-conservation concerns, without enough emphasis on sustainable development, especially agriculture. Current challenges include consensus building for eco-regional visions, strengthening partnerships with government institutions, and negotiating land-use trade-offs within focal landscapes. Increased attention to revenue generation from agriculture and forest products, as well as enhanced communication and widespread participation by all stakeholders, should augment the success of broad-scale conservation and development programmes.

  • Relations between the Ugandan government and NGOs engaged in gender-focused NGO advocacy tend to keep NGOs visibly engaged but do not necessarily alter the status of poor women. These relations manifest themselves in government advising NGO advocacy work; sympathising with the NGOs; co-opting NGOs and individuals; publicising gender issues; and de-legitimising gender-focused NGO activities. The article links these phenomena to the government's wish to appear receptive to the concerns of civil-society organisations, of which NGOs are a major component. This is important to its image in the international aid community, where it projects itself as generally democratic and supportive of good governance.

  • This Viewpoint argues that international development aid agencies have failed adequately to address the rights and needs of genocide survivors in Rwanda. It illustrates that genocide survivors remain impoverished and marginalised, and that development aid agencies only tangentially, if at all, acknowledge their vulnerability and take steps to empower them to realise their rights. It provides examples of aid programmes that are reaching genocide survivors and urges development aid agencies in Rwanda to design and implement programmes explicitly for genocide survivors.

  • Africa Rice Center (WARDA) facilitated the development and translation of 11 rice videos. From 2005 to 2009, WARDA partners translated them into more than 30 African languages. Open-air video presentations enhanced learning, experimentation, confidence, trust, and group cohesion among rural people. The videos strengthened capacities of more than 500 organisations and hundreds of thousands of farmers. WARDA's integrated rural learning approach also helped women to access new markets and credit. Learning videos allow for unsupervised learning; unleash local creativity and experimentation; facilitate institutional innovations; and improve social inclusion of the poor, youth, and women.

  • Food shortages have become a chronic feature of many sub-Saharan countries, not just because of bad weather but also because of increasing poverty levels. In economies that do not have government social-security programmes, humanitarian relief and safety-net initiatives are imperative to prevent mass starvation. This article discusses the implementation of a cash-for-work programme designed to bridge the hunger gap in Malawi, highlighting its value and drawing lessons for practitioners with regard to the various components of the programme such as design, targeting, and timing, as well as challenges.

  • Native species of trees and shrubs contribute significantly to farmers' livelihoods by supplying food, medicinal products, fodder, and wood. In the case study reported in this article, this contribution to farmers' annual revenue varied from 26 per cent to 73 per cent, and was as high as US$ 650 a year for households for which agroforestry products were the primary source of revenue. Household consumption was not quantified in the study, but farmers' comments confirmed that native trees also played an important role in assuring food security, especially in the 'hunger period' when grain stores are low and farmers are waiting for the next harvest.

  • Over-exploitation of medicinal plants for traditional healing practices endangers pristine conservation areas. In South Africa, the Mpumalanga Parks Board (MPB) attempted through a medicinal-plants project to promote nature conservation and benefit traditional healers. The project was well planned and implemented, infrastructure was created, and a model farm was established to propagate medicinal plants. Yet, although the project was aimed at community development, very little materialised. This article outlines the need for medicinal-plant propagation in South Africa and uses the project to illustrate shortcomings in attempts to link nature conservation with sustainable livelihoods and community development.

  • The term 'partnership' can be considered something of a Trojan Horse, disguising the reality of the complex relationships in imbalances of power and inequality, often expressed through the control of one 'partner' over the other. With particular reference to the experience of a small, UK-based NGO working in Uganda (Hives Save Lives - Africa), this article highlights how power is manifest within donor-NGO partnerships through the control and flow of money; and illustrates that NGOs pursuing funding from donors face many challenges that reinforce this imbalance of power.

  • Education is commonly regarded as a state responsibility. Non-state provision is, however, increasingly prevalent in many developing countries in response to the inaccessibility and poor quality of state provision. Its unplanned growth has led to proposals for developing ‘public–private partnerships’. However, as a number of the papers in this collection indicate, such partnerships are insufficiently developed in national planning, with potentially adverse consequences for equity. More often, non-state providers are attempting to develop relationships with the state, both to strengthen their own service delivery as well as to put pressure on government to improve the quality of its own provision.

  • Emerging trends in reforms of education-sector plans indicate a shift not only in how foreign aid is disbursed, but also in how civil-society actors engage in new policy and advocacy roles. This contribution examines these changing civil-society roles in four countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. While sector-wide approaches have created new opportunities for civil-society participation at the national level, this research suggests that sector reforms have also presented significant challenges for engagement with government and donors. This research emphasises the need for a transparent, regularised, and democratic process for the inclusion of civil-society organisations at the policy table.

  •  

    This contribution examines relationships between international NGOs and state education institutions in their efforts to achieve Education for All. It does this through an investigation of Oxfam GB’s multi-level and multi-strategy approach to education in Tanzania. Looking at three components of this programme, it explores what a ‘one-programme approach’ means for Oxfam GB’s education work and investigates its partnerships and advocacy relationships at the local and national levels with different state education institutions and agents. The boundaries of partnership and collaboration are discussed and it concludes that advocacy practices need to be viewed as multiple, part of a process, and emergent.

  • This contribution reviews ten case studies of complementary education programmes conducted by the USAID-funded Educational Quality Improvement Program 2. The state-non-state relationship in each case is explored to reveal the arrangements that permit non-state providers to extend the reach and improve the effectiveness of education, particularly for populations that are underserved by the state system. Non-state providers improve on the standard models of state schooling by changing the mix of inputs at the school level, altering the institutional incentives that govern how schools operate, and setting up political accountability relationships closer to the points of service delivery.

  • Between 1995-06 and 2005-06, more than 85,000 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years participated in a complementary education programme in rural areas of northern Ghana. School for Life, a non-profit organisation, provides nine months of instruction in the children's spoken language. An impact assessment of the programme demonstrates that complementary education programmes are able to help children attain basic literacy in their mother tongue within a shorter timeframe and more cost-effectively than formal state primary-school systems can.

  • This contribution examines the Government of India's proposed public-private partnership (PPP) strategies in education in its Tenth and Eleventh Five Year Plans. The analysis aims to ascertain the state's role as financier, manager, and regulator of education in view of the proposed PPP strategies. The analysis shows that strategies strongly link PPPs in education with privatisation, and further, that despite assertions of 'a greatly expanded role for the state', the proposed strategies result in a diminished role for the state in education financing, management, and regulation.

  • Madrasas, Islamic schools, are prominent non-state education providers in South Asia, especially for hard-to-reach children in Muslim communities. Recent attention on madrasas has, however, focused on their alleged links with militancy, overshadowing analysis of their role as education providers. Based on a comparative analysis of the state-led madrasa-modernisation programmes in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, which aimed to introduce secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, this contribution argues that madrasas can be important partners to advance Education for All. The forging of such a partnership is, however, contingent on the state making a serious financial commitment to the reform programme and building a trusting relationship with the religious elite.
     

  • Popular-education programmes conducted by social movements are reshaping politics and education in Latin America. Negotiating with governments, they promote social justice while educationally challenging 'neo-liberal' educational standardisation. Moving from a defensive towards an offensive strategy, some movements support themselves economically while developing new educational strategies. They encounter both support and opposition from the social democratic governments in the region. They are at odds with the international bilateral and multilateral organisations that promote neo-liberal top-down policies, and some of these new social movements have moved beyond social action in specific regions and national borders creating regional alliances for their struggle.

  • Collaboration between governments and non-state providers of basic services is increasingly a focus of attention by international agencies and national policy makers. The intention of such collaboration is to support common goals for achieving universal provision. Drawing on research in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the contribution shows that collaboration can be successful where NGOs do not depend on limited sources for their funding, and invest time in building an informal relationship with government officials. In such cases, not only can collaboration strengthen NGO service provision directly, but it also provides opportunities for NGOs to engage in broader policy advocacy through insider influence.

  • This viewpoint uses evaluation reports from Nepal, Afghanistan, and Yemen in order to learn lessons about how donors and governments can work more effectively with non-state actors to deliver education in fragile states. The evaluation framework draws on the Development Assistance Committee principles for good international engagement in fragile states. The analysis concludes that a more effective partnership requires better regulation of non-state actors, increased efforts to build community capacity to hold schools and local government to account for the quality of services, and more upfront and systematic analysis of the conflict dynamics of investment in the education sector.

  • Relations between states and non-state providers in fragile states occur within specific complex political and economic contexts. Moreover, donor approaches to specific fragile states shape the flow and priorities of aid resources. In the health sector, fragile states have dramatically poor health outcomes, with higher mortality and morbidity rates than other low-income, relatively stable states.

  • The Kenyan government introduced free primary education in 2003 in order to universalise access to primary education. Although the policy allows universal coverage, it ought to benefit the poor most as they are the ones who were excluded from the education sector before the policy was introduced. Using household-survey data collected in Nairobi, this contribution assesses the impact of the policy on schooling outcomes of the poor. The findings reveal that the free primary-education policy in Kenya still excludes the poorest of the poor.

  • This short contribution provides a brief history, touching on some of the key trends and turning points in ActionAid's education work, and it documents the evolution of the relationship between ActionAid and governments. The story of ActionAid is illustrative in many ways of wider changes in the NGO sector since the early 1970s.

  • Whether Northern NGOs have willingly embraced or tried to stand out against the New Public Management orthodoxies that have increasingly dominated development and humanitarian assistance over the past 20 years, the assumption remains that their interventions make a sustainable difference to people living in poverty, excluded from decisions and processes that affect their lives. Some NGOs deliberately channel their assistance through local organisations, while others are quicker to take an operational role; some define their interventions in terms of human rights (or rights-based approaches) and gender equity, or issues of class; others would emphasise the inequalities that lie at the heart of capitalist globalisation. They would tend to argue that unless they conform to the demands and expectations of their own donors, they could not raise the money required in order to do their work. There have been attempts at NGO self-regulation, most obviously in the humanitarian sector with initiatives such as the Sphere Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Project, with their roots dating back to the 1994 Code of Conduct for The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief; and organisations such as Keystone are looking at accountability for social change (see, for example, Wilford and Jacobs 2010). But the sector overall seems to take for granted that it is basically on the right tracks.

    It is, then, particularly opportune for Jenny Pearce to ask whether it is possible for Northern NGOs to fund social change in the South and, if so, what they might need to do differently. She argues that the answers will not be found in imposing more and tighter reporting schedules on local counterpart organisations, but in refining NGOs’ conceptualisations of social transformation, which will in turn shape the kinds of relationship that they form, and the role of resource transfer within them. She further argues that theoretical and political clarity about transforming power, not merely ‘doing empowerment’, will also determine how robustly an NGO will resist or modify bureaucratic pressures that run counter to such an agenda. Such a position may, of course, result in reduced budgets, as there will almost always be amore compliant NGO to step in: would any Northern NGO still claim that its goal is to make its own existence unnecessary? Rosemary McGee writes about the difficult balance to be struck between the headquarters of a Northern NGO and its country offices – in this case in Colombia. While it is understandable that such agencies wish to establish organisation-wide policies and procedures, interpreting them will require flexibility in each specific context, in order to keep faith with the underlying principles. The ‘radical practice of partnership’ is indeed the only meaningful way to work in situations that are marked by complex political violence. Moire O’Sullivan pursues the partnership issue in her article about the realisation by Concern Worldwide of the discrepancy between its definition of partnership and the range of relationships in which it was actually involved; she describes how the agency mapped these relationships in order to help staff to be clearer, and therefore more discerning, about the nature of their engagement with local organisations. Barry Cannon describes an Active Citizenship programme in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, which comprised a number of initiatives aimed at strengthening the capacity of local civil-society organisations
    (CSOs) to engage in public action to influence the policy process, and which also included an NGO diploma. This again highlights the importance of having clear theoretical positions regarding, for instance, the definition and role(s) of civil society, and a well-informed sense of the political space within which civil society and CSOs specifically can operate – although recent events in Honduras took even seasoned observers by surprise. Richard English presents brief examples from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, where collective action has successfully brought about change via well-researched advocacy or has by the power of example influenced national policy.

    A further set of articles focuses on economic issues with reference to Latin America. Jason Spellberg and Morgan Kaplan attribute the failure of US policies to eradicate the cocaine trade to the lack of viable economic alternatives for Andean coca producers. This results in the intensification of US military efforts, which further alienates small farmers without achieving the principal objectives. The authors call instead for USAID and other donors to enable local producers to form co-operative industries that would make selling high-quality processed products to international markets sufficiently profitable for them to abandon coca production voluntarily. William F. Waters addresses the current interest in conditional cash transfers as a means of fostering social development, in particular health and education, focusing his attention on their application among indigenous communities in Panama. The lessons drawn from his qualitative research are that, to be effective, programmes depending on co-responsibility need first and foremost to respect and be imaginative about how to incorporate cultural norms and expectations, must be properly explained in the local language, and then should be consistently available to the intended beneficiaries; he argues also that conditional cash transfers are only part of a far wider picture and are not in themselves a development solution. Hugo Santana de Figueirêdo Jr and Bryanna Millis assess the impacts of regulatory reforms on the Brazilian cashew-nut industry, using a value-chain approach to identify constraints and to develop a consensus on necessary reforms, specifically tax and credit regulations, required to make the industry more competitive internationally.

    Joel F. Audefroy compares experiences of emergency and post-emergency housing programmes in Latin America and Asia, particularly following major catastrophes, highlighting good practices in relation to the design of temporary shelter and permanent housing, use of local materials, skills, tools, and technology, and the encouragement of participatory processes of decision making and evaluation. Traffic accidents are responsible for 1.2 million fatalities a year worldwide and are a leading cause of avoidable death. Ruth Salmon and William Eckersley argue, however, that much education on road safety is inappropriate and impractical; they present a pioneering community-managed programme in Ethiopia which might be adapted for use in other settings. Finally, Matt Grainger reports on the November 2009 World Summit on Food Security, concluding that despite its obvious failings there was one breakthrough that could, if it gains sustained international support, ensure a co-ordinated global approach to food security. But whether governments will ever voluntarily put the needs of the world’s majority above the demands of their domestic constituencies remains a moot point.

    Reference
    Wilford, Robyn and Alex Jacobs (2010) ‘Listen First: a pilot system for managing downward accountability in NGOs’, Development in Practice 20 (7), forthcoming.
     

  • Northern NGOs have come under critical scrutiny since the 1990s, often with negative conclusions as organisations which had supported radical social change in the 1970s and 1980s have since turned themselves into a professionalised and bureaucratic aid sector. The article focuses on the Northern NGOs that purport to fund progressive social change and which encourage beneficiaries to question market and political power, and on the NGOs to which they channel funds in Latin America. After examining various types of critique, the article asks whether it is not only dangerous in practice to fund social change but also misguided in principle, or whether there remain ways to use resources to enhance the capacity of local change agents to make the choices that they deem appropriate. It concludes that much depends on the theory and practice of social change that underpin the resource transfer, particularly in relation to the transformation of power (as opposed to ‘empowerment’), to social activism, and to the robustness of efforts within NGOs to resist or modify bureaucratic imperatives from back-donors.

  • Certain contexts render particularly challenging the disjunctures and discontinuities between international NGO (INGO) headquarters and in-country operations, as this Christian Aid case demonstrates. Torn loyalties result when seeking to discern how best to work with partners in a human-rights crisis in a middle-income country. Navigating these challenges requires a critical interrogation and radical practice of partnership. With many INGOs partially or wholly decentralising operations, and in anomalous and complex INGO programme contexts like this, it is vital to analyse the disjunctures and to support in-country staff to respond creatively to them, to do justice to programme potential and partnership principles.

  • This article places the experiences of the Active Citizenship in Central America project, led by Dublin City University, within wider discussions on the role of civil society in building democracy and furthering development. The article examines project development and content and assesses its effectiveness, using a framework derived from Nancy Fraser’s (1993) concept of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ publics. It finds that the project oscillates between these positions, and it makes policy recommendations to help to move it closer to a ‘strong publics’ conception. It ends by asserting that in the current conjuncture a ‘strong publics’ conception is a useful guiding principle for the design of development projects to strengthen civil society.

  • From United Nations emergency responses involving tent camps, to the reconstruction approach of FUNDASAL in El Salvador and the post-disaster provision of housing by Caritas in Asia, it is clear that a giant step has been taken in thinking about emergency shelter, as well as about how prevention and reconstruction are managed. This article evaluates some current good practices in Asia and Latin America in post-disaster emergency shelter that use local skills, materials, and tools, and participatory processes.

  • Governments in Latin America and elsewhere have implemented conditional cash-transfer programmes to improve standards of living in populations defined as vulnerable and excluded from the benefits of development, in order to improve access to education and health services, and to improve human capital. Qualitative research conducted among three indigenous groups in Panama provides lessons for assessing these programmes on the basis of the perceptions and culturally informed beliefs and practices of potential beneficiaries. This article shows that required co-responsibilities should be matched with high-quality services that are consistently available and socially, culturally, and linguistically appropriate.

  • Since the 1980s, the USA has fought cocaine in the Andes with carrots and sticks: interdiction and crop eradication wield the sticks, while Alternative Development (AD), which offers economic assistance to farmers who voluntarily abandon illicit cultivation, provides the carrots. Yet cocaine continues to permeate US streets, and rural Andean communities remain isolated from the legitimate economy. Many critics blame US belligerence for compounding the Andean drug war. The underlying problem with the existing strategy, however, might not be the aggressiveness of its military sticks, but the flimsiness of its development carrots. The inability of AD to persuade farmers to abandon coca cultivation may be causing US policy makers to over-apply military solutions – often inflaming rural communities and exacerbating regional instability in so doing. Few legal crops can match the earning power of coca. The article therefore suggests that the US carrot could be made more attractive by adopting a Venture Development model which helps rural farmers to process their legal produce into highquality finished goods that command premium prices. Such a strategy could conceivably choke the cocaine engine by applying market-based forces to address market-based realities.

  • This work evaluates regulatory impacts on the Brazilian cashew industry through the pilot use of CIBER, a value-chain-based approach, to identify and measure regulatory constraints and to enact regulatory reforms in donor-funded development projects. Drawing from secondary sources complemented by primary field research, all the CIBER-suggested steps are followed. The results reveal that tax and credit regulations should be priorities to improve the competitiveness of the cashew business in Brazil, and that CIBER can be an effective tool to expand industry analysis and to design reform strategies towards improved competitiveness.

  • It is very motivating to see vulnerable people becoming strong advocates for their own rights and persuading their government to act; or to see passionate young economists influencing the state and effecting positive change for tens of thousands of poor households. It is impressive to see dedicated work by a national NGO to build successful community health-care programmes that influence the health services of a whole country. The three stories from the Caucasus presented in this article show what can be done when people become strong advocates for their own rights or for the rights of others living in poverty.

  • Traffic crashes kill 1.2 million people annually, and the number is growing fast, particularly in developing countries. Although child road-safety education is widely considered important, few programmes have resulted in demonstrated improvements in safety. We review road-safety education in Ethiopia and conclude that it is often locally inappropriate and impractical. Such programmes are frequently based on dominant but ineffective educational models imported from other contexts. Drawing on our experience of establishing a community-managed child roadsafety education programme in Ethiopia, we suggest how road-safety education in developing countries might become more effective.

  • Despite its adoption of a partnership approach within its countries of operation, Concern Worldwide has struggled to match its definition of partnership with the range of relationships in which it actually engages on the ground. A relationship-mapping diagram conceived during its Partnership Policy formulation workshop has now helped to bridge this gap between theory and reality. Country programmes have also found that the process and result of such mapping exercises help them to recognise what relationships they have, and in turn which relationships they need, in order to achieve results.

  • It may not be scientific, but it was interesting to hear journalists passing judgement among themselves on the 2009 World Food Summit organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. ‘A waste of time and money’, one told this author. ‘What did it achieve? Nothing.’ The BBC and other news crews had already packed up their gear and departed well before the final day because, they said, the story had gone: ‘Our editorial desks have lost interest in it’. Journalists had no alternative but to conclude that the Summit was a failure and disappointment. Oxfam rated it two out of ten (a generous rating, they could have given it one out of ten). ActionAid said that the Summit had thrown away a great chance of stopping a billion people going hungry.

    The meeting’s host, Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf, said he ‘regretted’ that the Declaration did not mention new targets or deadlines for tackling global hunger; he even went so far as to say that he was out of the room when it had been finalised on Day 1. These were extraordinary statements for him to make. It was taken as confirmation from on high that all action and ambition had been knowingly stripped out of the summit, leaving it as an empty talk-shop. Diouf’s candour made it easy for journalists to savage his Summit but, even so, the UN and country delegates did not seem to have any plan or inclination to defend it at the end. This was more than a PR glitch. Rich countries in particular seemed to have calculated that they did not need to invest much political capital in the Summit, because they would not lose any should it fail. And they were right: the Summit simply whimpered to an end, with everyone and no-one to blame. This kind of political cost–benefit calculation was played out again a month later, but with a far different outcome, at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, where leaders who did personally and substantively invest in a successful outcome emerged severely bruised from another ‘disappointing’ UN process, amid much more noise and hostility. There was never a danger of news crews walking away early from the Copenhagen story, which at least meant that we were left with a better idea of why things happened as they did. So what went wrong in Rome – and did anything go right?

    From the beginning the UN, aided by campaigning NGOs, set the context for the 2009 World Summit on Food Security as being the worst moment for human hunger in recorded history. For the first time, the number of hungry people on Earth had topped one billion (in fact well over a billion and rising fast). So there was a general expectation that this was a summit that really did matter. However, behind the scenes a different judgement had already been made: no G8 leader ever intended to urn up to the Rome Summit (bar Silvio Berlusconi, who lived just a short taxiride
    away). Before it had even started, rich countries had dismissed it as a potential theatre of action because they had already pledged US$ 20 billion to tackle global hunger earlier in the year at the L’Aquila G8 meeting. Insider wisdom said that the rich-country governments were not prepared to go further than that at yet another summit (and one that they did not want), especially because the potentially big-spending conference on climate change was scheduled to take place in a few weeks’ time. Diouf and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon tried inventing some moral and political momentum (and media coverage) by staging a personal 24-hour hunger strike, but among journalists and others this was seen as a stunt born (at least a little) in desperation. The media were interested in critics saying that absent G8 leaders had caused the imminent failure of the Rome Summit on Food Security, but while this was certainly true to some extent, the G8 leaders did not cancel en masse at the last minute. The UN was long aware that its summit – for all of its life-and-death importance – was not politically popular within the G8. However, in stark contrast, a large number of leaders from developing countries did want this Summit and believed that it mattered enough for them to attend personally.

    Even given the high level of disregard by some, and cynicism among many others, the Final Declaration was still extraordinarily bland. Instead of specific plans to halve global hunger by 2015, countries could only come up with a vague statement to ‘take action . . . at the earliest possible date’. Countries could have declared a rescue package for the Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger by finding up to US$ 40 billion a year, with half of it going to farming, transport, and market systems that support smallholder farmers, and the other half to reformed food-aid and emergency interventions and social protections. But all they could manage in the end was to ‘be ready to increase the percentage of ODA to go to agriculture’ if countries wanted that. The meeting should have increased support to the kinds of sustainable farming method that would help poor farmers to feed their families and increase their income. According to Oxfam, that this did not happen tainted the Summit with arguably its worst failure.

    However, the Summit did agree to empower the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The CFS will, it said, become the foremost inter-government platform for the development of global policies and strategies in support of countries’ plans to enable poor farmers and farm workers and consumers to achieve food security and sustainable livelihoods. Groups and organisations including NGOs, UN agencies, IFIs, the WTO, and private-sector associations will feed into this newly strengthened CFS, whose annual meetings will from now on be ‘mini-world food summits’ with ministerial representation. Although not headline-friendly, the empowerment of the CFS was a significant result from the Rome Summit; indeed, it could one day prove to have been historic. One of the biggest handicaps in tackling human hunger to date has been the complete lack of co-ordination among governments and UN, Bretton Woods, and non-government agencies. A revamped CFS could fix that, if all countries commit to it, both politically and financially. It could increase global co-ordination, coherence, and accountability, especially between humanitarian and development assistance for food security.

    But even this one victory of a failed summit is far from secure and harmonious. It could yet all unravel. Some governments are unconvinced that the CFS should have such power, or that it can be effective across 191 member states. These concerns are not groundless. Among the G8 countries, the USA, the UK, and Canada – plus Australia and New Zealand – are pushing for global agricultural funding and strategies to be channelled through the World Bank via the ‘L’Aquila Food Security Initiative’ instead. This raises fears that the beneficiaries will not be poor people in developing countries, but those living in the rich countries. The World Bank is clearly a strong advocate of economic liberalisation and of agricultural methods that may not be wholly appropriate and sustainable for poor farmers. Rich countries have pledged US$ 20 bn over three years to the L’Aquila Initiative – and hence possibly the reason why they did not really want to engage at a high level in Rome; however, only about a quarter of that money appears now to be new. There are a number of other initiatives to tackle global hunger similar to the L’Aquila Initiative which, unless they become part of a CFS-led co-ordination effort, could end up undermining the entire CFS process. The idea of a democratic CFS where all stakeholders have a voice is a good one, but in order to gain credibility it must put paid to a lot of scepticism first.

    In terms of who will make the big decisions on global food governance and food security (and in whose interests), the Rome Summit on Food Security left many questions unanswered. Will governments continue to exploit natural resources in an unsustainable way to feed rich-world consumption and profit patterns? Will they choose a greener, fairer path and invest in smallholder farmers in developing countries and encourage responsible business behaviour? How will governments organise themselves to raise and spend to fairly promote food security and sustainable livelihoods in a carbon-constrained world? Who will regulate agribusiness, and how? There remains a lot still to play for in 2010.
     

    The author
    Matt Grainger is Head of Media at Oxfam International.
     

  • In 'The F-word and the S-word - too much of one and not enough of the other', by Cassandra Balchin (Development in Practice, volume 17, numbers 4 & 5: 532-8, DOI: 10.1080/09614520701469500), a statement on page 535 read as follows:

    Meanwhile, gender specialists working in international development and human-rights NGOs continue to find acceptance for the simple message that fundamentalism is bad for women's health.

    It should have read:

    Meanwhile, gender specialists working in international and human-rights NGOs still find it hard to get acceptance for the simple message that fundamentalism is bad for women's health.

    Deborah Eade, the Editor-in-Chief, takes full responsibility for this error, for which she offers her sincere apologies to the author and to readers.
     

  • This special issue of Development in Practice is dedicated to Natalia Streuli Wilson (1976–2012), who sadly passed away prior to its publication following a brave struggle against cancer. Natalia conducted her doctoral fieldwork in a Young Lives site in Peru and worked with Young Lives from 2008 until her death; initially in Oxford, and more recently in Lima, she had taken on the role of a lead qualitative researcher for Peru. Natalia was a highly valued and committed member of the team whose contribution will have lasting effect on our research and policy engagement. A cherished friend, she is sorely missed by everyone.

  • This special issue on child protection reflects a growing awareness among many researchers and practitioners of the sheer numbers of boys and girls in developing countries who continue to be exposed to poverty and other related adversities, despite recent concerted efforts to improve children's survival and well-being. There is evidence that too often our efforts to protect children are not as effective as we hope and, worse, there have been nagging suspicions that they are sometimes even misguided and counterproductive. It has gradually become clear that the challenge to understand why and how children become vulnerable flows into the challenge of understanding why and how our efforts to protect them succeed or fail. It is that question that this journal issue addresses.

    The Oak Foundation was concerned to better understand some of the numerous risks confronted by children in developing countries, taking into account as far as possible boys' and girls' own perspectives, and to propose ways forward for policy: to this end, the Foundation was keen to initiate an exchange between researchers and practitioners by funding a workshop hosted by the Young Lives study in Oxford in May 2011. Independent scholars and Young Lives staff were brought together to share findings from their research with children in diverse contexts and consider the implications for policy. The contributors are all experienced researchers and practitioners who have worked for many years with children in developing countries. It soon became apparent in the workshop that participants shared a critical perspective on current policies and a consensus was reached on the need for new approaches. The articles presented here reflect this critical perspective and offer suggestions for reform based on empirical findings around a range of child protection concerns, including children's work, independent migration, family separation, early marriage, and military occupation. The introduction and concluding reflections, co-authored by Michael Bourdillon and William Myers, who also facilitated the workshop, draw out the key messages. Together, these contributions provide an important body of knowledge which is applicable to humanitarian and development policy and practice.

    Young Lives' involvement in this work has been motivated by evidence emerging from the study that poverty is a key indicator for multiple risks in children. Building on a multidisciplinary perspective and using a mix of survey and qualitative data, the study is tracking 12,000 children, their households, and communities over 15 years, in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru, and Vietnam. The boys and girls in the sample are in two age groups, one born around 2000–2001 and the second, 1994–1995. They were drawn randomly from approximately 20 poor rural and urban sites in each country that were selected to reflect country diversity in terms of livelihoods, ethnicity, religion, and other social determinants. 

    For more information about Young Lives, visit www.younglives.org.uk. Longer versions of several of the articles in this special issue can be found on the Young Lives website (searchable at www.younglives.org.uk/our-publications).

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.672963

     

  • This paper introduces the special issue. It first places the protection of children in the context of development studies. It goes on to outline current international trends in the protection of children and raises questions about them. Finally, it introduces the papers in the issue and highlights how they speak to the questions raised.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672962

  • Many claims are made for the role of research in development, their proponents divided very broadly into those who focus on its potential influence on policy and those more concerned with its impact on practical outcomes. A further divide exists between 'professional' researchers, whose careers and reputation are dependent on what they produce, versus those who emphasise a more iterative approach, among whom there are many co-producers, including people with no academic ambitions or credentials, none of them claiming sole ownership. And of course there are all sorts of researchers or knowledge-brokers who cross over these boundaries, or fall between them. Central to such considerations are the familiar questions of whose knowledge matters, but also how such knowledge is packaged and for what purpose(s) it is intended.

    An example from my own experience will serve as illustration. We now know that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has, among other things, undermined Mexico's previous self-reliance in the production of staple grains and accelerated the decline of subsistence and self-provisioning agriculture. These processes were already well under way in the far more fragile Central American states in the mid-1980s, although peasant farmers' unions were barely aware of the inexorable shift away from predominantly agrarian economies, and were certainly in no position to see the whole picture. Academic research into the cattle and maize sectors brought these issues to light, but not of course in a form that could be comprehended outside academic departments of economics. The researchers were passionately concerned to convey their findings to the people most affected, via unions representing the rights and interests of peasant farming communities. It is rare, however, that academics - in addition, in this case, foreigners - can communicate their findings in a way that semi-literate rural communities can readily understand and act upon. Most researchers have difficulty even in producing the 'one-side-of-A4' that government officials and policy makers require. Rather than pretending that it was feasible to expect them to do this, a two-pronged approach was taken. On the one hand, a local journalist published a series of newspaper articles highlighting the findings and their implications, which he followed up with interviews with politicians and government officials - effectively sensitising urban public opinion and also creating the environment for social mobilisation. On the other hand, the essential facts were portrayed in narrative form and used as post-literacy material for participants in the union's adult-literacy campaign, serving the dual purpose of provoking new thinking about how they should strategise (specifically, whether it still made sense to promote land seizures, often violent affairs) and creating material that would really engage new readers' interest and thus reinforce their literacy. Nobody would claim that agrarian policies turned around as a result: political and economic forces had always been stacked against such a utopian outcome. But what is clear is that a range of communicators needed to be engaged from the beginning, not to 'dumb down' or sensationalise, but to make development research truly relevant to the shapers of policy and practice - which, I would argue, is fundamentally an issue of accountability to those who are supposedly intended to benefit from development.

    A number of articles in this issue focus on development research, and particularly on the values that underpin it. Birgit Habermann and Margarita Langthaler consider different concepts of what development research should set out to achieve, and therefore how it should be conducted. They find an increasing gap between those who assert that the role of research is to provide the evidence base for policy, and should therefore tailor its approach, presentation, and language accordingly; and those who believe that the best way to contribute is to maintain a critical distance from policy and practice and become a 'pure' academic discipline. Cathrine Brun and Ragnhild Lund offer a candid account of the difficulties as well as the successes of academic-NGO collaboration, based on the experience of applying a Real Time Research methodology to post-tsunami work in Sri Lanka. Sam Wong also reflects in a refreshingly honest way on the fact that the 'right to safety' of local NGO staff is often compromised by external researchers' 'right to know', where the power relations between them make it hard for the local people even to feel that they have the right to negotiate. The author suggests some basic principles for taking account of emotional aspects of safety in research ethics.

    Alex Jacobs and Robyn Wilford describe a pilot scheme for improving downward accountability in NGOs, where the mechanisms - and mindsets - have traditionally focused on being upwardly accountable to donors, a trend generally replicated in the tendency for field offices to be accountable to the headquarters, rather than the other way around. Chris Mowles' article on NGO management, including what is considered 'evidence' and how this is validated, again touches on the issue of how social change comes about, arguing for a more subtle understanding of the ongoing social and political processes of human interaction in shaping beliefs and practices.

    Beliefs and practices often diverge, however. The orthodoxy of rights-based development is challenged in the article by Mary Llewellyn-Fowler and John Overton, who examine how local NGOs in Fiji understand and use human rights for development, demonstrating the tensions involved in translating 'universal' approaches to human rights into local contexts. In a fascinating longitudinal study, Sidney Ruth Schuler, Farzana Islam, and Elisabeth Rottach return to earlier work on women's empowerment in Bangladesh and find that while the enormous social and economic changes that have since taken place render some previous indicators less relevant, continuing gender inequality leaves no room for complacency. Kirsty Martin and Michael Wilmore present an account of community radio in Nepal and efforts to be responsive to local views in developing programme content. Again with reference to Nepal, Bishnu Maya Dhungana and Kyoko Kusakabe look at the somewhat patchy success of self-help groups of women with disabilities in surmounting the social and practical constraints affecting their potential employability and their actual ability to secure paid employment: as is well known in other contexts, women's organisations tend not to take disability into account, while the disability movement is dominated by men, and tends not to take on board issues specific to women. Encouragingly, however, Sue Coe and Lorraine Wapling describe the early stages of World Vision's initiative to become disability-aware, following its commitment to principles of inclusion. The issue closes with a brief presentation by Alasdair Cohen of a methodological tool for measuring rural poverty.
     

  • This article offers a critique of the dominant ways of conceiving of, managing, and evaluating development. It argues that these management methods constrain the exploration of novelty and difference. By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of emergence, the article calls for a broadening of our understanding of how social change comes about. Arguing that the domain of development is not a narrow technical discipline, but an intensely social and political practice of mutual recognition, this article calls for a greater focus on power and processes of relating as they affect local interaction between people.

  • Development research has been through many stages over the past few decades and during this time has experienced fluctuating appreciation by development practice. There is an increasing gap between different ways of doing development research. For some, the purpose of development research is primarily to influence policies, and in order to do this development research has to reframe its whole approach, language, and methodology. Others maintain that development research needs to distance itself, maintain an analytical and even critical approach towards development practice, and become an academic discipline in its own right.

  • This article develops the ‘safety–emotion–power’ nexus and highlights the role of emotion in research by politicising the unequal power relationships between researchers and NGO staff members in defining danger and negotiating safety in their fieldwork. Drawing on the author’s research experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, it argues that research touching on emotion-laden topics can inflict stress and pain on NGO staff members and their families. The ‘right to safety’ of NGO staff members is often compromised by researchers’ ‘right to know’. The norms of conflict-avoidance also deter NGO staff members from negotiating safety. In addressing these issues, the article suggests three principles for taking account of emotional aspects of safety in research ethics.

  • This article reports on a research project intended to develop systematic ways of managing downward accountability in an international NGO. Innovative tools were developed and trialled in six countries. The tools comprised a framework, defining downward accountability in practical terms, and three management processes. They were successfully used to (a) encourage staff to improve downward accountability in ways relevant to their context; (b) hear beneficiaries’ assessments of the level of accountability achieved and the value of the NGO’s work; and (c) generate quantified performance summaries for managers. Taken together, they form a coherent draft management system. Areas for further research are identified.

  • This article examines the experiences and outcomes from collaboration between a group of researchers and a Northern NGO to improve recovery work in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. A Real-Time Research methodology was established to follow and intervene in the recovery practices as they took place on the ground. What was learned and achieved through this collaboration is assessed, with particular reference to the relationships between various stakeholders in the collaboration.

  • While ‘rights-based’ approaches to development – those in which development and poverty alleviation are viewed through the lens of human rights – have become the language of choice among the international development community, less is known about how human rights are used for development at the local level. Using a case study of Fiji, this research investigates how local NGOs understand and use human rights for development. It demonstrates some of the tensions involved in translating broad and supposedly universal approaches to human rights into local contexts.

  • This article explores the changing dimensions of women’s empowerment over time in three Bangladesh villages where one of the authors has been conducting research since 1991. The article discusses theoretical issues related to the measurement of women’s empowerment, and describes findings from a recent study in the villages exploring the current salience of indicators developed for a 1992 survey. In the article we discuss the types of social, economic, and political change that affect the measurement of women’s empowerment; propose and explain a new set of indicators for the rural Bangladesh setting; and discuss implications for measuring women’s empowerment in other settings.

  • The literature on self-help groups (SHGs) shows a mixed record on empowering women both economically and socially, while the literature on Women with Disabilities (WWDs) highlights the problems of isolation that exacerbate their disadvantages. This article, asking whether SHGs can empower WWDs, is based on a study conducted in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. It concludes that being an SHG member is useful for gaining employment that leads to better recognition in the family and society. However, employment opportunities and organisational experiences mean that the benefits are not equally shared among all members.

  • This article explores local involvement in community radio and the changes that it has brought to the lives of ordinary people in Nepal. We argue that since Nepal’s first independent radio licence was granted in 1997, community radio has become an important vehicle for popular views. Drawing on a case study of a radio series produced by a community radio station broadcasting Radio Lumbini’s Hamro Lumbini (‘Our Lumbini’), this article addresses the ways in which local community involvement is currently understood and discussed by listeners and programme producers, and the implications of this involvement.

  • This article considers early lessons learned from the inclusion of disabled people, based on socially inclusive principles, in World Vision programming work in Angola, Armenia, Cambodia, and Senegal. Externally led reviews and evaluations conducted between July 2007 and April 2008 drew out seven key lessons. In summary: the substantial effect of stakeholders’ attitudes on practical implementation; the importance of authentic consultation with a range of disabled people; appropriate budgetary considerations; and a need for caution regarding livelihoods work.

  • The Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT) measures fundamental dimensions of rural poverty in order to support poverty-alleviation efforts in the less developed world. This article’s primary purpose is to introduce MPAT and describe its theoretical rationale. It begins with an overview of the importance of creating enabling environments for rural poverty alleviation before describing MPAT’s purpose and structure. The article goes on to address some of the advantages and shortcomings of surveys and indicators as means of measuring poverty, and concludes with a few caveats on using MPAT, and a focus on its added value to practitioners and academics.

  • It is particularly pleasing to end our twentieth-anniversary volume with an issue devoted to the theme ‘Rethinking Impact: Understanding the Complexity of Poverty and Change’, compiled by guest editors Nina Lilja, Patti Kristjanson, and Jamie Watts. Their call to legitimise what they describe as the ‘boundary-spanning work’ whereby researchers give first priority to linking the knowledge generation with practical action echoes precisely the aims and objectives of Development in Practice, summarised in our strapline ‘Stimulating Thought for Action’. They argue for a diversity of methods for the production and sharing of knowledge, to enhance capacity, and to evaluate the impact of such efforts. However, as they emphasise, such multidisciplinary and embedded ways of working need ‘to be recognised and rewarded, and sufficient resources dedicated to [them]’.

    This issue is also my last as Editor-in-Chief of Development in Practice. Although readers and contributors may not have noticed, in January 2010 Oxfam GB sold the journal to the publisher, Taylor & Francis. The new owner is committed to maintaining the unique identity of Development in Practice as a practice-relevant and Southern-focused journal. The change of ownership, however, brought significant operational changes, including my departure from Development in Practice and from Oxfam GB. Having led Development in Practice for two decades, and having created more than 20 titles in the associated book series, I have been succeeded by a new editorial team, based at INTRAC (International NGO Training and Research Centre), which takes over from 2011.

    When I was appointed in 1991, towards the end of the journal’s first year, the editorial cupboard was almost bare – containing just one article, written in ‘Spanglish’ – a mixture of English and Spanish – requiring sensitive interpretation simply to unravel the language and get it to pre-publication standard. From my first day, a willingness to identify, encourage, and actively assist writers whose work might otherwise never see the light of day has been one of our hallmarks. Many of those whose articles we published when they were still firsttime or relatively inexperienced authors are now university professors and senior aid-agency officials, some with lengthy publication lists, others proud to have appeared in a peer-reviewed journal and to exert influence over the long term by being cited on reading lists. The ability to attract and work with a mix of seasoned and new authors, and in particular those who ‘span boundaries’ – whether professional, cultural, or linguistic – is one of the characteristics that sets Development in Practice apart from other development journals.

    I cannot leave Development in Practice without honouring just a few of my long-standing friends and former colleagues who have in various ways played an important part in making the journal what it is today. The first debt is of course to the founding editor, Brian Pratt, without whose insistence Oxfam GB would never have imagined establishing a journal. Over the many years of our collaboration, Caroline Knowles’ combination of intellectual creativity and down-to-earth wisdom contributed to our most significant strategic developments, while making sure to keep our feet on the ground: the decision to include abstracts in translation and to go online in 1995, to found the book series in 1996, to move to Carfax (the predecessor of the new owner) in 1997, to establish a multilingual website in 2000 to celebrate our tenth anniversary: all these decisions bear Caroline’s mark. Robert Cornford has accompanied Development in Practice from its early infancy through adolescence to adulthood and has been a constant source of ideas, support, and good humour – always able to tease out something positive from the most hostile circumstances. Finally, Mike Powell, who first got to know Development in Practice in 1993, when he was brought in as external evaluator to help the senior management of Oxfam GB to decide whether or not to continue with the journal, must be thanked. He convinced us to establish a transparent business plan, setting all costs (including the hidden ones!) against income. Most importantly he helped me to understand that editorial development and marketing cannot sit in separate compartments: to produce a practice-relevant publication without knowing, engaging with, seeking feedback from – and being prepared to change in response to – existing and intended audiences is either dishonest or self-indulgent, or both. Since then he has worked alongside Development in Practice, always supportive but never complacent: the ideal critical companion.

    Successive Editorial Advisers have generously lent their experience to Development in Practice and enhanced its reputation. Many others, too numerous to mention by name, have been part of what has come to be known as ‘The DIP Project’. I would, however, like to acknowledge our regular translators – Isabelle Fernández, Maria Beatriz Lessa Guimarães, and Miguel Pickard – our long-standing copy-editor, Catherine Robinson, and everyone at ELDIS and the GreenNet Collective.

    But of course my deepest gratitude must be to the hundreds of authors and referees and tens of thousands of readers, who together are what keep Development in Practice alive. Today, despite the increase from three to eight issues a year under my direction, the editorial cupboard is full to bursting, and article downloads and document-delivery requests remain exceptionally high. These are sure signs of confidence and good health. I therefore trust that the journal and its associated projects will continue to go from strength to strength under the new editors at INTRAC.
     

  • The international workshop ‘Rethinking Impact: Understanding the Complexity of Poverty and Change’ (Cali, Colombia, 26–28 March 2008) explored the challenges inherent in evaluating agricultural research-for-development efforts, identifying lessons and approaches for sustainably improving livelihoods. Use-oriented research which links knowledge with action has greater welfare and development impacts. Researchers must help to link diverse stakeholders in order to create and share knowledge for effective, sustainable action. The legitimacy of such boundary-spanning work needs to be recognised and rewarded, and sufficient resources dedicated to it. Traditional economic-impact assessment does little justice to complex poverty-related activities, which require a diversity of methods and enhanced capacity.

  • This article reports on an ex-ante impact study in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia. The study, guided by a livelihoods approach, developed a spatial-mapping methodology based on secondary data for 18 variables which served as indicators of the five livelihood classes of assets (natural, physical, financial, social, and human). The overall livelihood-asset index showed a significant and strong negative correlation (R = –0.65, P = 0.00) with the national poverty line, with poverty peaking in districts where the assets base was lowest, and vice versa. The livelihood assets approach has broader application, for example for ex-post impact assessment.

  • Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a practical approach to planning, monitoring and evaluation, developed for use with complex research-for-development projects. PIPA begins with a participatory workshop where stakeholders make explicit their assumptions about how their project will make an impact, and produce an ‘Outcomes logic model’ and an ‘Impact logic model’. These two logic models provide an ex-ante framework of predictions of impact that can also be used in priority setting and ex-post impact assessment. PIPA engages stakeholders in a structured participatory process, promoting learning and providing a framework for ‘action research’ on processes of change.

  • Can agricultural research help to enlist smallholders and their resources for global food security? The Convergence of Sciences (CoS) research programme in Benin and Ghana (2002–2006) tested the impact of technology development, using a pathway for impact which featured ‘technographies’, diagnostic studies, and farmer-experimenter groups to ensure appropriateness. Within the existing small windows of opportunity only marginal improvements proved possible. The CoS team realised and partly tested the notion that innovation is predicated upon change of the institutions that frame opportunity. The sequel to CoS (2008–2013) uses an innovation system approach to pursue cross-system institutional change.

  • An ‘Outcome Mapping’ approach was applied retrospectively to five diverse, highly collaborative research projects aimed at poverty reduction. Designed to help plan for, clarify, and document intended and actual changes in behaviour, actions, and relationships of groups and organisations that directly influence a project’s intended beneficiaries, Outcome Mapping enabled us to identify and describe the strategies and actions that played important roles in the innovations achieved. Successful strategies observed included the use of champions, jointly producing high-profile outputs that enhanced the status of local partners, multiple communication strategies, targeting ongoing policy processes, and strong emphases on and investment in capacity building.

  • Many agricultural research and development projects seek to achieve pro-poor outcomes through policy change. However, policy processes are complex, and a strategic approach to enhancing impact at policy level is often not applied. This article describes two case studies of actual policy change – on dairy marketing in Kenya, and on urban agriculture in Kampala – with analysis of the policy-change processes. It draws lessons which could be applied to enhance policy-level outcomes from other projects, and highlights two key matters: the role of ‘user voice’, through links with civil society and user groups; and the value of strong links with ‘formal’ policy-process actors.

  • A growing concern about the limited impact of agricultural research and development on natural-resources management (NRM) and livelihoods in the highlands of East and Central Africa led to the establishment in 1995 of the African Highlands Initiative, with a mandate to develop methodologies for integrated NRM and institutionalise them in partner organisations. Emerging lessons show that a combination of innovative approaches is necessary for enhanced uptake of NRM practices. These approaches include working with strategic partners and multidisciplinary teams; involving multiple stakeholders; adopting appropriate entry points based on farmers’ priorities; and use of linked technologies with complementary and synergetic effects.

  • This article argues that the managerial approaches to development need to be reconstituted through a more comprehensive understanding of how institutional and behavioural change processes occur. Drawing from a case study in Nepal, and by exploring the largely unintended consequences of project actions, this article argues for viewing change as a complex social phenomenon based on people’s interests, motivations, relationships, and actions that are embedded in their historical and cultural situations. In the final analysis, it is argued that the effectiveness of managerial approaches cannot be understood or applied outside an understanding of change processes.

  • Since 1996, CTA-ZM, a local Brazilian NGO, has been developing better ways to understand its work on pro-poor institutional transformation in Minas Gerais. It operates within a ‘messy partnership’ which includes farmer trade unions, associations, social movements, and academic institutions. The combined challenge of institutional transformation and messy partnerships has made it clear that mainstream monitoring is inadequate to trigger the diversity and depth of learning required within concerted action. This article describes a ten-year organisational learning journey, looking critically at the author’s own work on participatory monitoring as an alternative. A framework of eight design principles is offered as an essential starting point for ‘rethinking impact’.

  • The following individuals served as referees for articles received or published in 2010, or supported us in other ways.

    Kiikpoye Aaron
    Haleh Afshar
    Kwame Akyeampong
    Bryant Allen
    Ghartey Ampiah
    Marta Arango
    Colin Bangay
    Owen Barder
    Rebecca Barnes
    Simon Bell
    Mario Biggeri
    Joseph Bock
    David Bright
    John Brohman
    Lene Buchert
    John Burstein
    Charlie Buxton
    Mary Calveri
    Stuart Cameron
    Deirdre Casella
    Milindo Chakrabarti
    Rachel Christina
    Matthew Clarke
    Susan Coe
    Marc Cohen
    Anne Coles
    Stephen Commins
    Sarah Cummings
    Anirban Dasgupta
    Rick Davies
    Peter Devereux
    Stephen Devereux
    Charles Dhewa
    Jan Kees van Donge
    Alan Doran
    Robyn Eversole
    Anna Feldman
    Jacques Forest
    Bob Frame
    Marie Gaarder
    Michele Ruth Gamburd
    Janice Giffen
    Jane Gilbert
    Dominic Glover
    Jonathan Goodhand
    GreenNet Collective
    Isabelle Guerin
    Maria Beatriz Lessa Guimaraes
    Asha Gupta
    John Hailey
    Joanna Ha¨rma¨
    Vandra Harris
    Jon Hellin
    Andy Higginbottom
    Thea Hilhorst
    Joanna Hoare
    Susan Holcombe
    Françoise Hollande
    Frances Hunt
    Chris Jackson
    Alex Jacobs
    Zellynne Jennings-Craig
    Susan Jolly
    Angella Kail
    Liam Kane
    Dean Karlan
    Nancy Kendall
    Nicole Kenton
    Simon Kisara
    Caroline Knowles
    Patti Kristjanson
    Tao Kong
    Linda Kreitzer
    Mona Lena Krook
    Yianna Lambrou
    Alexa Lamm
    Rachael Lammey
    Peter Laugharn
    Carlisle Levine
    Nina Lilja
    Amy Lind
    Sarah Macbeth
    Ian Macpherson
    Graeme Macrae
    Firoze Manji
    Guy Manners
    Ellen Martin
    Susan Maur
    John M Mbaku
    Kevin McLure
    M Miles
    Amanda Milligan
    Judi Minost
    Rooba Moorghen
    William Moseley
    Melanie Muro
    Francesca Musiani
    Shafiq Najeeb
    Valerie Nelson
    Mary Njenga
    Mario Novelli
    Michael O’Donnell
    Moses Oketch
    Masumi Owa
    Jaddon Park
    Mike Parnwell
    Jenny Pearce
    Lee Pegler
    Jethro Pettit
    Karen Pfeiffer
    Miguel Pickard
    Mike Powell
    Meena Poudel
    Brian Pratt
    Martin Prowse
    K Pushpanath
    Ranjita Puskur
    Sarah Radcliffe
    Dinah Rajak
    Bernadette Resurreccion
    Catherine Robinson
    Chris Roche
    Alan Rogers
    Pauline Rose
    James Rowland
    Frances Rubin
    Issa Sanogo
    Professor Savyasaachi
    Yusuf Sayed
    Sidney Schuler
    Ahmad Seyf
    Judith Shaw
    Rajendra Prasad Shrestha
    Hugo Slim
    Melinda Smale
    Alan Smith
    Isabelle Sol Fernández
    Andy Storey
    Jane Strachan
    Martha Thompson
    James Thomson
    Graham Tipple
    Meera Tiwari
    Barbara Trapani
    Anand Vadivelu
    Tony Vaux
    Fabio Veras
    Robin Vincent
    Hugh Waddington
    Caleb Wall
    Tina Wallace
    Jamie Watts
    Wave Co-operative
    David Westendorff
    Howard White
    Sarah White
    Peter Williams
    Fiona Wilson
    Jacqueline Wood
    Paul Yankson
    Sarp Yeletaysi
     

  • Articles

    Aikman, Sheila: ‘Marching to different rhythms: international NGO collaboration with the state in Tanzania’, 20 (4&5): 498–510

    Alvarez, Sophie, Boru Douthwaite, Graham Thiele, Ronald Mackay, Diana Córdoba, and Katherine Tehelen: ‘Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis: a practical method for project planning and evaluation’, 20 (8): 946–57

    Anyidoho, Nana Akua: ‘“Communities of practice”: prospects for theory and action in participatory development’, 20 (3): 318–28

    Archer, David: ‘The evolution of NGO–government relations in education: ActionAid 1972–2009’, 20 (4&5): 611–18

    Audefroy, Joel F.: ‘Post-disaster emergency and reconstruction experiences in Asia and Latin America: an assessment’, 20 (6): 664–77

    Banerjee, Subhojit: ‘Project “RAMBO”: an initiative to improve rickshaw pullers’ earnings’, 20 (1): 57–69

    Bano, Masooda: ‘Madrasas as partners in education provision: the South Asian experience’, 20 (4&5): 554–66

    Baruah, Bipasha: ‘Women and globalisation: challenges and opportunities facing construction workers in contemporary India’, 20 (1): 31–44

    Batley, Richard and Pauline Rose: ‘Collaboration in delivering education: relations between governments and NGOs in South Asia’, 20 (4&5): 579–85

    Berry, Chris: ‘Working effectively with non-state actors to deliver education in fragile states’, 20 (4&5): 586–93

    Brun, Cathrine and Ragnhild Lund: ‘Real-time research: decolonising research practices or just another spectacle of researcher–practitioner collaboration?’, 20 (7): 812–26

    Cannon, Barry: ‘Wanted! “Strong publics” for uncertain times: the Active Citizenship in Central America project’, 20 (6): 649–63

    Carr, Edward R.: ‘The place of stories in development: creating spaces for participation through narrative analysis’, 20 (2): 219–26

    Casely-Hayford, Leslie and Ash Hartwell: ‘Reaching the underserved with complementary education: lessons from Ghana’s state and non-state sectors’, 20 (4&5): 527–39

    Coe, Sue and Lorraine Wapling: ‘Practical lessons from four projects on disabilityinclusive development programming’, 20 (7): 879–86

    Cohen, Alasdair: ‘The Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool: a new framework for measuring rural poverty’, 20 (7): 887–97

    Commins, Stephen: ‘Non-state providers, the state, and health in post-conflict fragile states’, 20 (4&5): 594–602

    De Beer, Frik: ‘Issues in community conservation: the case of the Barberton Medicinal Plants Project’, 20 (3): 435–45

    de Figueirêdo, Hugo Santana Jr and Bryanna Millis: ‘Evaluating competitiveness impacts of regulatory reforms in the Brazilian cashew industry’, 20 (6): 706–19

    DeStefano, Joseph, and Audrey-Marie Schuh Moore: ‘The roles of non-state providers in ten complementary education programmes’, 20 (4&5): 511–26

    Devereux, Stephen and Katharine Vincent: ‘Using technology to deliver social protection: exploring opportunities and risks’, 20 (3): 367–79

    Dhungana, Bishnu Maya and Kyoko Kusakabe: ‘The role of self-help groups in empowering disabled women: a case study in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal’, 20 (7): 855–65

    English, Richard: ‘How people can influence government policy – stories from the Caucasus’, 20 (6): 720–25

    Erdmann, Thomas K.: ‘Eco-regional conservation and development in Madagascar: a review of USAID-funded efforts in two priority landscapes’, 20 93): 380–94

    Faye, Mbène Dièye, John C. Weber, Bayo Mounkoro, and Joseph-Marie Dakouo: ‘Contribution of parkland trees to farmers’ livelihoods: a case study from Mali’, 20 (3): 428–34

    Fforde, Adam: ‘Responses to the policy science problem: reflections on the politics of development’, 20 (2): 188–204

    Frediani, Alexandre Apsan: ‘Sen’s Capability Approach as a framework to the practice of development’, 20 (2): 173–87

    Gaynor, Niamh: ‘“But you can’t compare Malawi and Ireland!”: shifting boundaries in a globalised world’, 20 (3): 342–53

    Gellman, Mneesha: ‘World views in peace building: a post-conflict reconstruction challenge in Cambodia’, 20 (1): 85–98

    Ghatak, Shambhu: ‘What has the World Development Report 2008 to say about Indian agriculture?’, 20 (1): 131–7

    Grainger, Matt: ‘World Summit on Food Security (UN FAO, Rome, 16–18 November 2009)’, 20 (6): 740–42

    Guijt, Irene: ‘Rethinking monitoring in a complex messy partnership in Brazil’, 20 (8): 1026–43

    Gurung, Barun and Stephen Biggs: ‘Institutional change: the unanticipated consequences of action’, 20 (8): 1013–25

    Habermann, Birgit and Margarita Langthaler: ‘Changing the world of development research? An insight into theory and practice’, 20 (7): 771–83

    Hadiprayitno, Irene: ‘Food security and human rights in Indonesia’, 20 (1): 122–30

    Heffernan, Claire and Jun Yu: ‘ICTs and decision making: findings from the Poverty Assessor’, 20 (2): 287–96

    Hellin, Jonathan, Olaf Erenstein, Parvesh Chandna, and John Dixon: ‘Livelihoodsbased impact assessment in the rice–wheat farming system of South Asia’, 20 (8): 933–45

    Hooton, Nicholas A.: ‘Linking evidence with user voice for pro-poor policy: lessons from East Africa’, 20 (8): 984–99

    Indrawan, Mochamad: ‘World Conservation Congress 2008: Climate Change, Islands, and In-situ Conservation’, 20 (1): 138–41

    Jacobs, Alex and Robyn Wilford: ‘Listen First: a pilot system for managing downward accountability in NGOs’, 20 (7): 797–811

    Jones, Lauren Ila and Carlos Alberto Torres: ‘Struggles for memory and socialjustice education in Latin America’, 20 (4&5): 567–78

    Kassam, Karim-Aly: ‘Practical wisdom and ethical awareness through student experiences of development’, 20 (2): 205–18

    Kolawole, Oluwatoyin: ‘Inter-disciplinarity, development studies, and development practice’, 20 (2): 227–39

    Lilja, Nina, Patti Kristjanson, and Jamie Watts: ‘Rethinking impact: understanding the complexity of poverty and change – overview’, 20 (8): 917–32

    Llewellyn-Fowler,Mary and JohnOverton: ‘“Bread and butter” human rights: NGOs in Fiji’, 20 (7): 827–39

    Manyozo, Linje: ‘The day development dies’, 20 (2): 265–9

    Martin, Kirsty and Michael Wilmore: ‘Local voices on community radio: a study of “Our Lumbini” in Nepal’, 20 (7): 866–78

    McGee, Rosemary: ‘An international NGO representative in Colombia: reflections from practice’, 20 (6): 636–48

    Morais, Neavis and Mokbul Morshed Ahmad: ‘Sustaining livelihoods in complex emergencies: experiences of Sri Lanka’, 20 (1): 5–17

    Mowles, Chris: ‘Successful or not? Evidence, emergence, and development management’, 20 (7): 757–70

    Mowo, Jeremias, Chris Opondo, Adolf Nyaki, and Zenebe Adimassu: ‘Addressing the research–development disconnect: lessons from East and Central African Highlands’, 20 (8): 1000–12

    Mundy, Karen, Megan Haggerty, Malini Sivasubramaniam, Suzanne Cherry, and Richard Maclure: ‘Civil society, basic education, and sector-wide aid: insights from Sub-Saharan Africa’, 20 (4&5): 484–97

    Nabacwa, Mary Ssonko: ‘Relations between gender-focused NGOs and government: a Ugandan case study’, 20 (3): 395–406

    Ntata, Pierson R.: ‘Bridging the hunger gap with cash transfers: experiences from Malawi’, 20 (3): 422–7

    Nyangaga, Julius, Terry Smutylo, Dannie Romney, and Patti Kristjanson: ‘Research that matters: outcome mapping for linking knowledge to poverty-reduction actions’, 20 (8): 971–83

    Oketch, Moses and Moses Ngware: ‘Free primary education still excludes the poorest of the poor in urban Kenya’, 20 (4&5): 603–10

    O’Reilly, Kathleen: ‘Combining sanitation and women’s participation in water supply: an example from Rajasthan’, 20 (1): 45–56

    O’Sullivan, Moire: ‘Is this a partnership or a relationship? Concern Worldwide maps the difference’, 20 (6): 734–9

    Owen, John R.: ‘“Listening to the rice grow”: the local–expat interface in Laobased international NGOs’, 20 (1): 99–112

    Parkinson, Sarah: ‘The learning organisation as a model for rural development’, 20 (3): 329–41

    Pearce: Jenny: ‘Is social change fundable? NGOs and theories and practices of social change’, 20 (6): 621–35

    Reith, Sally: ‘Money, power, and donor– NGO partnerships’, 20 (3): 446–55

    Röling, Niels: ‘The impact of agricultural research: evidence from West Africa’, 20 (8): 958–70

    Rose, Pauline: ‘Achieving Education for All through public–private partnerships?’, 20 (4&5): 473–83

    Salmon, Ruth and William Eckersley: ‘Where there’s no green man: child road safety education in Ethiopia’, 20 (6): 726–33

    Sato, Jin: ‘Matching goods and people: aid and human security after the 2004 tsunami’, 20 (1): 70–84

    Schimmel, Noam: ‘Failed aid: how development agencies are neglecting and marginalising Rwandan genocide survivors’, 20 (3): 404–13

    Schuler, Sidney Ruth, Farzana Islam, and Elisabeth Rottach: ‘Women’s empowerment revisited: a case study from Bangladesh’, 20 (7): 840–51

    Shaw, Judith: ‘Making housemaid remittances work for low-income families in Sri Lanka’, 20 (1): 18–30

    Spellberg, Jason and Morgan Kaplan: ‘A rural economic development plan to help the USA win its war on cocaine’, 20 (6): 690–705

    Srivastava, Prachi: ‘Public–private partnerships or privatisation? Questioning the state’s role in education in India’, 20 (4&5): 540–53

    Starling, Simon: ‘Monitoring and evaluating advocacy: lessons from Oxfam GB’s climatechange campaign’, 20 (2): 277–86

    Thomas, Bejoy: ‘Participation in the Knowledge Society: the FOSS Movement compared with participatory development’, 20 (2): 270–6

    Tripathy, Jyotirmaya: ‘How gendered is Gender and Development? Culture, masculinity, and gender difference’, 20 (1): 113–21

    Ulrich, Hans Peter: ‘Enhancing the effectiveness of international development: a systems approach’, 20 (2): 251–64

    Van Mele, Paul, Jonas Wanvoeke, and Espérance Zossou: ‘Enhancing rural learning, linkages, and institutions: the rice videos in Africa’, 20 (3): 414–21

    Waters, William F.: ‘Qualitative methods for assessing conditional cash-transfer programmes: the case of Panama’, 20 (6): 678–89

    White, Sarah C.: ‘Analysing wellbeing: a framework for development practice’, 20 (2): 158–72

    Wong, Sam: ‘Whose lives are worth more? Politicising research safety in developing countries’, 20 (7): 784–96

    Yankson, Paul W. K.: ‘Gold mining and corporate social responsibility in the Wassa West district, Ghana’, 20 (3): 354–66

    Yi Lee Wong: ‘The Civic Education Project in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova: the impact of donor dependency’, 20 (2): 240–50

    Book reviews

    Andersson, Kristen, Gustavo Gordillo de Anda, and Frank van Laerhoven: Local Governments and Rural Development: Comparing Lessons from Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru, 20 (3): 464–6

    Aoyama, Kaoru: Thai Migrant Sexworkers: From Modernisation to Globalisation, 20 (1): 151–2

    Bekoe, Dorina A.: Implementing Peace Agreements: Lessons from Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia, 20 (2): 309–10

    Bello,Walden: The FoodWars, 20(7):898–9 Bicknell, Jane, David Dodman, and David Satterthwaite (eds.): Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges, 20 (7): 899–901

    Bourne, Richard: Lula of Brazil: The Story So Far, 20 (2): 307–9 Bracking, Sarah: Money and Power: Great Predators in the Political Economy of Development, 20 (7): 901–2

    Brazier, Chris (ed.): One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, 20 (1): 152–4

    Buskens, Imeke and Anne Webb (eds): African Women and ICTs: Investigating Technology, Gender and Empowerment, 20 (7): 902–4

    Collins, Andrew E.: Disaster and Development, 20 (7): 904–5

    Collins, Daryl, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven: Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, 20 (6): 743–4

    Cumming, Gordon D.: French NGOs in the Global Era: A Distinctive Role in International Development, 20 (3): 468–9

    Deb, Debal: Beyond Developmentality: Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability, 20 (3): 466–8

    Dowie, Mark: Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, 20 (2): 301–4

    Ensor, Jonathan and Rachel Berger (eds.): Understanding Climate Change Adaptation – Lessons from Community-based Approaches, 20 (7): 905–7

    Fisher, R., S. Maginnis, W. Jackson, E. Barrow, and S. Jeanrenaud: Linking Poverty and Conservation: Landscapes, People and Power, 20 (1): 149–51

    Frundt, Henry J.: Fair Bananas! Farmers, Workers and Consumers Strive to Change the Industry, 20 (2): 297–8

    Giddens, Anthony: The Politics of Climate Change, 20 (2): 300–301

    Goldstein, Andrea: Multinational Companies from Emerging Economies, 20 (6): 744–5

    Holt-Giménez, Eric and Raj Patel with Annie Shattuck: Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, 20 (7): 907–8

    Johnson, Craig: Arresting Development. The Power of Knowledge for Social Change, 20 (1): 144–6

    Kaplan, Seth D.: Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development, 20 (1): 142–4

    Leipziger, Deborah (ed.): SA 8000 – The First Decade: Implementation, Influence and Impact, 20 (2): 298–300

    Levermore, Roger and Aaron Beacom (eds.): Sport and International Development, 20 (7): 908–11

    Linden, Ian: Global Catholicism: Diversity and Change since Vatican II, 20 (6): 746–7

    Lucas, Edward: The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, 20 (3): 461–2

    MacLean, Sandra J., Sherri A. Brown, and Pieter Fourie (eds.): Health for Some: The Political Economy of Global Health Governance, 20 (6): 747–8

    Manby, Bronwen: Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, 20 (7): 911–12

    Marsden, Peter: Afghanistan: Aid, Armies and Empires, 20 (3): 458–9

    Mathiason, John: Internet Governance: The New Frontier of Global Institutions, 20 (2): 310–13

    Mitlin, Diana and Sam Hickey (eds.): Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls, 20 (7): 912–13

    Newman, Michael: Humanitarian Intervention: Confronting the Contradictions, 2 (6): 748–50

    Ó Gráda, Cormac: Famine, a Short History, 20 (3): 456–7

    Power, Samantha: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, 20 (3): 459–61

    Quarry, Wendy and Ricardo Ramírez: Communication for Another Development: Listening before Telling, 20 (2): 304–5

    Reynolds, Martin, Chris Blackmore, and Mark J. Smith (eds.): The Environmental Responsibility Reader, 20 (3): 469–72

    Roberts, Paul: The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry, 20 (1): 146–7

    Schreuder, Yda: The Corporate Greenhouse: Climate Change Policy in a Globalizing World, 20 (6): 750–51

    Ian Smillie: Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organisation That’s Winning the Fight Against Poverty, 20 (6): 751–3

    Walker, Peter and Daniel Maxwell: Shaping the Humanitarian World, 20 (3): 457–8

    Wassenhove, Luc van and Rolando Tomasini: Humanitarian Logistics, 20 (2): 305–7

    Yaffe, Helen: Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, 20 (3): 463–4

    Zandvliet, Luc and Mary B. Anderson: Getting it Right: Making Corporate–Community Relations Work, 20 (1): 148–9
     

  • Development in Practice offers practice-relevant analysis and research relating to development and humanitarianism, providing a worldwide forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences among practitioners, scholars, policy shapers, and activists. By challenging current assumptions, and by active editorial engagement with issues of diversity and social justice, the journal seeks to stimulate new thinking and ways of working. Contributors to this peer-reviewed journal represent a wide range of cultural and professional backgrounds and experience. Contributions in French, Portuguese, and Spanish are welcome; abstracts are published in these languages. Development in Practice particularly encourages new writers as well as previously published authors.

    Editor-in-Chief
    Deborah Eade, Writer & Editor, Monnetier-Mornex, France

    Editor-in-Chief Designate
    Brian Pratt, INTRAC, Oxford, UK

    Editorial Advisers
    Awa Faly Ba Mbow IED Afrique, Senegal; Peter Ballantyne ILRI, Ethopia; Joseph G Bock Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA; Charles Buxton INTRAC, Kyrgyzstan; Yaliwe Clarke African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Stephen Commins Department of Urban Planning, UCLA, USA; Kate Critchley Department for International Development (DFID), UK; Sarah Cummings Context International Cooperation, The Netherlands; Sumi Dhanarajan Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Singapore; Fiona Dove Transnational Institute, The Netherlands; Robyn Eversole University of Tasmania, Australia; Jonathan Fox Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; Dharam Ghai International Institute of Labour Studies, Switzerland; John Hailey City University, London, UK; Jon Hellin International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Mexico; Islah Jad Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University, Occupied Palestine; Caroline Knowles Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK; Pushpanath Krishnamurthy Oxfam GB, UK; Okello Okuli Africa Vision 525 Initiative, Nigeria; Adebayo Olukoshi African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), Senegal; Jenny Pearce Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK; Jethro Pettit Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK; Miguel Pickard CIEPAC, Mexico; Mike Powell IKM Emergent, UK; Shahra Razavi UNRISD, Switzerland; Marcia Rivera ILAEDES, Puerto Rico; Alina Rocha Menocal Overseas Development Institute (ODI), UK; José Antonio Sanahuja Universidad Complutense, Spain; Andy Storey University College Dublin, Ireland; Martha Thompson Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), USA; Alison Van Rooy CIDA, Canada; Jennifer Vaughan Plan International, Honduras; Tina Wallace International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK; David Westendorff Urbanchina Partners, China; Sarah White Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath, UK; Ricardo Wilson-Grau Organisational Development Consultant, Brazil; María Hamlin Zúniga International People’s Health Coalition, Nicaragua

    The views expressed in articles and reviews are those of the signed authors, and not necessarily those of the Publisher, the Editors, the Editorial Advisers, or the institutions to which authors are affiliated.
     

  • On 1 July 2010, INTRAC (the International NGO Training and Research Centre) took over the editorship of Development in Practice, with myself as Editor-in-Chief. In the issues published since then, we have been handling the content that was carefully crafted and prepared by the previous Editor-in-Chief, Deborah Eade. This is our first editorial (although the contents for this issue, and the next, are also the result of Deborah’s work), and I must begin by thanking Deborah and the previous editorial team for their dedication and hard work in building up the journal to what it is today.

    INTRAC is delighted to be editing Development in Practice, given its strong record of bridging the divide between academics and practitioners, and the fact that it has gone from strength to strength in expanding its scope and readership since it was founded in 1991. INTRAC is particularly pleased to be taking over the editorial role because it shares with the journal a commitment to disseminating research and practice in the field of international development to a global audience.

    Over the years Development in Practice has managed to act as a peer-reviewed journal which publishes high-quality articles, while at the same time offering a platform for new authors and front-line development workers – from the global south as well as the global north – who wish to share their experiences. We intend to strengthen both of these functions further. First, we wish to continue encouraging writers from around the globe. Already a large proportion of our writers and reviewers are from the developing world, and we are enjoying working with them. Through core subscriptions, and a raft of Routledge initiatives, the contents of Development in Practice are disseminated to a truly global readership. Many of these initiatives offer access to articles at subsidised rates.

    To help expand our global reach even further, we are appointing a small group of contributing editors who will act as representatives for DIP in their respective regions and channel new authors towards us, encouraging the brightest and best young thinkers and practitioners to submit articles. Secondly, we hope to reinforce the quality and rigour of the publication. We have applied through Routledge for inclusion in the Reuters-Thompson citation index, which we know is increasingly important to academics. At the same time, in both peer-reviewed articles and other contributions (Viewpoints and Practical Notes) we are committed to maintaining the practical focus of the journal.

    We are fortunate to retain most of the previous advisory board and are looking for a few new members to ensure that we are fed new ideas and have a ‘sounding board’ with broad conceptual, thematic, and geographic coverage. In addition we are of course always interested in recruiting more collaborators to act as expert peer-reviewers, helping to ensure that DIP is publishing the best articles possible on the topics that we cover.

    We have already taken steps to introduce some innovations in the Book Reviews section. For example, we are asking major actors in development to write about three significant publications which have influenced their own careers and thinking.

    We must of course thank the team at Taylor & Francis (Routledge), who have been so helpful in the handover process, and Oxfam GB for further financial support which will help to ensure that we can maintain the mandate and quality of the journal. Thanks are due also to my excellent editorial team. We can all be contacted via the Development in Practice email address:  We are confident that we are now in a good position to continue building upon DIP’s sound subscriber base and excellent reputation; and we hope you will join us in supporting the journal by reading, reviewing, or contributing articles which provide a platform for global voices reflecting on development in practice.

    In the current issue, many of the articles address the values, ethics, faith, and assumptions that commonly underpin development practice but are often insufficiently examined or questioned. Rick James notes the importance of faith-based organisations, but calls for improved ‘faith literacy’ among aid agencies which have often in the past had ambiguous attitudes to FBOs. Matthew Clark et al. take a detailed look at FBOs working with people with HIV/AIDS and argue that their comparative advantage is their ability to work at the community level and with a longer-term commitment than is normal in many secular NGOs. Victoria Palmer considers whether being a Muslim faith-based organisation provides advantages of ‘cultural proximity’ when working in humanitarian programmes with Muslim populations. She concludes that although the potential is there, experience of working with the Rohinga in Bangladesh shows that the relationship is by no means simple.

    Several papers question assumptions about the nature of community-driven development and ask whether ‘community based’ initiatives automatically provide a good basis for development. Jelke Boesten and Anna Mdee show how apparently voluntary and community-based work is not always well integrated into local governance systems and conclude that there are many problems of accountability and sustainability in such situations. This is reinforced by C.A.P.S. Msukwa and Dan Taylor, who use experience from Malawi to show that participation is often resented as ‘forced labour’, or merely perceived as offering only temporary gain. They argue that this failure is due to a lack of community ownership of the processes and agendas of development agencies. The article by Deborah Cummins traces the initial experience of introducing gender-based quotas into local government structures in Timor Leste and describes continuing barriers to the full participation of women who are appointed to local leadership committees.

    Three articles refer to the nature and approaches of development workers. The first, by Susie Jolly, raises questions about our heterosexual-normative approach to all aspects of development, and our limited awareness of gender roles and the differences between people with whom we work. Ishbel McWha considers how the status of development workers and volunteers affects their relationships with each other and those they work with. A piece by Rachel Napier-Moore challenges us to look at the often negative relationship between ‘front line’ workers in humanitarian programmes and the long-term displaced people whom they try to support.

    A Practical Note by René Véron and Ananya Majumdar on micro insurance in West Bengal prescribes caution in assessing some of the more optimistic claims made on behalf of micro insurance for the poor, noting the slow progress being made in partnerships between insurers and NGOs. Finally, we have included a Viewpoint describing one aspect of the work of Sigrid Rausing and her Trust’s support for the power of artistic contributions to capture the public imagination and cultivate a fuller understanding of crucial social issues.

    These articles are all good examples of the journal’s aims to publish work that ‘challeng[es] current assumptions. . . [and] stimulate[s] new thinking and ways of working’ through the ‘exchange of ideas and practical experiences among practitioners, scholars, policy shapers, and activists’.
     

  • There are an estimated 33 million people living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) worldwide. While national education campaigns have been successful in providing a broad platform of awareness of HIV and AIDS, within some countries faith-based organisations (FBOs) have assumed an important role in educating and supporting local communities to reduce HIV transmission. This article conceptualises the successful characteristics of a Christian organisation in West Papua and a Muslim organisation in Thailand. The ability of both these FBOs to engage successfully with their communities on issues of sexual practice provides important lessons for other FBOs seeking to reduce HIV transmission.

  • International development work has both reinforced and challenged inequalities related to sexuality and gender. The concept of heteronormativity is a promising frame for understanding these dynamics. This article starts with a description of the history of the concept and an exploration of its possible applications. It goes on to consider heteronormativity in development work, in relation to three areas in which struggles based on sex and gender orders have been most visible: in household models and family forms; HIV/AIDS; and efforts to combat violence against women.
     

  • This article reports on exploratory research based on interviews with expatriate and local aid workers employed by local and international NGOs in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thematic analysis of the interviews found that personnel were placed in groups based on their job category – consultant, volunteer, or permanent staff – regardless of experience. These categories logically reflect each worker’s pay level, purpose, and role, but they may also have an implicit power meaning which reinforces group differences and inhibits inter-group relationships. Relationship building was reported to be the most important factor contributing to the success of capacity-development initiatives. Four sub-themes were identified: communication, friendship, reciprocal learning/teaching, and confidence.

  • Within current neo-liberal approaches to development, models of community-driven development assume that community-based workers (CBWs) are key actors in improved and accessible service delivery. We argue that use of CBWs is under-theorised and seems to be based largely on untested assumptions about community participation and responsibility. Drawing on case studies on potable-water management and home-based care for HIV/AIDS patients in Tanzania and South Africa, the article explores issues of accountability, professionalism, and personal motivations in systems involving CBWs. It argues that many assumptions in relation to the effectiveness of CBW programmes require re-visiting.

  • The adoption of techniques to elicit community participation in development practice is an important step forward. The question remains whether this is sufficient for development outcomes that accord with the aspirations of ‘participants’. Community perceptions are somewhat different, as our own conclusions demonstrate. We have developed a ‘methodology of inclusiveness’, based on community institutions which embed collective social action in everyday life. We use the analogy of funerals as collective action in which activities are planned, roles are demarcated, responsibilities are assigned, and desired outcomes are realised. We ask the question: why can’t development be managed more like a funeral?

  • Why do front-line workers not always display humanitarian compassion towards people living in camps? In seeking an answer, this article conceptualises the ‘humanicrat’: a front-line worker who is part humanitarian and part bureaucrat, each with typological emotions. Case studies from NGO teams in long-term camps in northern Ugandan illustrate the social production of emotions. The two teams work in differing contexts of organisational arrangements and discourses: conditions which result in predominant emotions of compassion and indifference in one team, and hostility in another. The article ends by asking what, if anything, can be done to curb the ill-treatment of displaced people.

  • This article examines the experiences of women occupying reserved seats on the suku councils of Timor-Leste (each of which represents a number of small villages). The limited political participation of these women is often ascribed to patriarchal ideas within rural areas, and the need for capacity development. This article argues, however, that there are further structural issues at play, whereby the interaction between traditional and modern governance makes it difficult for women occupying reserved seats to make their mark. While gender quotas can be a useful tool to encourage women’s political participation, these structural issues need to be recognised and addressed in order to truly empower women.

  • Based on fieldwork carried out on Islamic Relief’s relief programme for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, this article contributes to the debate on whether Muslim aid agencies bring added value when working with Muslim beneficiaries in Muslim areas. The author explores the significance of religion in relations between actors in the aid process and argues that a common religion does not necessarily override political, social, and cultural divisions. The article questions whether it is useful to claim that Muslim solidarity exists in the aid process when in practice it is difficult to have any meaningful engagement with religion in the field.

  • Religious faith has always had an intense but uneasy relationship with development. Donors are currently seeking greater engagement with faith-based organisations (FBOs). This positive shift needs careful consideration. Faith can be a powerful – but flammable – fuel for change. FBOs are highly diverse and complex. Donors therefore need to handle them with understanding and care. This article outlines both the major concerns about faith in development and also the potential ‘value-added’ of FBOs. It charts growing interest yet residual ambivalence on the part of donors towards faith in development. It presents the practical challenges and suggests ways forward for both donors and FBOs.

  • This is the text of a talk given at a conference for Publishing for Social Change in Oxford. It explores the effect of literature on political consciousness.

  • This Practical Note examines the nascent micro-insurance sector in West Bengal, paying particular attention to the corporate–NGO partnership model for micro-insurance distribution, which has been enabled by India’s unique regulatory framework. We challenge the popular construction of this model as a ‘win–win’ for all parties by analysing conflicting understandings of micro-insurance schemes and their purposes by insurance companies, NGOs, and poor villagers. The article also considers the role of the specific political context of West Bengal in constricting corporate–NGO micro-insurance.

  • We are in a time when many detractors of international development are regularly challenging the whole concept of development, including those who feel that international aid should be cut to avoid or reduce budget reductions in donor country’s domestic services. Meanwhile supporters of development assistance are also concerned both by recurrent failures to meet intended impacts, and that this is now being ‘exposed’ in the popular media and academic literature. It is therefore salutary to reflect on the wide range of activities actually covered by the term ‘development’. Even just this one issue of Development in Practice takes us through several very different approaches and sectors.

    The breadth of activities described here illustrate why it is important to avoid trying to define development or development assistance too narrowly. It is also clear that the evidence base in favour of one type of approach to development over another is simply not there. There are some good examples in this issue of critical reviews of some very targeted and practical interventions designed to improve the lives of poor people. Articles such as that by Shaheen Akter and John Farrington illustrate how even a well-established, 20-year poultry programme has had to work within a complex situation of a changing economy, practical challenges and differing markets. Although overall there was much positive in this work, there were also still unanswered questions about the programme and ways it could be improved.

    The article by Rebecca Barnes, David Rosser and Paul Brown sets out to look at the planning frameworks for rural water and sanitation development projects. They argue that if 30–60 per cent of all existing rural water supply systems are inoperative at any one time, this must reflect on weakness in the planning systems. Given this, they analyse several frameworks against the criteria they see as key in achieving an improved outcome for such projects. This damning statistic of failed water projects should also raise wider questions for us as to why projects in the water and sanitation sector are so difficult to get right. Is it because of the technical factors, or more complex factors, such as relationships and communication between different stakeholders, or the issue of pricing undermining sustainability if people either cannot afford to, or do not see the importance of, paying for water? Why are some sectors apparently easier to set up and be maintained – is it because they deliver people (education) or capital (microcredit) which are given a higher priority by poor rural people?

    Capacity building is an issue in several of the articles, and their review of failings in many forms of capacity building leads Jayalaxshmi Mistry et al. to argue in favour of a problemled approach to capacity building as a way of enhancing adaptive capacities. This is compared to programmes, which merely transfer prescriptive technical knowledge. The article argues that in the context of the complexities of natural resource management, which almost by definition is permanently evolving, traditional capacity building is unable to help people cope when new issues inevitably arise.

    Meanwhile, Pradeep Kumar Dash et al. argue in favour of both capacity building in the context of sustainable watershed management, allied with local knowledge and improved gender equality. This accompanies their argument that a wide range of groups need to be engaged with the discussion and action around watersheds, and that a gender perspective has often been missing from many such programmes.

    We have two articles from different perspectives looking at capacity building in both governance and democracy programmes. In West Papua, Julius Ary Mollet, looks at the struggles of local government to deal with the major challenges to a province rich in mineral income but with a poor distribution of its benefits to its inhabitants. Different governors have regularly changed their policies and priorities, resulting in a failure to deal with major issues around the provision of education and health, as well as to encourage local economic development despite a theoretically high per capita GDP. This frustration is clearly echoed in the article on corruption and human rights in the Niger Delta, where again massive resources (in this case oil) have failed to have the impact they should. Ibaba Samuel Ibaba argues that the development failure in the Delta is in a large part because of corruption, which inhibits investment in basic services and other local development. As such, it is argued that corruption actually works against development and human rights, leading to increased conflict in the region.

    In a related article, Gordon Cummings notes that in Cameroon NGOs neglected issues of governance for many years. When French and local NGOs engaged in a governance and democracy programme in Cameroon, their failure to agree the purposes and procedures of the programme led to conflicting interests, views and ultimately allowed for a misuse of funds. He argues that this opportunity did later lead to a more successful set of programmes, once NGOs and donors alike absorbed some of the lessons from the failure.

    Three articles take different approaches to the growing debate about fair trade and corporate social responsibility. The first, by Amparo Merino and Carmen Valor, takes a critical look at Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and argue that the lack of an ‘ideological’ debate around CSR means that many initiatives fail to engage with what would need to happen for CSR to genuinely contribute to poverty eradication, rather than serve the shorter-term interests of companies.

    The second, by Rie Makita, uses a case study from southern India to examine the pressures on rural producers to try to benefit from both fair trade and organic accreditation, which often overlap in western consumers’ perceptions, but may have quite different consequences on the ground. Farmers tried to cope with the product-based systems of fair trade and the productionunit basis of organic accreditation. Some were able to manage the costs and gains of both, whilst others made choices to engage with one or the other.

    Finally, Hannah McDowell, John Humphreys and Jane Conlon look at a Fairtrade registration scheme, which sees the relations of production as being more appropriate for fashion goods rather than the more traditional systems used for agricultural products. They feel that by exposing the relations of production this helps identify other labour relationships, which need to be taken into account in addition to the traditional one of ensuring improved process for ‘producers’. These articles are reinforced by the Practical Note by John Gorlorwulu who argues that in the context of post-conflict Liberia, investment in financing and capacity building of local small businesses has a sustainable impact on creating jobs and rebuilding the local economy.

    The Viewpoint by Maria Constanza Torri in this issue also relates to trade, as it looks at herbal medicine in India and discusses ways that this major traditional trade can improve the incomes of the poor rural inhabitants who tend to collect the herbs.
     

  • Fashion, accessories, and homeware fall outside the regulations of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), which certifies mostly food products. A handful of fashion-led Fair Trade enterprises are now providing ranges of high-quality desirable products, made by workers employed in urban enterprises as well as independent producers in cooperatives. Tabeisa, an NGO involved in Fair Trade retailing, has developed a new regulatory framework which uniquely starts by defining the relations of production between all actors in the chain. This ensures that those not previously covered by existing standards are made visible and receive fair pay and conditions.

  • This article focuses on one of the assumptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR), namely its usefulness as a tool for eradicating poverty. The claims that business and CSR strategies can be effective in fighting poverty face major challenges, in particular the wide divergence of understandings about the notion and implementation of CSR, and the absence of clear understanding of underlying ideological bases concerning business and poverty. The authors find that, although usually considered as ideologically neutral, the CSR discourse requires the introduction of ideological debate if it is to meet the goal of poverty eradication.

  • Poor initial planning processes have been implicated in the high failure rate of rural water and sanitation development projects. This article critically examines 17 existing planning frameworks for rural water supply and sanitation projects with respect to key attributes of good planning practice, in order to discover the extent to which these address the elements of planning that relate to sustainability. It identifies sustainability-related factors from the sector that have been recognised as such and incorporated into current frameworks, as well as factors that are not yet well covered, and makes recommendations to practitioners wishing to employ such frameworks.

  • As natural-resource issues become more complex, particularly in developing-world contexts, there is a growing need for adaptive management solutions. However, the skills necessary to deal with these increasingly complex situations are not always present in many low-income countries. There is also a growing recognition that many capacity-building activities are limited in their effectiveness. This article suggests a problem-based learning (PBL) approach to capacity building. Using the example of training courses developed to help natural-resource management in Guyana, this article illustrates how PBL can help to enhance the capabilities needed for adaptive management.

  • Although the confluence of Fair Trade and organic agriculture has become a salient phenomenon, they contradict each other at the production level: Fair Trade focuses on specific products, while organic agriculture targets production units. This article explores how Southern small-scale producers cope with this discrepancy, by observing one farmers’ group’s attempt to obtain the two certifications in India. This case study identifies stakeholders who react to the two certifications differently under different livelihood strategies. Combining the two initiatives may not always be the best practice for realising poverty reduction and environmental conservation –aims which the initiatives have in common.

  • NGOs have traditionally had little scope to bring about political reform in developing countries. This was certainly true of French development NGOs (NGDOs) operating in Cameroon during the early post-colonial decades. This situation changed in 2002 when French NGDOs, with support from the French state and Cameroonian civil society, initiated a multi-actor consultative programme (the PCPA), aiming to build democracy in Cameroon. This article traces the origins of the PCPA, assesses its achievements, and explains why the programme failed. It then identifies key lessons and asks whether the PCPA represents a useful model for French NGOs and donor states.

  • There have been enormous political, economic, and social changes in West Papua. Every governor of West Papua has designed programmes to boost economic development and reduce poverty. The influx of migrant workers under the ‘transmigration programme’ into West Papua has limited the job opportunities for indigenous people in the labour market. This article concludes that the local government's strategies failed to deliver suitable development programmes to the local people, which resulted in increased poverty, the continuing poor development of the education system, and the deterioration of the population's health condition, with a rise in the number of Papuans infected with HIV and AIDS.
     

  • This article examines the interdependence between corruption, violations of human rights, and conflict in the Niger Delta. It is argued that corruption-induced violations have triggered conflicts that have become cyclical. The article sets out a theoretical context against which to examine the interface between corruption, human-rights violation, and conflict in the Delta, and calls for the integration of the fight against corruption into the peace-building process in the Niger Delta.
     

  • The implementation and effective management of watershed-development projects is recognised as a strategy for rural development throughout the developing world. Several government and non-government agencies have launched watershed-development projects to tackle the challenges of soil conservation, improving land productivity, and economic upliftment of the rural poor for efficient use of natural resources. Participatory community-driven institutions of integrated watershed management are considered vital for the sustainability of natural resources. This study focuses on the impact of local institutions on watershed development in India and examines the degree of women's participation in relation to the effective management of natural resources and sustainable development.
     

  • This article evaluates poverty transition using self-assessment in a quasi-experimental framework. Data are drawn from a survey conducted in 2006 of 400 women who were the beneficiaries of a poverty-alleviation programme which involved longer-term interventions towards building the strength of government departments, participating organisations, and beneficiaries. During the survey, when the project was approaching its conclusion, about 50 per cent of these farmers were still in the programme. The article addresses a number of key questions related to pathways out of poverty through livestock-based activities, heterogeneity in livelihood choice and its impact on household welfare, and wider applications.
     

  • The medicinal plant sector is on the increase in many developing countries. Despite this, the existing supply chain is unable to improve the livelihoods of the gatherers. This article considers Gram Mooligai Company Limited (GMCL), the first community-based enterprise active in the herbal sector. GMCL promotes a more equitable sharing of benefits in the sector, while also aiming for a more sustainable use of natural resources. The article draws conclusions and lessons about supporting such types of enterprises, reforming the herbal-sector supply chain, and promoting new forms of partnership between ayurvedic firms and communities.
     

  • Sustainable job creation in post-conflict environments often involves financing private-sector development. However, a poor business climate and the erosion of capacity in the domestic private sector reduce the effectiveness of traditional financing strategies in post-conflict environments. Using the experience of post-war Liberia, this article discusses strategies for improving small and medium enterprise (SME) development projects in post-conflict environments through innovative financing which takes into account the effects of conflict on managerial and entrepreneurial capacity and the business climate. Implementation strategies that support conflict-sensitive post-conflict development are also discussed.
     

  • It is at least 20 years since authors such as Peter Oakley1 and Jonathan Friedman2 wrote about the concept of empowerment, and even longer since Paulo Freire3 and others popularised the concept of ‘conscientisation’. Do these concepts still have a value and a relevance at the present time, when so much development thinking is dominated by technological solutions to problems, or alternatively assumes that the hidden hand of the market will resolve economic and social ‘inefficiencies’? Behind the idea of empowerment was always an assumption that action was required to help to rebalance political and socio-economic inequalities resulting in or maintaining structural poverty. A few years ago in The Broker4 and elsewhere, several commentators tried to argue that development had become depoliticised under the influence of technologists and growth economists. It has been argued that this tendency enabled elites to avoid having to make the changes necessary to confront the real causes of poverty. Post-empowerment concepts such as ‘agency’ had the disadvantage of placing too much of the onus for change on the individual – which raised questions about what produces agency in some people and not in others.

    More recently there has been a welcome resurgence of interest in governance, but much of the debate about empowerment gets lost in programmes for the reform of public administration. Reform of public administration is, in itself, valuable, but it does not necessarily remove the need for rebalancing unjust and unequal relationships – for example between classes, castes, sexes, and ethnic groups. The question which should still concern us all is: have we downgraded the importance of the political and power in development, from the household or community level, through to the nation state, and even international relationships? Is the current discourse dominated by euphemisms and the misuse of language, such that we talk of ‘governance’ rather than ‘inequality’, and ‘democratic deficits’ rather than ‘dictatorships’? If this is the case, what are the implications for our understanding of empowerment: is it still about genuine social transformation, or is it no more than introducing minor changes in the way that development is managed?

    This issue of Development in Practice presents several articles which attempt to reassert the importance of empowerment, especially in the context of gender and generation. These articles illustrate that empowerment can be looked at from the perspective of the individual, or the organisation, or the community, with a gender or policy perspective, and at many other levels.

    Trae Stewart explores ‘community-based service learning for Palestinian youth’, an approach to empowerment for Palestinian young people which uses learning acquired outside schools which is linked to strengthening the concept and practice of citizenship. This was achieved by encouraging young people to play roles in their society which reinforce their self-confidence, provide positive experiences, and enable them to achieve a great deal in an otherwise negative and constraining context of a contested political space, traditional values, and restricted physical mobility – problems compounded by low levels of employment.

    Babken Babajanian describes a World Bank programme in Kyrgyzstan which aimed to promote ‘empowered participation’ in poor villages. He finds, however, that where levels of personal experience and capacity are low, a more conscious design process and effort are required to enable such participation to take place effectively. Jason Hart et al. look indirectly at children's empowerment in the context of an international aid agency's attempt to incorporate child participation into its organisational practice and culture. This was a challenging process in itself, which gave rise to valuable reflections on the importance of spaces for individual reflection, ownership, and indeed participation when trying to shift an organisational culture towards one that incorporated these values.

    Abdulkareem Lawal, writing about gender diversity in Nigeria, notes the increased income from poultry projects for women in fishing communities, but argues that even more important was the increased empowerment of the women, as evidenced by their greater confidence. This study is also interesting because it relied on longer-term tracking of the outcomes of the original poultry programme on the status of the women participants.

    Similar gains are claimed by Hilary Ferguson and Thembela Kepe in their Practical Note, which reviews the work of Ugandan women-based agricultural cooperatives. They also look beyond the tangible gains of those cooperatives to social benefits, such as the increased confidence and enhanced empowerment of local women. Self-confidence in the workplace and in local community organisations resonates with the definitions of empowerment used by the women in Cambodia who feature in Jenny Pearson's article, which provides an honest account of her attempts to improve women's empowerment in the Cambodian NGO for which she works. Although the approach was well thought out, it did not seem to deliver the expected outcomes. The article considers the constraints of local culture in a post-conflict context where fear and traditional values inhibit even professional women from breaking out of these constraints. The article goes on to demonstrate the effects of the empowerment process on the working lives of the women participants, as well as sometimes unexpected changes in their domestic relationships.

    This article brings to our attention an important point about the way in which different local culturally bound perceptions and definitions can affect well-meaning attempts to empower women. In her work in Cambodia, the author shows how local women interpreted the meaning behind some of the Western approaches used within the workplace, and how they affected their personal lives. On reflection, the author notes how many of her own assumptions came from her personal experience of feminism at a particular time and place within Western culture and history.

    From a different perspective, Ishara Mahat writes of the failure, in Nepal, to take into account women's views of rural energy production and needs, a failure which slows down the process of adaptation, given that women in particular are often the major users and often producers of energy (collecting wood). Therefore the views of women are essential if new alternative technologies are to achieve major possible gains for Nepal. The importance of gender mainstreaming is also argued by Mary Njenga et al., who discuss ways of redressing the lack of gender-based needs analysis in the processes of agricultural research, describing an attempt to improve on this through the urban harvest programme sponsored by the International Potato Centre. Bipasha Baruah's Practical Note provides tips on disaggregating data by gender for environmental and development programmes, based on experiences with CIDA in the Caribbean.

    Other articles include an innovatory description of index-based insurance for pastoralists by Harriet Matsaert et al., reviewing risk management in the context of climate insecurity and livestock production in Kenya. This is complemented by an article about a market-information service run by the Zambian National Farmers Union, using SMS messaging systems, described by Simon Milligan et al. This demonstrates the potential of new technologies to resolve long-term constraints such as a lack of market information for isolated small-scale farmers.

    Finally, I would like to draw readers' attention to a new feature, ‘Essential Reading’, where we have asked senior people in our field to reflect on three key books which have influenced their thinking and practice over the course of their careers. We felt that the increasing proliferation of new information tends to make us forget about some of the more formative books, articles, and reports from the past. The first article in this series is by Ian Smillie, the well-known Canadian writer on development, previously Executive Director of CUSO and founder of Inter Pares, who has chosen to write about essential reading in relation to ‘Learning and Development’. Other reflections will follow in future issues, and we would be pleased to hear from possible contributors.

    Notes.

    P. Oakley (ed.) (2001) Evaluating Empowerment: Reviewing the Concept and Practice, Oxford: INTRAC.

    J. Friedmann (1992) Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    P. Freire (1974) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Continuum.

    The Broker (2008) ‘Issue 10: Deep democracy – Civic driven change: Reinventing citizen action’ (retrieved December 2010). www.thebrokeronline.eu/index.php/en/Magazine/archive/Issue-10-Deep-democracy-Civic-driven-change-Reinventing-citizen-action  

  • Palestinian youth face developmental, cultural, and political barriers that impede them from fully engaging in civic life. Non-traditional, youth-centred pedagogies of engagement, like community-based service-learning, have shown their potential to motivate marginalised populations and provide space and roles for them to form individual identities while developing civic skills. Using data collected through focus-group interviews, this article considers the impact on West Bank youth who participated in an NGO's community-based service-learning leadership programme. Six themed findings are discussed, and the author suggests that non-school-based service-learning may have a central role to play in the civic-identity development of Palestine's most populous group of citizens.
     

  • 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. Participatory projects must carefully design arrangements and operational procedures for the co-financing component of the project, in order to support citizen empowerment and democratic inclusion.
     

  • This article considers the challenges of promoting children's participation in development programming. It argues against the tendency to see the main obstacle to achieving this aim as technical. Instead it explores the institutional dimensions of change that may be required. The experience of a four-year process of training and organisational review within Save the Children Denmark provides the substance for reflection about the kinds of cultural and structural change that are implicated in enabling a development organisation to become capable of engaging young people as stakeholders in a meaningful and sustainable manner.

     

  • Pastoralists in northern Kenya live with a high level of risk, including climatic shocks, disease, and insecurity. This article considers the potential role of index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) as a mechanism which pastoralists can use to manage climate-related risk. How might it complement or compete with existing risk-management practices? Is the current institutional and policy environment favourable to developing this type of product? This study uses an innovation systems perspective to explore and answer some of these questions, and to consider the strategic role of research and development actors in the development process.

     

  • Commodity markets have changed significantly in the past two decades, with smallholders increasingly requiring robust market intelligence to understand and secure benefit from the new environment. This article explores the approach to, and lessons stemming from, an IFAD-financed market information service in Zambia. It finds that by locating the service within a pre-existing institution with legitimacy and credibility, the service has secured the interest of a wide range of actors, and has better enabled smallholders and traders to access and utilise relevant, up-to-date, and actionable information to shape decision-making. The article concludes by discussing the key considerations that shaped the institutional analysis, and the issues that will influence the financial sustainability of the service.

     

  • In many rural households, women are much more involved than men in poultry production. This article examines the introduction of exotic chickens into communities along the shorelines of Kainji Lake in Nigeria and the consequent impact on women's participation and decision making within the household. Women's household decision-making power, particularly in terms of spending money from the sale of chickens and their own extra income, is stronger when the household keeps improved chicken species. The rearing of improved chicken species was positively correlated with social-status enhancement, especially for women.

     

  • Despite increased attention to gender issues in the international development arena since the rise of feminism in the 1970s, few agricultural research organisations have integrated gender in their problem diagnosis and technology development. Gender mainstreaming can significantly enhance the impact of research and technology development. Entrenching gender mainstreaming in organisations and their research agendas remains a challenge. To overcome it requires political will, accountability, a change in organisational culture, and technical capacity within an organisation. This article presents an experience of gender-mainstreaming practice in the institutional culture and agricultural research processes by Urban Harvest and the International Potato Centre (CIP).

     

  • The lives of female Cambodian NGO staff are characterised by the contradictions of apparent freedom and multiple invisible constraints on their behaviour and choices. An empowerment process facilitated by an expatriate did not produce the expected responses of sisterhood and group action. Through a series of workshops, learning emerged about the context-dependent nature of concepts of empowerment, and the irrelevance of many Western models for other cultures. Fear and mistrust, rooted in both traditional culture and the post-conflict context, are powerful and profound blocks to change in women's lives. No visible difference in workplace behaviours appeared after the empowerment process. However, the women responded to new insights about their lives, beliefs, and culture in ways that had meaning for them; and they reported significant benefits for family and social relationships.

     

  • Rural women in general, and mountain women in particular, are greatly involved in managing household energy systems in Nepal. Alternative energy technologies have a high potential to reduce women's workloads and improve their health status, as well as increasing efficient energy supply. Interventions in rural energy are primarily aimed at reducing firewood use and increasing economic growth through rural electrification, rather than aiming to reduce human drudgery, especially that of women. Hence, such intervention takes place without considering the needs, roles, interests, and potential of rural women, even though women are the primary users and managers of rural energy resources. This article aims to analyse the gender implications of rural energy technologies in Kavre district, where the Rural Energy Development Program (REDP) has been implemented, especially in terms of saving women's labour and increasing socio-economic opportunities for women.

     

  • This article presents a case study of Manyakabi Area Cooperative Enterprise in south-western Uganda, which shows that benefits from agricultural cooperatives can extend beyond monetary tangibles. We discuss several social factors that women members claimed have improved since they became members of the cooperative, including their confidence, their negotiating skills, the ability to be of service to their communities through transferring skills to non-members, and the ability to take control of certain household decisions when dealing with men. We conclude that these social benefits could be enhanced if they were fully acknowledged as important by agents of change.

     

  • Environmental and development policies used to be considered gender-neutral. Women's needs and interests were perceived to be identical to those of men. Empirical research has more recently asserted that policies that were thought to be gender-neutral were actually gender-blind and, therefore, either inadequate or inappropriate to capture the impacts upon women of environmental and development policies. This article presents a range of practical tools and mechanisms that may be used to monitor environmental and development issues from a gender perspective. It also outlines key strategies through which governments, NGOs, and donor agencies may assess the impact of such policies on women.

     

  • This article reports on the Warwick Conference on Humanitarianism, where practitioners and academics shared their experiences of the problems and limitations of humanitarianism, and how they dealt with them.

     

  • Partners in Development: The Report of the Commission on International Development, Lester B. Pearson (Chairman), Praeger, 1969
    Rural Development: Putting the Last First, Robert Chambers, Longman, 1983
    Development Projects as Policy Experiments, Dennis A. Rondinelli, Routledge, 1993

    Good books on development tend to stay in print a long time, not least because there is a timeless quality in good development. Two of my three favourites are still available new and unused. Robert Chambers' Rural Development: Putting the Last First is now in its 27th year and must be in its 50th printing. Dennis Rondinelli's Development Projects as Policy Experiments, dating from 1993, is also still in print, deservedly so. That's the good news. The bad news is that a new copy of the Rondinelli will cost you a great deal (potentially $220!). Chambers' book is available at a much more reasonable price.

    My third choice, although not necessarily in that order, is Partners in Development: The Report of the Commission on International Development (commonly known as ‘the Pearson Report’). This one, now more than 40 years old, has long been out of print. The Internet, however, solves all problems, and if Amazon can't find you a used copy somewhere, Abebooks will. I recently found Partners in Development for 20¢, a Chambers for 82¢, and a Rondinelli for $14.69.

    Partners in Development: The Report of the Commission on International Development

    ‘The Pearson Report’, published in 1969, which was originally written to investigate the effectiveness of the development assistance of the World Bank, is important for many reasons, most notably because it identified clearly almost all of the failings of the development enterprise four decades ago and proposed remedies that are still valid today. It spoke of the need for universal primary education, of vast needs in health and nutrition, and the importance of food production and research in agriculture. It identified the debt burden of developing countries as an issue needing urgent attention – at a time when that debt was only 5 per cent of what it subsequently became. It dealt at length with the need to develop the private sector in the developing world for local investment and manufacturing.

    The Pearson Report was not all-seeing. It neglected the environment, and it had little to say about women. It reflected the hysteria of the day about population growth, although its ‘low’ prediction for world population in 2000 was right on target. Interestingly, it saw trade liberalisation as a major key to long-term development, and it may have been the first major development publication to use the term ‘structural adjustment’ – 15 years before it became the donor weapon of choice. The Pearson version of liberalisation and structural adjustment, however, was different:

    The growth of world trade must be accompanied by liberalization. This in turn implies a willingness on the part of industrialized countries to make the structural adjustments which will enable them to absorb an increasing range of manufactures and semi-manufactures from developing countries.
    (Pearson 1969: 72)

    This is the polar opposite of what came to pass: a requirement that developing countries open their economies to the manufactures of the world, while swallowing medicine that weakened their abilities to invest in the education, health, infrastructure, and research required for competition in the global economy.

    Partners in Development talked about a ‘crisis in aid’: the damage caused by tied aid, the wastefulness of technical assistance, aid skewed in favour of some countries while others were ignored, and low overall volumes of official development assistance (ODA). The report said that ‘international support for development is now flagging. In some of the rich countries its feasibility, even its very purpose is in question. The climate surrounding foreign aid is heavy with disillusion and distrust’ (Pearson 1969: 4) – a cry that rings down the decades as an excuse for rich countries to seek advantage, cut back, do less.

    The report called for a new partnership, including the creation of new multilateral institutions that could bridge the gaps and minor faults of bilateral assistance, and it called for a ‘worldwide cooperative campaign’ that could lead to rapid growth and economic independence for developing countries. ‘It is a noble goal,’ the report said, ‘to which mankind is called in the last third of the twentieth century.’

    To achieve the goal and the considerable ambitions of the report, its authors came up with a target: ‘Each developed country should increase its commitments of ODA to the level necessary for net disbursements to reach 0.70% of its GNP by 1975 or shortly thereafter, but in no case later than 1980’ (Pearson 1969: 152).

    One wonders what the world might have looked like today had the recommendations been implemented – even by halves: had trade from developing countries been advanced rather than blocked; had investment in local capacities not been constricted; had debt fallen instead of skyrocketed; had aid been used more intelligently and reached anything like the targets that were set. The importance of the Pearson Report today lies not so much in what it got right or what it missed. It lies in its dramatic demonstration that very few of today's ideas about development are new. And it is a sobering and tragic reminder – if one is needed – of 40 years of lost opportunity, broken promises, and hypocrisy in the world of international development.

    Development Projects as Policy Experiments

    Dennis Rondinelli's title sums up his book in a phrase. He asks why so many development efforts fail, and he presents a brief history of once sacrosanct ideas, lying abandoned like so many tractors, rusting in forgotten fields: integrated rural development, basic human needs strategies, sectoral development, structural adjustment. The problem, he says, has been the boundless faith placed in planning and control, and in systems for project administration that were beyond the capacity of donors and recipients alike to implement efficiently: ‘The tendency to abstract, rationalize, standardize, control and complicate not only created the conditions for failure but inflicted hardships and frustration on the intended beneficiaries’ (Rondinelli 1993: 78).

    Failure, of course, tends in some quarters to provoke even greater levels of control. Rondinelli was writing in 1993, but little, it seems, has changed. In a powerful 2010 article on the dangers of over-controlling development assistance, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios writes about what he calls the two tensions in development programming: ‘accountability and control’ versus ‘good development practice’. He says that the balance ‘has now been skewed to such a degree in the U.S. aid system (and in the World Bank as well) that the imbalance threatens program integrity’.1 Natsios goes on to say that the control element ‘ignores a central principle of development theory – that those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.’

    Rondinelli argues that ‘perfectionist planners’ are the bane of good development, and that ‘The inherent uncertainty about the outcome of all development projects suggests that alternative methods of planning and implementation must be employed’ (Rondinellli 1993: 158). He says that central control and coordination are the least effective instruments of influencing decisions and behaviour. Instead, he argues for adaptive management and a culture of learning that embraces error detection and correction as an alternative to the all-too prevalent suppression and punishment. Good management in any walk of life is about learning – not just about what works, but about what does not work. And it is about remembering and applying the lessons so that mistakes are not repeated, so that success can be the foundation for more success. It seems simple, but it can't be repeated enough in the world so accurately described by Andrew Natsios.

    Rural Development: Putting the Last First

    Robert Chambers takes the Rondinelli idea to the grass roots. Chambers speaks to the ‘outsiders’ who create development plans and projects, often without understanding what they are seeing, without hearing what they are told, and without getting off the tarmac and spending time with the people whose lives they aim to change. His description of the different levels of poverty, powerlessness, and vulnerability, and of the biases applied to the problem by outsiders, was and remains groundbreaking. Chambers gives us the nuts and bolts of learning about poverty, poor people, and change. And he cuts sharply into the ‘bafflegab’ that haunts so much thinking and writing about development.

    [One] failure of analysis occurs in the ritual call for integration and coordination, and even maximum integration and maximum coordination. These words slip glibly off the polished tongues of practised non-thinkers. They can be strung together in alternate sentences to give a semblance of solidarity to a smokescreen of waffle.
    (Chambers 1983:154)

    For years after this book came out, I would take it with me on trips to Africa and Asia, and at night, sometimes in the guilty comfort of an air-conditioned hotel room, I would read a few pages to remind myself what I was supposed to be doing. I would often pause at page 47, where Chambers quotes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: ‘You don't know much,’ said the Duchess, ‘and that's a fact’.

    Notes.

    Andrew Natsios (2010) ‘The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development’, Center for Global Development, www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424271, accessed 17 August 2010.

  • Towards the end of 2008, Marc J. Cohen and Melinda Smale, both then working for Oxfam America, approached me with a proposal for a special issue of Development in Practice on the global food crisis that had been generated by chaotic price increases. The resulting volume is both grounded in lived experiences and forward-looking. It also presents an opportunity to explore the differences between the relatively self-contained food-related emergencies of the past and the global dimensions of the situation that we now confront.

    The theme also offers a pleasing symmetry. First, Development in Practice was founded and at the time still owned by Oxfam GB (OGB), which was founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. Notwithstanding the Allied blockade and prohibition on ‘trading with the enemy’, a small group of concerned British citizens mobilised significant popular support to relieve the famine in occupied Greece. So from its inception, OGB's founders had the vision to understand that hunger is rooted in politics, and that civilians therefore have the right, the duty, and potentially the power to do something about it.

    Second, and quite coincidentally, I had begun my own career in OGB almost 30 years earlier by working on food issues, initially as a researcher on the role of food aid as a tool for development. The resulting book (Jackson and Eade 1982) was accompanied by a campaign of seminars, speeches at the European Parliament, briefings for journalists, aid agencies, and parliamentary assistants, radio broadcasts, and innumerable interviews and short articles. Prior to this, critiques had focused on the politics of government-to-government food aid. It was taken for granted that so-called ‘project food aid’ was exempt from such concerns and that it could promote development (via food-for work (FFW), mother–child health (MCH), and school feeding programmes).1 Indeed, despite clear evidence that food aid was displacing local produce as people sold unwanted maize, corn oil, and milk powder, proponents argued that food aid was intrinsically ‘self-targeting’, because the only thing that poor and hungry beneficiaries could do with it was to eat it. Attentive reading of the food-aid agencies' own internal reports and commissioned evaluations revealed, however, that the developmental impacts were largely illusory: we therefore argued that the NGOs that depended on channelling food aid for development needed to acknowledge and act upon the facts already at their disposal.2

    On moving to Mexico in 1982, I turned my attention to the insidious use of food aid in counter-insurgency, characterised by General Ríos Montt's infamous frijoles y fusiles (‘beans and guns’) programme in Guatemala (Eade 1984a). Following an involvement in a fascinating research programme on US–Mexican agricultural relations (Winder and Eade 1987), OGB commissioned me to write one of a series of three ‘Under the Weather’ reports aimed at dispelling the popular myth that food crises are caused primarily by extreme or erratic climates, rather than things like hoarding and speculation, erosion and other forms of environmental degradation, the ‘pesticide treadmill’ (Bull 1982), and generations of marginalisation – in other words, that hunger is caused by human not divine agency and is therefore a breach of the right to food enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Eade 1984b).

    Reading through the contents of this volume brought other recollections to the surface of my mind:

    •• A landless family in Bangladesh so poor that they had sold their only remaining possessions, including their cooking pots. Already painfully thin, they were just about surviving on whatever they could forage, and hoping to get food in return for gathering firewood. But of course even if they did manage to earn a few handfuls of rice and catch a couple of fish, they no longer had anything in which to cook them. With no remaining assets, they seemed trapped in a downward spiral.
    •• A woman in a remote village in Honduras who arrived with her newborn infant and three small children at the pulpería (local grocery) to buy a tablespoon of cooking oil, an egg, and one tomato. She wanted a fizzy drink for the children but was short of a few cents. In fact she had already paid some 20 times over the odds for her meagre purchases: in addition to the mark-up charged by any store that is off the beaten track, purchases of such minuscule quantities multiplied the cost several times over.
    •• 1 January 1994, the date when the Zapatistas famously went public in Chiapas, Mexico to mark the coming into effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Chiapas is a major coffee-growing area, yet no roadside cafés or restaurants had ever served the local produce: only the low-grade and ready-sweetened instant version was on offer. In San Cristóbal de las Casas you can now feel virtuous as you watch the world go, enjoying a cup of organic coffee grown on a plantation run by the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation); or justify the food miles by purchasing fair-trade ‘Café Rebelde’ via the Internet. The EZLN and other Mexican producers have cornered the ‘sustainable’ gourmet coffee market – organic, shade-grown, bird-friendly, and peasant-grown (Pérez-Grovas et al. 2001: 62). Yet volatile global markets frequently force these small-scale producers to sell below cost (Pérez-Grovas et al. 2001: 5).

    Given the dependence of the poorest sectors of the population on agriculture, the incorporation of the Mexican and far weaker Central American economies into neo-liberal global markets has inevitably had major repercussions on their agrarian systems, and on the lives of peasant farmers and labourers. An underlying premise of both NAFTA and DR–CAFTA (Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement), and their variations worldwide, is that even traditional food staples are no more than a commodity, a consumer item like a pair of trainers or an MP3 player. The value of food is determined only by the price that it can fetch on the market. The assumption seems to be that as long as people have food on the table, it is immaterial where or how it was grown. Or in other words, it does not matter if small farmers go to the wall as long as their daughters can land jobs in the maquila, and a hamburger and a sugary soda drink fill the stomach just as well as more nourishing traditional foods.

    The producers of rice, maize, beans, and dairy products in Mexico and Central America must now compete via closed trade agreements with subsidised US agribusinesses that grow the same crops – albeit not the same varieties. Imports of yellow maize, for instance, are used as a substitute for the sorghum from which Nicaraguan producers manufactured feed for poultry, pigs, and other livestock (Cáceres 2005). Meanwhile, in a perverse twist of the age-old policies of export-led growth and import substitution, farmlands in East Africa and Latin America are using their ‘comparative advantage’ to cultivate cut flowers and out-of-season fruit and vegetables for export, while staples are imported. Mexico has long sent strawberries – and agricultural labourers – over the border to the USA. But when Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in 2010, disrupting flights to and from Europe, Jane Ngige, head of Kenya's flower council, told the BBC that growers were losing up to US$2 million a day, because 97 per cent of the country's cut-flower exports are sent to Europe, from where they are re-exported around the world. Many thousands of blooms rotted at Nairobi airport because they could neither be stored nor transported. As far away as Toronto, florists turned instead to suppliers in Colombia and Ecuador (for details, see www.humanflowerproject.com).

    In 1980, Mexico launched an ambitious, though short-lived programme (the Sistema Alimentario Mexicano, or Mexican Food System) to promote food sovereignty and address poverty by supporting peasant production of staple foods while also providing an equitable food-distribution system and assistance for housing, health, education, and nutrition for marginalised sectors (COPLAMAR) (de Janvry and Vandeman 1987: 86).3 Yet only five years later, predicting the death of food self-sufficiency, David Barkin and Blanca Suárez noted:

    We have seen in many countries that when commercial interests govern agricultural policy there is a rise in imports of food staples. Some might argue that such imports are unnecessary because food shortages are due to unequal distribution between social sectors, between human beings and livestock, and to avoidable losses. Of course, if today's production capacity were directed primarily towards meeting basic human needs, there would be more than ample. But this is not how the system works: capitalism tends to produce not what is essential but what is profitable, and in the many countries where the majority live in poverty, or who do not participate fully in the capitalist economy, these two principles are incompatible unless there is a clear government policy to make it a priority to ensure that the entire population enjoys a decent standard of nutrition.

    (Barkin and Suárez 1985: 241, my translation)

    Presciently arguing that ‘the internationalisation of capital’, which is today called (economic) globalisation, aggravates social conflicts and repression, they continued (Barkin and Suárez 1985: 243):

    It rips people apart from their traditional societies and makes them dependent on the market for their basic needs. It imposes profound changes without any guarantee that once the basis of their self-provisioning has been destroyed it will be replaced by any other source of subsistence. It seeks to reduce the independence of peasants and artisans, offering them other work or an outlet for their produce, but with no guarantee of success.

    The neo-liberal project demands that governments abrogate their right to intervene in order to (re)integrate the production and consumption of local foods – it is assumed that the market will sort this out. Disinvestment in small producers has been helped along over decades of repeating the mantra that small producers and family farms are inefficient, risk-averse, backward, and unable to respond to market opportunities; that development means modernisation; and that the way forward is for each country to exploit its comparative advantage in global markets by becoming ever more specialised: in effect a form of agricultural Taylorism. Land reform has completely fallen off the agenda: the political space is even more limited than governments' appetite for it. As a result, ‘[p]overty reduction strategies often jump from one extreme to the other, commercial agricultural production for global markets, to safety nets for the most needy’ (Gopal et al. 2009: 3).4

    But food is an integral part of human culture, giving a sense of belonging. Customs concerning what may or may not be eaten are central to many cultures and religions, and certain foods may even have ritual significance. Learning how to cook, serve, share, and eat food is a defining element within all processes of socialisation. Major celebrations such as weddings, births, and other rites of passage invariably involve people eating together. Food is not, therefore, a mere commodity. And nobody can eat roses or carnations if the bottom drops out of the global flower market.

    For Mesoamerican peoples, maize is not merely a staple food but is intrinsic to knowledge, to wisdom, to what gives meaning to human life within the universe. Writing specifically about communities of the Peruvian Andes, but whose insights would resonate in many other settings, the anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin notes:

    For indigenous peoples, the world is not divided between a material reality and a nonmaterial reality. The beings of the Pacha, such as human beings, the water in its many forms, the earth, the plants, the animals, the stars, the sun, the moon, and so forth, all share the same world.

    (Apffel-Marglin 2010 : 40)

    Because food means so much more than simply ingesting the correct amount of nutrients, it does in fact matter how and by whom it is produced, and how and by whom it is consumed. While it is certainly no panacea, the fair-trade movement does at least seek to reintegrate the links between producers and consumers and to place this relationship on a more even footing. In so doing, it articulates a connection between producers' collective rights and the politics of individual consumer choice.5

    As contributors to this collection illustrate,6 the reasons for the global food crisis – or, rather, crises – are varied, complex, and dynamic. Rather like the chaos theorists' butterfly, which by flapping its wings in China affects weather patterns in Cameroon or Canada, food-related issues are rooted in diverse local realities as well as global markets. So while there is no single, overarching policy response, it is now vital that small producers and ordinary consumers – local, national, and global – see where their common interests lie and work together to ensure that all human beings enjoy the right to adequate food, and that all food is produced in ways that are environmentally and socially sustainable and which respect cultural diversity.

    Notes.

    1The USA is the largest single food-aid donor. When J. F. Kennedy renamed the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (PL 480) ‘Food for Peace’, he stated: ‘Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want’.

    2In 2007, CARE caused a stir among US NGOs by withdrawing from a system whereby the US government purchases goods such as sunflower oil from (largely subsidised) US agribusinesses, ships these goods overseas, and then donates them to NGOs, which in turn sell them on the local market and use the proceeds to finance their anti-poverty projects. Following a review, CARE concluded that the system was inherently inefficient and that it displaced, or at least discouraged investment in, local production. On the face of it, the arrangement amounts to a costly and elaborate form of dumping. According to former US President Jimmy Carter, the system continues because household-name NGOs defend it – because much of their funding now depends on it (New York Times, 16 August 2007, posted at www.un-ngls.org/article.php3?id_article=330&var_mode=calcul, retrieved 7 February 2011).

    3A significant problem was that because the subsidies were geared to produce rather than to producers, large irrigated farms in northern Mexico switched to producing maize and wheat for export, effectively cornering the support intended for small-scale rain-fed produce for the local market.

    4Contemporary safety nets still include variations on ‘food aid for development’, but these have been joined by conditional cash transfers (CCTs), whereby an agency (whether state, official aid agency, or NGO) identifies the ‘target’ population whose behaviour they wish to change, and who agree to do things that they would not have done without financial inducement (such as attending antenatal clinics, getting children vaccinated, keeping girls in secondary school). Paying people to do things, however objectively desirable, begs the question of whether the behaviour change will outlive the supply of cash. Even proponents of FFW schemes which provide infrastructure that should benefit the community – roads, irrigation, school buildings, water tanks – have found that it falls into disrepair once there is no material inducement to maintain it. A Caritas official in Haiti once described how the ‘community councils’ (known as food councils or konseys manjes) worked: ‘They construct roads in order to receive food … Where there is no more food, there can be no more work. Goodbye food, goodbye road! If they got food in order to finish a road, they regret it as soon as they have finished … They only then wish for the deterioration of the road so that they can re-do it’ (cited in Jackson and Eade 1982: 32).

    5The Northern consumer movement is by and large a middle-class phenomenon, because those who are struggling to make ends meet do not enjoy the same luxury of choice.

    6Development in Practice has published dozens of articles on food-related issues and three special issues in conjunction with CGIAR member organisations, two of which are also available in book form: Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research (2002) and Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (2010).

    References.

    1. Apffel-Marglin, F. 2010. “Feminine rituality and the spirit of the water in Peru”. In Women and Indigenous Religions, Edited by: Marcos, Sylvia. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

    2. Barkin, D. and Suárez, B. 1985. El Fin de la Autosuficiencia Alimentaria, México, DF: Centro de Ecodesarrollo/Oceano Sur.

    3. Bull, D. 1982. A Growing Problem: Pesticides and the Third World Poor, Oxford: Oxfam (UK & Ireland).

    4. Cáceres, S. 2005. CAFTA will be like a brand-name Hurricane Mitch. Envio Digital, 290 (September), available at http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3046 (retrieved 7 February 2011)

    5. de Janvry, A. and Vandeman, A. 1987. “The macrocontext of rural development: a second view of the US experience”. In US–Mexico Relations: Agriculture and Rural Development, Edited by: Johnson, B. F., Luiselli, C., Cartas Contreras, C. and Norton, R. D. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    6. Eade, D. 1984a. “Contrainsurgencia y la ayuda alimentaria”. In Desarrollo Rural y Contrainsurgencia en Guatemala, Edited by: López, Rolando. México DF: IOCE.

    7. Eade, D. 1984b. Unnatural Disaster: Drought in NE Brazil, Oxford: Oxfam. (UK & Ireland)

    8. Gopal, K. S., Gueye, B., Petersen, P., Ugas, R. and van Walsum, E. 2009. Family farming first. The Broker, 17 (December): 3

    9. Jackson, T. and Eade, D. 1982. Against the Grain: The Dilemma of Project Food Aid, Oxford: Oxfam. (UK & Ireland)

    10. Pérez-Grovas, V., Cervantes, E. and Burstein, J. 2001. Case Study of the Coffee Sector in Mexico, Fort Collins, CO: Fair Trade. mexico-perez.pdf, available at http://maketradefair.com (retrieved 6 February 2011)

    11. Winder, D. and Eade, D. 1987. “Agricultural issues in the United States and Mexico: views from a third country”. In US–Mexico Relations: Agriculture and Rural Development, Edited by: Johnson, B. F., Luiselli, C., Cartas Contreras, C. and Norton, R. D. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
     

  • Hunger has been on the rise since the mid-1990s, due to a variety of factors, including a lack of policy attention and a sense of complacency generated by long-term real declines in food prices. Food prices rose sharply after 2006, and there is considerable controversy over the reasons why. Analysts have pointed to a number of factors as possible causes, including rising fuel prices, diversion of food crops into biofuels, speculation, increased meat consumption in Asia, climate change, and environmental degradation, among others. There is disagreement about both the role played by some of these factors in driving up prices, and also the weight to assign to each specific factor. Discussion of the consequences of higher food prices has been based primarily on modelling; this special issue of Development in Practice presents some new modelling results, as well as results from field research on the actual consequences for poor farmers and consumers in developing, transition, and developed countries. The price increases led to sometimes violent protests in scores of countries in 2007–08, thereby putting hunger back on the front policy burner. Food prices spiked in mid-2008 and remained well above the levels of the early 2000s, globally, throughout 2009–10. By December 2010, prices had risen again, surpassing the peaks of 2008. There is consensus concerning policy prescriptions on what to do about higher food prices; this is embodied, for example, in the UN's Comprehensive Framework for Action of 2008. However, the authors of a number of the articles in this special issue find limitations to that consensus and offer additional policy prescriptions.

     

  • Governments need the capacity to manage price instability and its social consequences; but in countries where people suffer most, they are least able to respond, because of limited fiscal and institutional resources. This article argues that policies used by middle- and high-income countries are unsuitable for poorer, agricultural countries; it recommends instead that these nations promote broader access to land and raise land productivity. The authors explain why instruments used by richer countries, such as those that control prices and cheapen food, fail in poorer countries. They describe the features of smallholder farmers in poorer countries, drawing upon evidence from India, Peru, and Guatemala to demonstrate how subsistence farming can be part of policy responses to the distress of a food crisis in both the short and medium term. They call upon donors to improve their understanding of and support for small-scale, subsistence-oriented farming.

     

  • Rising food prices in the late 2000s sparked protests, sometimes violent, around the globe. These public expressions of outrage were only the tip of the iceberg. Many countries have a legacy of food wars. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 14 countries faced severe food insecurity as a result of conflict, civil strife, forced displacement, or damage from past wars. Armed violence leads to ongoing cycles of food loss which have an impact on food availability, access, and nutrition. In turn, food insecurity can contribute to conflict, although the exact sequence tends to involve complex factors, including environmental scarcities and identity-based competition for access to and control over what are perceived to be limited resources. Policy attention is urgently needed to address these dynamics. Efforts to meet the immediate needs of vulnerable populations, to raise agricultural production, to build resilient food systems that contribute to global food and nutrition security, and to protect low-income people with safety nets must not lose sight of conflict legacies, especially in Africa. Programme-implementation strategies must proceed in a manner that will dampen, not heighten, conflict potential.

     

  • This article argues that it is imperative to take gender into consideration when evaluating the impact of the global food-price crisis and developing crisis-related policies. Consideration of gender is important, given the key role that women play in agriculture, the disproportionate impact that the crisis has on women, and the potential role that women can play in resolving the crisis. Recent research on differential impacts of the crisis is discussed, as are gender dimensions – or lack thereof – in policy responses.

     

  • The food price crisis has led to assumptions that food price rises are due to inadequate food production, and that such food insecurity is linked to seed insecurity. Hence, in response to high food prices, seed resources worth hundreds of millions of US dollars are being shipped into vulnerable farming systems across the world. This article examines the evidence for linking food security to seed security, particularly in acute contexts, and shows how the challenges facing security features of availability, access, and utilisation are markedly different when assessing food security and seed security scenarios. The need for sharper thinking about (a) seed security strategy in itself and (b) the causal links between food security and seed security raises questions about supply-side responses which may wrongly identify both the problem and the solution. The article closes by suggesting ways to refine seed security goals which can provide more refined strategies for addressing food security needs.

     

  • A surge of media reports and rhetorical claims depicted genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to the ‘global food crisis’ manifested in the sudden spike in world food prices during 2007–08. Broad claims were made about the potential of GM technologies to tackle the crisis, even though the useful crops and traits typically invoked had yet to be developed, and despite the fact that real progress had in fact been made by using conventional breeding. The case vividly illustrates the instrumental use of food-crisis rhetoric to promote GM crops.

     

  • The recent commodity-price boom was one of the longest and broadest of the post-World War II period, and, not unexpectedly, it reignited discussions about resource scarcity as well as proposals to ‘manage’ reminiscent of the 1970s. This contribution looks at the factors that are likely to shape commodity markets in the longer term and concludes that a stronger link between energy and non-energy commodity prices is likely to be the dominant force, especially in terms of food prices. Demand by emerging economies is unlikely to put additional pressure on the prices of food commodities, although it may create such pressure indirectly through energy prices. The effect of biofuels on food prices has not been as great as originally thought, but the use of commodities by investment funds may have been partly responsible for the 2007–08 spike.

     

  • The food crisis of 2007–08 and the urban riots that ensued in some 40 developing countries placed the question of food price instability at the heart of policy debates. Since the 1980s, the prevailing idea has been that the best solution is managing risk without ‘affecting prices’ through private instruments (such as crop insurance, futures markets) in conjunction with the provision of safety nets for vulnerable populations. Nevertheless, this strategy did not prove effective: private risk-management instruments did not come to fruition, and safety nets did not succeed in preventing the deteriorating nutritional situation of vulnerable households. This paper shows that the arguments against price stabilisation (the informational role of prices and the ‘natural insurance’ of producers) do not hold when the different causes of price instability are taken into account. The author proposes a typology of these causes. The paper closes by proposing relevant combinations of instruments for each cause of instability and discussing ways to implement them.

     

  • This article takes the food crisis that began in 2007 as an occasion to draw attention to the deleterious impact of agricultural market volatility on poor farmers and food importing low-income countries. The article presents a menu of mechanisms that may reduce volatility or farmer and low-income country exposure to it. This is followed by a discussion of mechanisms that allow for the transfer of price risk through the use of instruments such as futures and options. Surveying empirical cases and experimental studies, the article focuses on potential applications of such mechanisms in low-income country settings.

     

  • This article examines the case of the Mexican ‘tortilla crisis’ of 2007. Drawing on reviews of literature and the media, key-informant interviews, and secondary databases, the authors explore the response of the Mexican maize–tortilla chain to a price shock. Price increases should theoretically be passed on to the consumer as a progressively less significant percentage of the overall price of value-added food products. However, in Mexico, price increases were magnified along the maize–tortilla production chain. This was due largely to asymmetries among segments of the chain, which conditioned the responses of industrial-scale corporations and small-scale family businesses. This case study suggests that, in order to understand the impacts of price-shocks on poor consumers, more detailed, country-level analyses of market chains and price-transmission structures are needed.

     

  • In the Andean region, national policy responses to the 2007–08 food-price crisis emphasised reducing pressures on consumers, and particularly on urban populations. In Bolivia, the prices of all domestic and imported food tubers and grains rose dramatically in major markets. Unexpectedly, evidence from focus groups and field research demonstrates that even in remote regions where farmers trade infrequently, smallholder farm families experienced food-price increases. Seeking to identify ‘average’ effects in such situations could also be misleading. Impacts on smallholders vary considerably according to crops grown, how families participate in markets, household characteristics, access to key assets, and livelihood strategies.

     

  • This study analyses the welfare and poverty effects of the 2007–08 food-price crisis on households in Guatemala. Estimates reveal that the price increases negatively affected 96.4 per cent of households and resulted in a 1.1 per cent increase in the national poverty rate. On average, households lose 2.3 per cent of their expenditure capacity, and high food prices have a regressive negative effect. The total welfare loss for all households in the country is estimated to be nearly 2 per cent of national aggregate expenditure, but the cost of compensating the poorest households would be only 0.5 per cent of national aggregate expenditure.

     

  • This article contrasts the impacts of the global food-price crisis in 2007–08 on three types of farmer in Mali. In the Niger delta, where the government undertook an ‘emergency’ initiative, farmers organised to market their rice collectively, gaining a stronger position vis-à-vis merchants and the state. Vertically integrated into an export value chain, cotton farmers have suffered from stagnating yields, slow organisational reform, and rising input-to-output ratios over the past decade. Consuming little rice, growing local landraces with few inputs, and insulated from the world market by their isolation, sorghum-millet farmers in the drylands were affected by poor rainfall.

     

  • High food prices in 2008 sparked food riots around the world, with urban West Africa suffering many of these disturbances. Urban Mali appears to have been spared the worst of this crisis as consumers shifted from rice to sorghum, a grain whose production increased steeply as cotton production collapsed in the wake of lower global prices for this commodity. This study comments on the ‘rice bias’ in policy circles, the tension between cotton and food production, and the hidden blessing of geographic isolation. The findings are based on household surveys and analysis of national-level production data.

     

  • This study examines household food-access status in rural areas of Guinea, a poor, net food-importing West African state, during the height of the food-price crisis. Linking a household's food-access status with specific household characteristics and strategies, the article provides evidence on those unique characteristics and strategies favouring sustained food access during the price crisis. The findings are discussed and their policy implications reviewed, identifying good practice for targeting and intervention and suggestions for further research.

     

  • In 2006–08, Ethiopia experienced high food and non-food inflation. This study shows that the recent inflationary spell is likely to have significantly worsened poverty in urban areas, given the reliance on the market for most consumption needs. In rural areas the distributive impact of inflation is less easy to measure. In Ethiopia's rural areas, many households are net food buyers, and non-food items weigh significantly in their budgets. Thus, it seems unlikely that high inflation was beneficial for poverty reduction, a position which seemed to underpin much of the policy response to the crisis.

     

  • South Africa experienced two waves of rapid food inflation in 2001–02 and 2007–08. During both periods the surge in the cost of food undermined the food-security status of low-income families. Belated state reactions to the food-price crises pay scant attention to the fact that poor net food buyers rely on agro-food markets for their food supplies. Moreover, the touted non-interference of the state in agro-food marketing policy gives the impression that this policy is disconnected from food security. This article challenges that notion. It analyses the content and evolution of agro-food marketing policies and argues the case for food security to be at the core of such policies.

     

  • The recent food-price crisis has contributed towards a huge increase in the number of hungry people in the world. The main purpose of this article is to use empirical data collected from food-surplus and food-deficit study districts to assess to what degree, and how, high food prices have affected smallholder farmers in Tanzania when it comes to production, income, food security, and livelihood security. The main finding is that some smallholder farmers in the food-surplus study area have benefited from high food prices, but that potential benefits are hampered by a range of factors other than food prices. In the food-deficit study areas, smallholder farmers are worse off due to the increase in food prices. The article discusses lessons learned and considers how smallholder farmers could take better advantage of the food-price increase and thereby improve their livelihoods.

     

  • Egypt has an extensive system of food subsidies which provides bread and other basic staples to the population at low prices. This article examines the functioning of the food-subsidy system during two recent periods of rapid food-price inflation to evaluate its effectiveness as a social safety net. Three aspects are considered: the difference in rural and urban policies, the price differentials between subsidised and free-market goods, and the extent of coverage of the system. The study finds that the food-subsidy system mitigated some negative impacts for the population, but exacerbated other challenges.

     

  • This article first reviews the development of food prices in China since 2000. The authors find that despite tremendous price fluctuations in the international market in 2007–08, major staple crops (rice, wheat, and maize) in the domestic market were shielded from the volatility of the international market. This price stability can be partly attributed to Chinese government's food-security policies in stimulating grain production and smoothing domestic prices. Household data reveal that farmers' supply response is affected by prices, market access, household assets, and farmer experience. In addition, poor families are less responsive to market signals, and the impact of poverty on grain production is indirect.

     

  • The Indian government is implementing a package of food-based safety-net programmes to resist disastrous food insecurity. Crucial programmes are (1) the Targeted Public Distribution Scheme, (2) the wage-employment programme (direct cash transfer as wages), and (3) a number of direct nutrition programmes for feeding children. This article explores the implementation of these programmes at district levels in the state of West Bengal, and in particular the extremely disadvantaged district of Purulia. West Bengal was selected for study because it has a decentralised governance structure and the distinctive mark of uninterrupted governance by the Left Parties under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) since 1977. Data presented, supported by related field evidence, show a mixed record of combating hunger in West Bengal relative to other states. In a number of respects, but not all, progress has been made over time. Overall, the democratic structure of the panchayats in West Bengal enables the free flow of information, which helps the government to avert mishap.

     

  • This article discusses the impact of the ongoing global economic crisis on the Indonesian agro-food sector. It compares the current situation with the crisis of 1997–98 and examines whether the liberalisation of the Indonesian economy (and the agro-food sector specifically) in the post-1999 period has increased the exposure of Indonesian food producers and consumers to the volatility associated with global financial and commodity markets. During the 1997–98 crisis, the Indonesian state (with the support of the international development community) instituted structural reforms and increased stabilisation measures to mitigate the effects of the crisis. The author considers whether those measures are still in place to offset the shocks of the current crisis, and what effect they have had on Indonesian food producers and consumers. The question of consumer demand in a recessionary time has particular relevance for those Indonesian agro-food producers who diversified into high-value-added commodities (such as organics) in the past decade.

     

  • Food prices in Cambodia increased by 36.8 per cent between July 2007 and July 2008. High food prices negatively affected people from all walks of life, but the extent of the impact varied. The poorest 40 per cent of the population spend 70 per cent of their incomes on food. The poor and net food buyers, who generally live in rural areas, were hit worst by these rising prices. Most of the food-insecure households are in the Tonle Sap and plains regions. For the very poor, both urban and rural, obtaining sufficient food is a daily struggle. About 50 per cent of surveyed households reported cutting back on food. Many went into debt. Food aid or ‘food for work’ should be the best solutions to meet short-term needs. Social safety nets based on food assistance should be introduced in order to avoid increased malnutrition and negative coping strategies used by food-insecure households.

     

  • Agricultural wage labourers in the Philippines were especially vulnerable to the food-price increases of 2007–08. Their wages do not cover the costs of food, clothing, and shelter, much less healthcare and their children's education. Food-price inflation reached 17.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2008. Farm workers had to spend most of their average daily wage of US$ 3 on buying rice, which meant foregoing the purchase of other foods and key necessities. Measures to reduce the price of calories for landless labourers are of critical importance to poverty alleviation. Improved social protection programmes would have helped in the short term. In order to achieve long-term food security, the Philippines must develop self-sufficiency in rice, based on small-farm agriculture. A key challenge is to generate productive, high-paying jobs and ensure that every poor household is gainfully employed or has its own source of livelihood.

     

  • 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. The transformation of the region's agriculture since 1991 has changed the structure of agricultural production and led to reallocation of more land to food crops, improving food security in the region, and mitigating the negative consequences of rising international food prices. The article argues that the further improvement of food security in the region requires concerted efforts from governments to remove constraints on agricultural productivity.

     

  • 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 article investigates relative price changes, the consequences for rural people, and the political backgrounds of the crises. It draws attention to international aspects which many studies neglect.

     

  • From a food-supply standpoint, the 30 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the world's rich club – can reasonably claim to be self-sufficient. Issues of food access are met through publicly funded social safety nets, and, for those who fall through the cracks, the emergency food-aid system, increasingly institutionalised as charitable food banks. Despite its best intentions, charitable food banking is very much a part of the problem of hunger in rich societies. While it makes a contribution to short-term relief, it is no guarantee of meeting demand, nor of ensuring nutritious or culturally appropriate foods. Its institutionalisation and corporatisation allow the public and politicians to believe that hunger is being solved. It reinforces the notion of hunger as a matter for charity, not politics. If there is to be a strong public commitment to eliminating hunger and reducing poverty in the wealthy states, there is an urgent need for governments to think and act outside this charitable food box. The human right to adequate food offers an alternative approach.

     

  • In the current context, when so many policies on international development are changing significantly, it is challenging to write an editorial which may quickly become dated. As I write, we see development ministers across Europe turning their backs on policies such as budget support, the principles behind the Paris Declaration, and co-funding for international NGOs. In their place we see the re-introduction of new conditionalities; a focus on short-term ‘results’; and a reduced list of priorities, such as security and basic welfare. Some policies are being dumped, or adopted, in line with political changes rather than as the result of serious evidence-based reviews.

    Policies which have not yet even been fully evaluated are being side-tracked or (quietly) dropped because development ministers wish to avoid public statements undermining processes their governments have already agreed upon. The right of politicians to change policies is not in dispute. Indeed, many areas of public life beyond international development are vulnerable to about turns, and the sudden introductions of new policies, practices and priorities. However, we still have to question whether the current obsession with evidence, results and evaluations is as genuine as claimed when decisions seem to be made on the basis of a political position rather than real evidence. Such questions over the real links between evidence and policy are a concern to Development in Practice, which seeks to share actual experiences and evaluations, and therefore to inform political decision makers.

    In this issue we have, as always, a range of impressive and diverse experiences of development. Increasingly we are seeing examples of ‘development’ interventions which come from outside of the traditional aid industry, although as Kiikpoye K. Aaron notes in his viewpoint on the oil-rich Niger Delta, the current interest in corporate social responsibility must be tested against the possible inherent conflict between profit-seeking and sustainable development. Radhika Gajjala et al . look at another alternative form of intervention – the growth of online micro-finance programmes. They analyse one such online network, Kiva.org, which has lent US$78 million to 180,000 people in 45 countries and claims a repayment rate of 98%. Such person-to-person lending, along with person-to-person grant making, looks set to be an important area to continue to monitor in future. Whether it supersedes the costly old model which uses aid workers, agencies, structures, and their procedures as middle men is yet to be seen.

    We have a few articles which capture learning from the struggle to find ways of engaging small-scale farmers to increase their production and incomes. Paul Van Mele et al . review two programmes with West African rice farmers and try to identify some of the reasons why the programmes turned out differently in Ghana and Mali. They point out that the tendency of the Malian programme to encourage more innovation may have been because the programme was run by NGOs with consistent staff members, with a greater emphasis on the principle of innovation, and more input from farmers themselves than in Ghana, where changing staff from government and research agencies placed more emphasis on fulfilling set programme activities. Anna-Katharina Hornidge et al ., looking at farmer innovation in Uzbekistan, note the problems of encouraging a culture of innovation in the context of a state which tries to involve itself in the details of agricultural production using ‘Soviet era’ approaches and command structures to decide what should be grown where, when and how. Despite this centralised form of agriculture, however, the article records the flowering of farmer-based agricultural innovation.

    Oscar Forero reviews two examples from Latin America on the use of digital technology for the sustainable use of natural resources in line with indigenous rights, and argues that it is the way the technology is used which determines whether the outcome is positive, irrelevant or negative. The examples support the views that new technologies require ground-level participation, and that attention should be paid to ownership of digitally-generated resources, if they are to result in the promised effects.

    Two articles examine microfinance. The first, by Theeraphong Bualar, discovered that the widespread Village Development Fund in Thailand has tended not to be distributed to disabled women because local people did not believe that these women could run small businesses. Thus more work is needed to be done to change local attitudes to disabled women before they are able to benefit from this national programme. Ana Pantelić compares experiences of cash transfers and microfinance in Latin America. She concludes that neither is the ‘magic bullet’ that they are sometimes claimed to be, although they can both contribute to poverty alleviation when dealt with together as complementary approaches.

    We have a conference report by Mochamad Indrawan et al . which illustrates the importance of taking major issues such as biodiversity to a specific context, in this case Papua. The conference concluded by stressing the importance of building social capital in order to protect one of the worlds most unique yet endangered ecosystems. A viewpoint by Jonathan Connor gives space to a debate about the role of the church in accepting or challenging homophobic tendencies by some African governments, specifically using the case of Zimbabwe. Another viewpoint, by John Beauclerk, looks at an alternative approach to civil society, which reintroduces the political into development, as opposed to the recent emphasis on civil society as merely a delivery mechanism for official aid agency priorities and programmes. Beauclerk goes onto provide a practice-based conceptual framework which should enable us to better understand the role and function of civil society. The second of our new series, ‘Essential Reading’ is by Alan Fowler who has chosen three more contemporary publications which he feels may be important pointers to the future of development.

  • Against the background of attempts to explain the poor Corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of transnational oil corporations in the Niger Delta in the context of flawed approaches, processes and inadequate CSR packages, this paper contests not only the explanations for the failure of CSR, but the core idea that CSR is capable of engendering sustainable community development at all. Given the enormity of the development challenge in the region, corporations cannot, even with the best of intentions, make meaningful impact on host communities, mainly because of the structural constraints arising from the profit-seeking ethos which drives corporate behaviour.

     

  • This paper addresses the question of whether microfinance and conditional cash transfers can be effective in alleviating poverty in the Latin American region, and provides a comprehensive assessment of each of these programmes using data and evaluation reports from 19 countries in the Latin American region, analysed in the context of six operational and impact criteria. The research shows that microfinance may be better suited for those living on US$2 per day or higher, while conditional cash transfers may be more beneficial for those living in extreme poverty. Neither programme offers a ‘magic bullet’ solution for poverty eradication, but they can provide positive outcomes when prescribed in combination.

     

  • An international project called PADS promoted participatory learning and action research with inland valley rainfed rice farmers in West Africa. All countries received the same training, similar funding, and the same leadership. Although the staff in Ghana were conscientious and gave much training to the farmer beneficiaries, the Mali staff explicitly encouraged farmers to experiment. Farmers in Mali responded to this favourable attitude by experimenting more than those in Ghana, and in qualitatively more interesting ways. Long-term engagement with grassroots organisations may be as conducive to changing public servants' attitudes as the actual participatory approach promoted on the ground.

     

  • This article questions the notion that the use of digital technologies guarantees better policy development for the sustainable management of natural resources, particularly in multicultural contexts. It is argued that input of digital technologies could positively or negatively affect the geopolitical projects and development strategies pursued by indigenous peoples.

     

  • 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. This paper discusses the challenges faced in this process of joint experimentation and learning between researchers and local stakeholders whose behaviours, attitudes and actions are heavily shaped by the local context, academic discipline and hierarchical culture of knowledge governance.

     

  • The Village Development Fund (VDF) is used in Thailand to empower the rural poor, especially women living with disabilities. This article investigates the problems of gaining access to credit faced by physically disabled women in rural Thailand. In-depth interviews with 20 women with physical disabilities in north-eastern Thailand indicate that these women still do not benefit from small loans from the VDF because they face significant attitude barriers from the VDF chairpersons and from their own families. The author argues that non-disabled communities and their own families believe that disabilities make these women less creditworthy.

     

  • This article reviews some of the main arguments advanced by scholars operating at the interface of religion and development. It then seeks to expand the current literature on religion and development to include more ‘uncomfortable’ subject matter, such as homosexuality and discrimination. Using the 1995 Zimbabwe Book Fair as a case study, the author argues that international religious NGOs engaged in evangelical activity must show greater attention to the contexts in which they operate. In particular, they must take an explicit stand against homophobia and discrimination. Otherwise, their development interventions risk strengthening and legitimating cultures of exclusion in countries like Zimbabwe.

     

  • The past 30 years have seen a proliferation in the use of the phrase ‘civil society' linked to international aid, resulting in the creation of official donor ‘civil society departments’. At the same time there has been growing understanding that international development has become commercialised into the ‘aid industry'. The result is an explosion of ‘aided', globalised and tamed civil society at the expense of the naturally occurring, local, less predictable and more politicised‘unaided' variety.

     

  • Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.

     

  • The International Biodiversity Conference for Sustainable Development in Papua Land (Jayapura, 11–15 November 2009) gathered inputs and best practices from various sources, and initiated commitments towards conservation and sustainable development in one of the earth's areas of richest biodiversity and bio-cultural heritage. The conference resulted in mandating the establishment of a local working group which will mainstream sustainable development. In particular, it is proper development of Papua's social capital that should drive the fight to save one of the earth's most unique yet endangered ecosystems and ways of life.

     

  • The Origins of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by Eric Beinhocker, Random House, Business Books, London, 2006 ISBN: 9780712676618, 526. pp.

    Investing in the Immaterial: An Annual Digest for Practitioners of Development 2010/2011, by the Community Development Resource Association, Cape Town, 2011, 106. pp.

    The Change Imperative: Creating a Next Generation NGO, by Paul Ronalds, Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2010 ISBN: 9781565493254, 233. pp.

    In the course of only a week or two, many interesting publications demand attention. I therefore try to periodically update my website with items that catch my eye and are worthy of a wider audience.1 They collectively reflect the many angles into what we do and why. Consequently, selecting ‘essentials’ has been difficult. The three I have chosen are important, I think, because they invite us to question how ‘change’ in society will itself change. By this I mean shaking free of decades of assumptions about inducing changes in and – beyond – a given society that will reduce poverty and attain social justice. The three titles speak in different but complementary ways to a necessary shift in the paradigms or frameworks that we use to read the world we live in and act to alter its winners and losers.

    Eric Beinhocker's book, The Origins of Wealth, is critical in taking a long view of economics in relation to society and politics. His contribution is distinctive not just for the breadth of the evidence he covers, but for weaving his story around the ideas and principles associated with complexity. It is a thick volume, but Beinhocker is a journalist, so the text is pretty accessible. A main argument is that economics – which still dominates aid thinking – took a misstep when it tried to treat itself as a physical science. Human sentiments do not follow the rigid laws and unerring rationality assumed by this ‘dismal’ discipline. So, we need to treat economics and the fixation on growth that it stimulates as a matter of political choice. It is not an iron law that subordinates people to its rules, whims and volatilities. The economics of markets are amoral, needing active management by society for the social good. Beinhocker's book is a seminal step in this direction, one that is not trapped in projecting the past into a knowable future.

    Applying a complexity lens in this way opens up a very different story about how a society's institutions emerge, interact and can be influenced. This story poses significant challenges to the assumptions we typically use, for example, about incentives, about the space available for social or political change, about speed in relation to achieving results, about the predictability of development efforts, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, his analysis points us towards the importance of connections, relationships and processes as starting points for understanding what is going on instead of first concentrating on the actors involved. This latter point of entry is typically found in rights-based approaches that concentrate on citizens as claimants and government as duty bearer. A complexity view pays significant attention to the relations between citizens with obligations towards each other. Social fragmentation, exclusion and xenophobia are generated by interactions within civil society that a complexity lens can help illuminate. And, in illuminating such processes, complexity opens up greater possibilities to be sensitive to the invisible and the immaterial forces that are in play, the substance of my second choice.

    The composite volume by CDRA, Investing in the Immaterial, illustrates the potential to better understand and self-reflect on what we do and ‘the games we play’ to try and stay true to the original inspirations of NGO-ism. For those familiar with CDRA, its annual reports were distinctive and original contributions to development thinking and practice. This way of sharing is seen to have run its course. An Annual Digest is its replacement, giving space to voices both inside and outside CDRA. This inaugural book contains a dozen chapters connected by a concern for appreciating the intangible, vital features of development that is truly transformative: a development that values dimensions of change in society and in people, which cannot be counted and enumerated. A ‘philanthropy’ that truly reflects its Greek etymology ‘love of humanity’. Collectively, the texts tease out what has happened over time to divert NGOs from their social and political inspirations and buy into a regime dominated by material change and its measurement. Measuring is legitimate. But the resulting subordination of interest in – and sensitivity to – what works, hidden within social processes, has overtaken and eroded much of what NGOs had to offer. The loss shows up in both detachment from, and inadequate attention to, critical forces and energies within civil society which self-organise and self-regulate to keep relations ‘civil’. In this sense, much of NGO-ism has become socio-politically deskilled.

    A recurring query in the book is why and how NGOs have arrived at a place where the economics of self-survival is a major distraction. A recurring answer is that, in ‘playing the game of not playing the game’ NGOs have not been adept at influencing the rules. And, in my view, it is because slowly but surely NGOs have lost their own definition of who they are and what they do – buying into role ascriptions provided by funders and a market philosophy. This process was abetted by relying on financial growth as a proxy for performance with governance and leadership that proved incapable of projecting an alternative story of how societies work and change. The CDRA volume offers a rich source of ideas and insights as a thoughtful counterweight to the prevailing climate of ‘if it can't be counted, it doesn't count’. Can this type of change be changed?

    The issue tackled in my third book of choice, is whether or not NGOs, especially those that are large and international, can draw on the CDRA volume and its counterparts to rediscover meaning beyond a concern with numbers.

    Until recently, Paul Ronalds was the chief operating officer of World Vision Australia. Written from the vantage point of an insider, The Change Imperative provides a critical assessment on the self-transformative potential of big international NGOs or, as they are to be known at the November 2011 Busan conference on aid effectiveness, big international civil society organisations (ICSOs). His book charts the environments that ICSOs will be facing – a useful source for thinking about strategy. But the main thrust of his story is about the about the ability of ICSOs to adapt in order to better cope with increasing global uncertainties and the demands of scale. Can their organisational change outpace the rate at which their multiple contexts are moving? And, as critically, can this process be transformative for who they are as well as for what they do? Can they, for example, rebalance the (im)material dimensions of social and political change, moving closer to the sense of ‘being’ and ‘soul’ that the CDRA volume describes? Put another way, can they become entities suited to the twenty-first century?

    The varied emerging configurations of ICSOs governance and approaches to (de)centralisation illustrate, once more, that no two are the same. Nevertheless, his overall view on their adaptability is not optimistic. But, rather than rehearsing the many existing sources of analysis of why this might be the case – learning disabilities, risk aversion, a confusion between professionalism and managerialism, pre-occupation with growth, and so on – his analysis homes in on some additional demands as well as opportunities that globalisation offers. These demands include: resilience to unanticipated shock; retaining relevance; making use of technologies that assist in responsiveness but simultaneously feed the ‘disintermediation’ of international resource transfers between citizens seen, for example, in Diaspora financing and web-based matching of projects and donors. He argues that INGO relevance is on the line if this self-organised global connectivity is not adequately taken into account.

    Further food for thought lies in the knotty area of achieving and demonstrating effectiveness. This volume helps to unpack connections between governance, accountability, transparency and the ‘hard’ evidence that they all require, typically from systems dedicated to monitoring and evaluation. As signalled in the CDRA book, the latter is currently highly contested terrain which makes demands on perhaps the most critical determinant of adaptability – leadership and NGO people.

    In the last analysis, Ronalds argues that transformation of INGOs will be determined by clear, courageous, compelling and inspiring leadership and the followership of people who are not just technically competent but sensitive to the socio-political complexity of their work. This conclusion is borne out by new initiatives dedicated to investment in NGO people and growth of leadership from within.2 The book by Paul Ronalds provides a well-founded introduction to what leadership and followership are likely to mean for a twenty-first century NGO. A required reading to add to the pile.

    Notes.

    1. See www.alanfowler.org  

    2. www.peopleinaid.org and DLP, 2011, ‘Politics, Leadership and Coalitions in Development: Policy Implications of the DLP research Evidence’, Background Papers, Development Leadership Programme, www.dlprog.org  

  • Young sportspersons now serve abroad within the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP) movement. Drawing on interviews with former interns from Commonwealth Games Canada's Canadian Sports Leadership Corps programme, this study explored what interns brought to, and learnt from, international SDP service. Interns confronted notions of expertise and privilege and, in some cases, considered the limits of Northern development stewardship. Interns also experienced a sense of ‘First World guilt’ that secured their sense of self at the expense of deeper engagements with inequality and struggles for development justice. Based on these findings, recommendations for supporting future volunteers are considered.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590885

  • This is a good issue. Wahey.

  • 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. Meanwhile we see several processes in parallel which signify attempts to reform the business of aid, if not of development, some of which are holding discussions despite the fact that decisions have already been made. Despite the lack of appetite for the long term, most aid agencies are very slow to change their course, so data being collected now for a review of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is extremely unlikely to affect any expenditure on MDG-related programmes before the 2015 target date.

    There seem to be few enlightened research programmes which take the longer term view, and rather too much focus on what the government minister wants to hear this year. It means that many international fora meet in the absence of useful data, either for short-term refinement of their programmes or longer term evaluation. As I write people are talking about the ‘road to Busan’ and the next high level review of the Paris Declaration, but most decisions around these have already been made. Some of these decisions are clearly for domestic political reasons, and certain bilateral donors will go directly against the original aims of the Paris Declaration. In many ways this mirrors the Millennium Development Goals summit last year which is unlikely, according to the donors I have spoken to, to lead to any major (or even minor) changes in donor policy before 2013 or even 2015. There seems to be a gap between the practitioner level where people share experiences, both positive and negative (as we hope is often illustrated in Development in Practice) and political decisions about international aid which sometimes seems to be based only marginally on ‘evidence’, despite the continuous claims to the contrary.

    A couple of themes emerge from the articles in this issue. One theme considers the people who work in development as professionals, either in humanitarian work or as volunteers. These primarily focus on the use of international staff and volunteers. Thus Simon Darnell looks at the experiences of international Canadian volunteers linked to sport for development, and explores whether the interns/volunteers saw the experience as developmental primarily for the hosts or for themselves. On the other hand, Natasha Tassell and Ross Flett explore a psychological-based, self-determination approach to understand the motivation of humanitarian health workers and why they are willing to work in often difficult and dangerous assignments. Linked to this is Chuck Thiessen's analysis of NGO work in post-conflict community development in Afghanistan. He looks at the tensions for NGO staff working alongside armed peace keepers, concluding that we need to think again about the post-Cold war role of NGOs in such circumstances. Finally there is a poignant Viewpoint by Aarthi Rao on her experience as a volunteer, where she reviews some of the wider literature on volunteering but concludes with her own frustration at being unable to fully impact on the education of a young girl in India. Together, these articles remind us that, whilst we may theorise about the use of staff and volunteers, there are human stories behind each person's experience and motivations.

    A second set of articles converge around the actual processes of international aid, which are timely given the succession of reviews and debates around the Paris Declaration and the MDGs at the present time. Jeet Bahadur Sapkota reviews Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in Asia against an index of globalisation, noting how trade and foreign investment come higher up the priorities of most PRSPs than say aid (equal to tourism), and labour migration is barely mentioned. The article concludes that the more autocratic regimes in the region show less openness to globalisation than the more democratic governments. Masumi Owa looks at the slow progress of the Paris Declaration and compares the progress made by two major bilateral donors, the UK and Japan. The conclusion appears to be that the Paris Declaration does more to reduce donor transaction costs than those of recipients, but there is also the growing influence of non-OECD/DAC donors in undermining the Paris Declaration. However, David Ojakaa et al. take a more positive view of the Paris Declaration processes in the context of improved coordination around HIV/AIDS work in Africa, as seen through the work of AMREF.

    Ruud Bronkhorst looks at the local purchase of goods for food aid in Burkina Faso and argues against the orthodoxy that opposes such purchases because they might drive up prices. The article notes that distress sales and imported food means that local prices are already imperfect, and that at least the higher prices paid to poor local farmers will improve their incomes. Kenta Goto meanwhile looks at issues around globalised value chains in textile production in Asia, and asks whether these merely lead to ‘a race to the bottom’ as countries compete to provide the lowest wages and worst labour conditions. They conclude that there are winners and losers in this commerce and hint at a change to the degree that growth based on cheap labour may only be a short-term gain.

    To access the pdf version of the article, please follow this link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.599111

  • Taking the case of Burkina Faso, the paper analyses effects of local purchase on marginal producers. It argues that because of imports of food together with ‘distress sales’ on the part of the producers, perfect market conditions do not exist. Therefore market price does not equal the optimal price. In the absence of an optimal price, price interventions are justifiable and this makes payment to local farmers of a ‘fairer’ price both possible and desirable. The additional income thus generated will not only give the producers greater access to food, but also the ability to invest in order to increase production.

     

    The full article is available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590882

  • This article explores the interview narratives of six NGO directors working in Afghanistan regarding the holistic and multi-track nature of their NGO's project work. Data analysis revealed that NGO leaders believed that effective NGO project work relies extensively on purposeful coordination with other NGOs, and is dependent on non-NGO actors such as the military, the UN, local government structures, and local organisations. However, working in proximity with international military forces posed special challenges for NGOs in Afghanistan. While validating the military's security work, NGO leaders believed it necessary to assert their independence from security operations, and military reconstruction and development work.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590883

  • Global Value Chains (GVCs) serve as significant sources of employment for developing countries, with various impacts upon their labour markets and workers. While participation in GVCs is important for economic upgrading, there is concern about a ‘race to the bottom’ happening in global competition. This paper attempts to understand how economic upgrading and decent working conditions interact in the proliferating GVCs, by looking at the garment exporting countries in Asia. It argues that worker profiles as well as local economic and labour market conditions have important implications on how competitiveness plays out in terms of working conditions.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590886

  • This paper emerged from the authors' interest in why humanitarian health workers initially engage and remain in humanitarian work, often in the face of threats to safety and personal well-being. Semi-structured qualitative interviews assessed the consciously available reasons why individuals engaged in humanitarian health work. Interview data was unpacked through a thematic analysis. Using self-determination theory as a guiding framework, data suggested introjected and identified motivations are applicable to this occupational domain. Introjected motivation is implicated in initial reasons to engage the work, while identified motivation is implicated in reasons to continue. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

     The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590889

  • The progress in endeavours to achieve the commitments of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness has been slow. This paper explains the challenges faced by the aid effectiveness agenda and discusses why and how it needs to be revisited. In order to elucidate the differences in donors' approaches to aid effectiveness, a comparison is made between the UK and Japan, which leads to two suggestions. The main messages are that it is important to be inclusive of different donors, and to link the policy dialogue with reality on the ground.

     The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590888

  • This paper examines the extent to which the key elements of globalisation, such as international trade, investments, foreign aid, transnational labour migration and tourism have been mainstreamed into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in the Asia-Pacific region. Using a content analysis, the paper finds that trade openness gained the highest priority in the PRSPs, followed by foreign investment, aid, tourism and, lastly, migration. As transnational migration of low-skilled workers brings higher benefits to poorer countries, further research is essential to find out the reasons behind the fact that this issue is being given the lowest priority in the PRSPs.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.591185

  • Effective use of donor aid is critical in achieving the sixth Millennium Development Goal –reversing the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2015. The Paris Declaration of 2005 identified five key principles for aid effectiveness: ownership, alignment, harmonisation, mutual accountability and managing for results. As civil society organisations play a critical role in implementing HIV/AIDS interventions, it is important that they adhere to these principles. Often, however, they fail to implement interventions conforming with the principles, leading to duplication and inefficiency. Two case studies from AMREF in Kenya demonstrate how the principles of aid effectiveness can be applied to increase the impact of HIV/AIDS interventions.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590887

  • The Government of India has made strides in increasing its education spending and improving access to schools, but there is much left to do. Programmes have concentrated on the expansion of higher education in India. In fact, public spending per student on the tertiary level is over six times what it is on the primary level. Non-enrolment can affect every aspect of a child's life. Education can give young girls the skills to make decisions independent of their husbands or families, access healthcare and other social programmes, and enter the workforce. This article offers reflections on some of the stubborn challenges around girls' education in India, based on a personal experience of volunteering in Jaipur.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590891

  • 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. The truth is that the final results of the effort to attain the MDGs by 2015 are already known, or at least the dye is cast. The figures for the next review in 2013 are those of today, and the trajectories are set to continue for the next four years in terms of funding and the larger programmes. What is not yet known is what will follow 2015.

    Meanwhile there is a change in the geopolitical balance of economic power, with recession and financial instability concerns within many countries of the ‘developed world’, and high unemployment and low levels of economic growth in many others. Recession in the west has led to a decrease in popular support for development assistance, and this is reflected in the policies of the political leaders. The implications of this loss of public support over the next four years are still to be seen, but we can surmise that further reductions in development assistance will be on the agenda.

    In contrast, we still see remarkable growth rates in many ‘emerging’, or should that be emerged, economies. The articles in Development in Practice illustrate there is a great deal of innovative, solid practical development experience across the globe. Increasingly, where countries are growing economically, national governments will have to decide how much they will accept financial and legal responsibility for this work. The challenge is whether they take the easy route in accepting work which tries to just ameliorate the symptoms of poverty, or will they confront the causes of poverty within their own nation state? We encourage authors to submit articles that reflect the balance between the empirical practice of development and the political and theoretical overviews of what causes poverty.

    The other side of this debate is what the role of the NGOs will be in the future, as international aid leaves many countries and in others governments do take over responsibility for a wider range of services. And where does this lead local civil society – from grassroots informal associations, professional groups, to membership organisations – which have not always been best served by international cooperation but may also not find national governments any more supportive in situations where local social tensions emerge as a result of the success of their growth strategies? There are many questions and experiences we expect to be exploring through the contributions to Development in Practice in the future, alongside our continued commitment to giving practitioners the space to share their experiences.

    In this issue, continuing our interest in capacity building, Jenny Pearson looks at attempts to strengthen capacity in a situation of entrenched organisational and cultural constraints in Cambodia. In particular, she draws out experiences from a programme using an organisational learning approach over several years. The apparent success of this longer-term programme raises questions for policy makers as to how the programme, which went through several changes, would have fared if judged by some of the current short-term approaches to results-based evaluation.

    Norma-Jo Baker describes the processes of introducing western liberal arts approaches into a post-Soviet university sector; an introduction which was supported by many external groups on the assumption that it would strengthen liberal democracy. She is, however, concerned that in many cases she reviews, this process did the opposite and reinforced authoritarian practices.

    Roger Drew et al. describe their attempt to use social network analysis in evaluating organisational networks, in their case those involving sexual health and rights. They conclude that the method could well provide a positive contribution to future evaluations.

    The participation theme is picked up by Christian Iyiani et al. with their study of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria, and a review of community-based work which suggests that despite the support from INGOs for ‘community participation’, there is still a tension between top–down single solution approaches, and those which stress community-based work strengthening social capital. It concludes that financial support from INGOs and technical support from local NGOs is important to work effectively with community-based programmes.

    Celina Del Felice and Lillian Solheim explore youth organisations and their learning processes, describing how they adapt adult-based organisational tools in their desire to learn and develop within their own perceived priorities and ways of working. They conclude that any capacity building must also be geared to what works for young people rather than assume that business and adult models will automatically be appropriate.

    We have two articles on microcredit, as the debate continues about its efficacy in different contexts. The first, by ATM Jahiruddin et al ., revisits microcredit in a district of Bangladesh. It concludes that often for a significant proportion of the poorest of the poor microcredit can exacerbate rather than relieve their poverty, especially where the recipients lack other resources to complement the loan or to fall back on if their businesses or families get into difficulty.

    In contrast Daraka Chhay, writing about a large microcredit programme in Cambodia, concludes that overall it was successful, although she also notes some of the failures for some poor women. Chhay concludes that care needs to be taken as ‘micro-finance is not a miracle solution to the economic situation of women’.

    Abebe Shiferaw et al . discuss an empirical study based on six years' experience of the development of forage in southern Ethiopia and provide examples of best practice.

    A study by A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah looks at the use of remittances to Bangladesh from Malaysia and Hong Kong. Great importance is placed on such remittances by the World Bank and others, indeed it is argued that they account for 6 per cent of Bangladesh's GDP. However, the study argues that very little of this flow leads to productive investment or even indirect investments such as in education. Despite the wishes of those remitting the funds a large proportion goes on consumption, and repaying the loans taken to fund the travel. The question remains open as to whether remittances are as positive as some would claim for the wider economy.

    Finally, the practical note by K.S. Mohindra, D. Narayana, and Slim Haddad opens an important subject around the ethics of participatory research and describes their attempt to draw up ethical guidelines using participatory research with marginalised, often illiterate, populations – where challenges around issues such as informed consent are difficult to establish.
    I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the very many authors and referees who we have worked with over 2011, along with our committed readership, who together make the journal what it is today.

     

  • A holistic learning approach to organisational capacity building with Cambodian NGOs produced impressive results in some organisations and important learning about blocks to change in others. The approach clearly demonstrates that moving beyond traditional training and organisational development interventions and into processes that promote learning and its integration into everyday work practices has positive and lasting impacts. Organisations willing to engage with the learning approach found that both individuals and the whole organisation were able to function more effectively, and that this contributed to sustainability and resilience. The approach also produced important lessons about organisational readiness to embrace learning and change.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.582854

  • 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. The author's university development and reform experiences in the former Soviet Union show that a depoliticised liberal arts pedagogy in fact reinforced authoritarian practices, and the promise of a liberal arts pedagogy as an emancipatory project remains an ongoing global task of critical knowledge practices.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590881
  • There are many challenges in evaluating international networks. The use of conventional tools can be difficult and often provides less than useful information. Social Network Analysis offers benefits for network evaluators by allowing for documentation and analysis of inter-relationships between individuals and organisations. This paper describes the use of this approach in the evaluation of a major international project entitled the Global Dialogues on Sexual Health and Well-being. It highlights the value of maps in enabling clear visual representations of networks, the identification of areas needing greater focus and the basis on which networks are constructed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590884

  • This paper builds upon field research in Ajegunle, Nigeria, which suggests that effective HIV/AIDS prevention requires a much higher degree of independent community participation. In exploring ways to achieve this, we suggest that assessing community strengths provides positive scope for understanding and utilising a much wider variety of HIV/AIDS responses which have not been previously used in the context of community development. Community-based approaches also encourage a deeper understanding of locally-specific vulnerability issues that surround HIV and AIDS. Such initiatives can be linked to trends that value the knowledge and capacities of neglected local people and build on their resources, including their networks, relationships and trust. However, the connection to, and use of, the resources of international NGOs (INGOs) remain central to success. If an interactive community-based agenda of working with local level resources receives enough acceptance at the higher levels of the INGOs, the results could be very significant. Such international/local agreements, where INGOs seek to work more closely with local community groups and their people on shared agendas, could begin to tackle some of the key structural issues, especially conflict and poverty, that exacerbate HIV/AIDS at the grassroots and are not responsive to purely medical solutions.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.582082

  • Youth and youth organisations are becoming valuable development partners, but little knowledge about their characteristics as learning organisations exists. This article presents perceptions of youth workers on this topic. These were gathered via an online survey and through research done by a youth network. Knowledge, skills and attitudes for active citizenship are facilitated by youth organisations as emergent learning spaces where peer-to-peer learning and experiential methods are central. Youth organisations adapt existing toolboxes and develop their own tools and knowledge that are more relevant to their needs. Support for youth organisations should take into account these special ways of learning.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.606892

  • Worldwide, microcredit has been recognised as a successful innovation in poverty alleviation. However, some claim that microcredit exacerbates poverty in developing countries. This study examines cases in Bangladesh where microcredit has actually worsened poverty among borrowers and investigates the underlying reasons for this adverse trend. Our results show that microcredit can exacerbate poverty in four interrelated circumstances. We argue that households living in extreme conditions of poverty who possess minimal or no surplus financial capacity to cope with contingencies are prone to adverse effects of microcredit, and suggest ways to avoid microcredit borrowers falling victims to such unintended consequences.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.607155

  • The use of microfinance to enhance income generation and job opportunities among the poor is a popular tool for governments and non-governmental organisations involved in raising standards of living in developing countries. Providing very poor families with small loans to invest in their micro enterprises, Village Bank empowers them to create their own jobs, increase their incomes, and increase their families' well-being. As women are more likely to spend the majority of their personal incomes on improving the family situation, this economic empowerment greatly benefits their children, who are generally more likely to attend school and have better nutrition.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.606891

     

  • Forage development is one of the strategies to address feed scarcity and low livestock productivity in Ethiopia. In line with government strategy, multiple actors took part in a forage development programme for six years (2004–09) in Alaba Special District, in southern Ethiopia. This paper analyses the six-year forage development programme, comparing its two phases, from an innovation systems perspective to identify best practices. The study shows that key forage innovative practices are: targeting innovative forage farmers, developing local forages, establishing private forage sources, forage promotion and diversifying capacity building. These best practices can be scaled up and out to address feed scarcity and increase livestock productivity.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.591186

     

  • 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. The article presents empirical data showing that while remittances are significant component of the Bangladeshi economy, a considerable amount goes to ‘unproductive’ schemes. Hence remittances at the micro level that do not significantly contribute to increasing household capacities fail to bring about the anticipated sustainable development at the macro level.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.582857

     

  • Participatory research is increasingly being used with poor and marginalised populations in developing countries. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to ethical considerations in participatory research. We argue that there is a need for additional strategies to promote ethically sound participatory research, especially when working with marginalised groups. We present our experiences from a participatory research initiative with an indigenous population in rural India, in which we developed and implemented a Code of Research Ethics and sought community consent as well as individual consent. The challenges that we faced and how we attempted to overcome them are also discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2011.590890

     

  • 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. Susan Holcombe from North America brings her academic perspective from Brandeis University as well as her previous experience with Oxfam America; Rajesh Tandon of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) will strengthen our understanding and contacts in South Asia; while Chiku Malunga from Malawi and Alan Fowler from South Africa will similarly advise on African perspectives. The contributing editors will complement the support and guidance provided by the existing editorial advisory group.

    In the current issue we cover several key areas, and include a number of valuable reflections on the practice of development. Monique Henninck et al. plunge into the perspectives of empowerment of international development organisations, through an analysis of the policies of 49 organisations. They come up with a framework consisting of six mechanisms, five domains and three levels, and conclude that the interdependence between them is essential if empowerment is to be understood within a specific context or development programme.

    The empowerment theme is taken up by Davíð Bjarnason, Valgerður Stefánsdóttir, and Lizette Beukes through an analysis of a programme to improve and extend the use of sign language in Namibia and its empowering effects on deaf people – improving educational opportunities and life chances.
     

    Gender and other issues which inhibit the success of development programmes are identified in both the articles by Lori Hanson et al. and Maria Torri. Hanson and her colleagues look at how disaggregating the impact of fair trade by gender and the use of the social determinates of health as a criteria might help better understand and illustrate the effects of fair trade; the Torri article looks at the importance of medicinal plants for poor people in rural India and how cultural and gender factors reduce the impact of programmes designed to encourage the growing of medicinal plants.

    The tension between innovative ideas and wider policies is explored by Payal Arora, who was engaged in piloting computerised medical diagnostic tools in isolated areas of rural India, and came to the realisation that what appeared to be a purely technical test required high-level changes in policy and legal frameworks before the pilot could go ahead.

    Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao explore the complex world of advocacy and communication for peace-building and conflict reduction, bringing together different international experiences.

    We also have three articles which touch on the role of the individual development worker. The first, by Nicki Wrighton and John Overton, looks at the pressure on government officials in the micro state of Tuvalu to engage with visiting aid officials or to attend global meetings. The article also concludes that processes such as the Paris Declaration have done little to lessen this burden; indeed it could be argued to have increased the time-consuming processes of aid. The second, from Deborah Nguyen et al. , looks at humanitarian workers and summarises some lessons from the experiences of individuals engaged in front-line humanitarian work which affected their motivation and performance. Finally, we have an important review of NGO fieldworkers in Pakistan from Muhammad Siddique and Mokbul Ahmad. This survey shows the problems fieldworkers face in both basic employment conditions as well as working in a difficult political and cultural setting. It provides a very different picture from the assumption that all NGO workers are well paid, well trained and enjoy a privileged position in many societies.

    As well as Nguyen et al, the current issue contains another Practical Note, where Matthew Seib, Katherine Arnold and Blair Orr show how a simple technology, originally for use in research into water and sanitation purity, unexpectedly became a useful teaching tool in rural Mali.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.652073

     

  • In recent years, increasing attention has been given to home herbal gardens (HHG) and numerous projects have been carried out. Despite this, the active participation of villagers in the cultivation of medicinal plants in HHGs is not very high. The present article analyses the challenges faced by local communities in participating in HHG programmes, paying particular attention to cultural aspects and caste and gender components. The article concludes by illustrating how development interventions in the domain of HHGs can be enhanced for the promotion of local livelihoods and health of rural communities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640988

  • Rural support programmes in Pakistan are major players in rural development, with significant outreach. Owing to funding constraints, they are currently exploring an exit strategy whereby they facilitate the formation of multi-tier local support organisations (LSOs), including those exclusively run by women. The present article focuses on the impact of this exit strategy on rural women. The findings, based on survey research, show that women have fared well, been more effective in running the LSOs than men and, despite confronting a conservative culture, have effectively filled in spaces vacated by men.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640982

     

  • The present article provides evidence from a collaborative research programme in Nicaragua that suggests that Fairtrade is falling short of its equity-promoting potential. Providing an alternative framing of Fairtrade based on the gendered social determinants of health, it suggests how Fairtrade can be optimised towards equity. The programme is based on experiences of community-based organisations and women coffee producers who perceive contradictions in the rhetoric of gender equity in Fairtrade. To orient future action and research towards more equitable and empowering possibilities for Fairtrade coffee producers, the framework illuminates the gendered nature of the contexts, activities, and impacts of Fairtrade.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640981

  • The Indian healthcare sector provides ripe ground for development as access to high-quality and timely medical diagnosis remains unrequited among its vast rural populace. With an acute shortage of doctors in rural areas, medical diagnostic software has been created as a surrogate, propelling non-physician workers to step in. For diagnostic software to function effectively, it is paramount to identify the user. Using an intended pilot programme of RightChoice software in the central Himalayas, the present article focuses on the political and economic complexities involved in identifying users of such software.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.642340

  • The present article outlines a development project carried out in Namibia in 2006–2010 by the Icelandic International Development Agency and the Namibian Ministry of Education. The project aimed primarily to empower deaf people by building capacity in deaf education and developing Namibian Sign Language. Strong emphasis was placed on strengthening government structures and services to contribute towards equal rights and participation in society. The article contextualises project activities and the lessons they offer with discussion on disability, development and deaf education, emphasising the importance of working closely with government and enlisting wide stakeholder participation to achieve sustainability.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640986

  • Empowerment has become a mainstream concept in international development but lacks clear definition, which can undermine development initiatives aimed at strengthening empowerment as a route to poverty reduction. In the present article, written narratives from 49 international development organisations identify how empowerment is defined and operationalised in community initiatives. Results show a conceptual framework of empowerment comprising six mechanisms that foster empowerment (knowledge; agency; opportunity; capacity-building; resources; and sustainability), five domains of empowerment (health; economic; political; resource; and spiritual), and three levels (individual; community; and organisational). A key finding is the interdependence between components, indicating important programmatic implications for development initiatives.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640987

  • NGOs have played a key role in development since the end of World War II, and more so since the 1970s. Like elsewhere in the world, the state and the market catered to the different needs of people in Pakistan. With the arrival of foreign funding, NGOs emerged as a channel for dispersing resources to far-flung communities. However, NGO fieldworkers are not valued. They suffer from personal and professional problems including job insecurity, poor salary structure, unhealthy working environments, and harassment. Vulnerability of the NGOs and their fieldworkers has further increased with the growth of terrorism.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.642341

  • Advocacy communication is now a key action term in development discourse. Advocates are usually issue- or programme-oriented and do not often think in terms of an ongoing process of social change in general, or peacebuilding in particular. The resolution of an issue or the initiation of a programme are ends in themselves. Thus, the primary aim of advocacy is to foster public policies that are supportive to the solution of an issue or programme. Since public policies must be viewed as an integral part of development processes, the kind of advocacy we advocate is participatory.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640980

  • The aid effectiveness agenda has placed much emphasis on issues of recipient ownership, alignment, and donor harmonisation. It has affected the policies and practices of many donor agencies and promoted a drive to consult widely with partners in governments and civil society and encourage their active involvement in aid-funded development activities. Yet, when we look closely at small island states – in this case Tuvalu – we can see how this participation and consultation is placing considerable burdens on such agents and institutions to the point where their effectiveness and even their putative ownership is compromised.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640983

  • Humanitarians find themselves working and living day-by-day in a physically and psychologically demanding and politically complex environment. As there are very limited training mechanisms, each humanitarian is often making their own way through the field, learning from their own mistakes and successes. This practical note highlights some of the innovative (and sometimes unusual) practices that humanitarians have devised to overcome the old and modern challenges of working in the humanitarian field. The note aims to demonstrate that a humanitarian's unique, individual practices can be combined to fit together within a larger framework maximising work effectiveness and personal satisfaction.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640989

     

  • In developing areas of the world, where local people's understanding of germ theory and water and sanitation problems is not complete, 3MTM PetrifilmTM can act as an important visual aid for development workers in order to educate people about water and sanitation topics. The present article gives an example of how 3MTM PetrifilmTM has been used to help establish a baseline understanding of water and sanitation problems in rural Mali, and motivated improved water and sanitation practices.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640985

  • I have recently heard several critiques of international development journals which argue that ideas and articles about development are dominated by northern-based research centres and the journals they sponsor. Development in Practice has always had a policy of encouraging a truly international set of both authors as well as readers. This current issue is a good illustration of the international nature of our contributors. In this issue we have authors from Iran, Afghanistan, India, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, as well as from the USA, Canada and the UK. We continue to seek to identify challenging articles from across the globe, and to do this we have recently introduced our international contributing editors to reinforce our editorial advisory group.

    Several articles in this issue show the importance of good evaluation work in both helping us learn from practice and to understand the complexity of development, including those issues and challenges not always identified by programme designers. Indeed the need to adapt as required to changing contexts, to design faults, and not be overly controlled by tight design around expected results based methods emerges not only from articles in the current issue but also from much of the material we publish. This reinforces the need to maintain an open mind about the way development works, and how policies can backfire even when introduced with the best of intentions. Human development, whether social, economic or political, is not an exact science and therefore priority must be placed on being able to refine and change our policies and programmes as well as learn from experience.

    We have a several contributions using evaluation material. Francis Alinyo and Terry Leahy look at shortcomings in two programmes designed to improve food security in Uganda: they conclude that models based on ‘prominent farmers’ do not help reduce poverty and they stress the greater need for a gendered approach to food security. Gerryshom Munala and Harald Kaing address the failure to improve water supplies to informal settlements in Kenya through the processes of ‘commercialisation’. The challenge of measuring development results is tackled by Mequanent Getachew, who reviews the use of fertilizers promoted by different agencies in Ethiopia and looks at the successes and failures over a 10-year period, noting the differences in ‘outcomes’ if we take a short-term view as opposed to a review over a longer period. Getachew concludes that we need to revise our use of some of the results-based methods to take into account time and context far more robustly. James De Vries shares some of the lessons of the Heifer ‘Passing on the Gift’ programmes and explores why these have been successful in some areas and less so in others, concluding that the basic idea of repayment of assistance to other beneficiaries rather than the donor agency has encouraged pride as well as helped people out of poverty. Finally we have a Practical Note, from Sue Coe, on practical lessons on disability inclusion, which follows on from an earlier and popular article in Development in Practice 20(7), based on lessons primarily from evaluations of World Vision programmes.

    Several of our contributors have engaged with methodological challenges to good development practice. Kent Schroeder and Michael Hatton tackle the problems around assessing risks, moving beyond the more simplistic approach to known risks to argue that resilience and adaptability are key to being able to cope with unknown risks; this should be allowed for in otherwise sometimes overly controlled results-based methods. Jiyang Kang et al. surveyed a number of US-based development NGOs and found that many still struggle with the introduction of monitoring and evaluation systems. The authors ask why the development of M&E has been so slow, speculating whether the competitive nature of fundraising inhibits the sharing of mistakes and failures, hence also inhibiting learning from practice.

    The concept of citizenship and the links made by many commentators to the neo-liberal free market is explored by Arun Kumar, using experiences from India, who notes the tendency to reduce citizenship to an individualised concept which takes development away from collective organisations and community mobilisation. Dipantear Datta, also from India, addresses the challenge of social assistance schemes in Orissa and argues for the use of new technologies in supporting community led, evidence-based advocacy. The examples of using information at community level and its ability to combat corruption, as well as informing the poor about their state-provided entitlements, provides an excellent illustration of how to improve overall governance.
     

    We have an interesting review from Iran by Hadi Veisi et al . who analyse the factors affecting the perceptions and understanding of environmental issues by local civil servants, as a way of trying to see how best to promote the concept of environmentally sustainable development. Roya Rahmani challenges the international community to review the way international assistance has been channelled to Afghanistan and in particular notes the negative perceptions of NGOs held by both the general population and some senior government figures. This article explores some of the history and practices which have led to this situation.

    In our final Practical Note, Carmen da Silva Wells and Christine Sijbesma review some innovations which strengthen community-led total sanitation, drawing on experience from the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, and echoing earlier articles by recommending greater equity based on gender and the poor to sustain sanitation services.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.675316

     

     

  • The present article documents the programme strategy that has been used to address the challenges of social assistance schemes in Orissa, India. Key aspects of the strategy are: community mobilisation; use of mobile technology, web and media for community-led evidence-based advocacy at the local level; and graduating this effort to address structural issues at the state level. Key challenges in the process were to minimise tension among different stakeholders, and to bring changes in attitude of communities who were habituated in receiving services instead of demanding them. Despite many challenges, the strategy has successfully contributed to mobilising communities to demand their entitlements.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664627

     

  • Aid effectiveness has been an important subject in discourses around Afghanistan's reconstruction and development. NGOs are important players in this discourse and there are contradictory views about their function, accountability and effectiveness. The present article gives an overview of the context in which NGOs have operated in Afghanistan since 1979, when the Soviets invaded the country. It then discusses the public perception of NGOs and the sources of this perception, and concludes that donors' lack of understanding of the local context and their policies have contributed to local NGOs' ineffectiveness.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664622

     

  • As agências de desenvolvimento enfrentam o desafio de medir e relatar os resultados de suas contribuições para promover o desenvolvimento equitativo e sustentável. Como parte disso, as agências fazem previsões ambiciosas de objetivos de desenvolvimento e então comprometem-se a medir o que elas não conseguem alcançar no final de seus programas ou projetos. O presente artigo utiliza o programa de extensão de fertilizantes do governo da Etiópia como um exemplo de definição do contexto, da abrangência e dos cronogramas para os exercícios de avaliação quantitativa de resultados. A experiência etíope sugere que é possível desenvolver métodos específicos contextualizados que possibilitam a medição de resultados práticos e mensuráveis.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664625

     

  • Despite the growing interest in performance measurement and evaluation of international NGOs (INGOs), little is known about actual INGO evaluation practices. The present article, based on a survey of 38 US INGOs, examines the process of evaluation practice, as well as the purposes and dissemination of the results. The findings on evaluation purpose, dissemination of results, and formal feedback mechanisms suggest that INGOs typically develop stronger formal accountability measures for donors and staff-members than for beneficiaries. The findings also indicate that many INGOs consider evaluation as an opportunity for organisational learning and for improving their performance. Many of the difficulties identified by respondents in conducting evaluations are consistent with previous literature.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664621

     

  • Food security is a key aspect of human development. The present article explores the shortcomings of agricultural interventions in two districts in eastern Uganda. Our study shows that these interventions have achieved only minor successes in relieving rural poverty and strengthening food security. Programmes that support prominent farmers with the aim of commercial development are unlikely to touch the poor. Food insecurity is related to the gendered division of agricultural work, control of cash income and the cycle of planting, harvest and crop sales for poor farmers. The present article recommends a set of effective subsistence-based strategies for poor farmers with an emphasis on the interests of women.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664620

     

  • The commercialisation of water services in Kisumu, Kenya has resulted in fewer managerial changes than had been anticipated. Challenges include perceived political interference, inequitable treatment of different groups of residents, and little inter-agency coordination. A survey was conducted, focusing on the informal settlements, to help understand the root cause of the management flaws. It revealed: six different water supply routes; that 47 per cent of the residents' source water came from kiosks; that women's numerical strength is insignificant in management; and mitigation of cartel problems and disputes by non-water-associated personnel. The present article suggests an integrative managerial management structure where the community takes the lead.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664619

     

  • Citizenship has gained considerable popular currency in development and is increasingly being used to represent its objectives and outcomes. The popular conceptualisations of citizenship have not remained unaffected by neo-liberalism, which has established itself firmly as the dominant development framework. In mapping the neo-liberal influences in conceptualisations and expressions of citizenship – evidenced in the work of 11 NGOs in India – the present article interrogates its limitations and effects on development outcomes. The article calls for the need to leverage the inherent plurality of citizenship more substantively by infusing the discourse of rights.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664628

     

  • Impact and sustainability of programmes are critical issues facing the development community. Heifer International has honed its approach over more than 60 years. Heifer's approach includes: use of holistic, values-based, and affirmative community development process; Heifer's Cornerstones – values and principles to guide work, including ‘passing on the gift’; and measurement of impact at three levels – values, attitudes and knowledge; living conditions; and policy and systems change. The present article shares the experiences of Heifer International in addressing the key questions of assuring programme impact, sustainability, and the spread of benefits through Heifer's unique practice of ‘passing on the gift’.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664626

     

  • The present study aimed to aid government sector managers in Iran in their understanding of sustainable development mechanisms. Research was undertaken with 338 managers selected randomly from seven government ministries. The findings revealed that the rules and devices of public participation, voluntary environmental certification systems, scientific cooperation, and education were all priorities for moving towards sustainable development. The results also showed that institutional development, social capital and education, economic instruments for environmental protection, monitoring and informing, a clean development mechanism, and sustainable government are key means for encouraging sustainable development in Iran.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664624

     

  • The present article follows on from the practical note in Development in Practice 20(7): 879–886 that looked at seven common early lessons learnt from the inclusion of disabled people in World Vision programming work across four countries, based on socially inclusive principles. Externally led evaluations and technical support work undertaken between December 2010 and July 2011 in Armenia, Ethiopia, India, Sierra Leone, and Senegal have yielded seven further common lessons. In summary: with intentional efforts, a ten-fold increase of disabled people being included can be quickly achieved; positive attitudinal change towards disabled children and adults is possible in a relatively short period; it is important to reinforce inclusion messages regularly with all stakeholders; adapting existing programming tools to be disability-inclusive is more effective than providing generic checklist tools; access by and inclusion of disabled people are not the same thing – each require a different strategy; active senior organisational champions significantly enhance and accelerate progress; and the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities currently offers fantastic opportunities for good progress because of the large number of countries that have now adopted it.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664629

     

  • Identifying risks and risk-mitigation strategies at the project design stage is a key part of managing development projects. Yet, experience in the field suggests that many risks that derail projects are unknowable during project design. Risk management needs to evolve to respond effectively to these unexpected risks. We argue that the concept of resilience can provide insight into responding better to unexpected risks. The article describes the nature of resilience and outlines a number of practical strategies to build resilience into projects to respond to risk more effectively.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.664623

     

  • 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:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.640984

     

  • This paper critically examines policy in Benin against child trafficking. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with adolescent labour migrants and their communities, it problematises both the assumptions underpinning anti-trafficking policy and the appropriateness of the initiatives that comprise it. It suggests that, in order truly to protect the young labour migrants defined as trafficked, the policymaking establishment needs to focus more closely on the structural economic underpinnings of migration and exploitation, and to adopt a more participatory approach to policymaking.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.673557

     

  • This paper considers the employment of spatialised practice within child protection efforts as pursued by humanitarian agencies. Starting from a brief overview of the genealogy of enclosure and separation within both humanitarianism and in relation to childhood, examination is then made of spatialisation in the setting of the occupied Palestinian territory. It is argued that in a situation of occupation, the spatialised approach entails numerous problems that are both practical and political in nature.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672961

     

  • This paper explores how an ostensibly child-centred system can fail to protect children. In some policy arenas, the Kenyan state is recognised as a leader in Africa for the care and protection of children at risk. Yet a case study of children's experiences illuminates how, despite adherence to a legislated framework and series of protocols, the Kenyan state proves unable or unwilling to ensure children's care and protection. The deployment of child-focused discourse and practice through bureaucratic documentation and judicial rulings camouflages (poorly) the state's neglect of children's perspectives and the fundamental risks to children, families, and communities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.673554

     

  • Drawing on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh, this paper examines intra-household relations, and the roles and responsibilities of children in this context. The findings offer several contributions to current debates and approaches in child protection. First, there is a need for greater recognition of intergenerational interdependence both within households among children and their parents, and outside among wider networks in the community. Second, children's work is revealed as having a protective function within these relationships. In the absence of economic improvements and external assistance, communities, which include children, remain a major resource for child protection.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.673555

     

  • This article explores divergent perspectives on female early marriage and genital modification in Ethiopia. It contrasts international norms and research evidence with local understandings, the latter focusing on the part these practices play in securing family social heritage, well-being of girls, and their transition to adulthood. The article explains the persistence of these practices in the face of campaigns to eliminate them and questions assumptions behind the international child protection model. It points to unintended adverse consequences of interventions that do not pay sufficient regard to local meanings and social relations, and suggests how policy might be approached differently.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672957

     

  • This paper explores how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) global priorities and strategies for refugee girls and boys are applied in long-term Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal. It examines UNHCR's interventions to prevent and respond to child protection issues, including separation from parents and caregivers, and early marriage. These are compared with community perceptions of, and assistance for, children living in difficult circumstances. Young refugees' own research on issues affecting children in the camps offers further insights into how protection is defined and experienced by children living in this context and their suggestions for community and bureaucratic responses.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672954

     

  • ‘Orphans’ became a category of vulnerable children deserving special protection in the context of the global AIDS epidemic, and currently the notion of ‘orphans and vulnerable children’ (OVC), dominates much of the policy for protecting children across sub-Saharan Africa. Analysis of survey and qualitative data from Young Lives in Ethiopia found that parental death does not guarantee the often assumed negative impacts on children's experiences, and that inequalities between children are greater along dimensions of poverty and household location, compared to orphan status. ‘OVC’ obscures poverty as a main source of child vulnerability and is therefore an outdated approach.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.673556

     

  • This paper discusses protection of children from hazards in agricultural work. International and national policies aim to protect children by eliminating all child labour. Previous literature on hazardous child labour tends to focus on single industries or crops, overlooking the variety of activities that children undertake in subsistence farming. We analyse survey and qualitative data from children, and present rates of work, injuries experienced, how children deal with risks, and perceived benefits of work. The most effective form of prevention may be to build on existing knowledge and experience, working with communities to develop strategies to make work safer.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672955

     

  • Child protection has focused on responding to interpersonal violence and abuse. This approach can detach children from the broader socio-economic and political structures which shape their life chances, by concentrating on the symptoms of risk rather than the underlying causes. Drawing on the Young Lives study of childhood poverty, this paper argues that poverty and inequalities are at the heart of childhood risk, shaping which children are at risk and access to sources of protection and therefore to children's life chances. In order to protect children better, the child protection field needs to engage with the structural nature of risk.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672953

     

  • 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. Children, youth and adults in four Thai communities collaborated in co-creating integrated strategies to address ICT and child protection. The paper describes the process and actions resulting from this child-centred partnership.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672960

     

     

  • Drawing on empirical data from a community-based study with children and adults in rural Peru, the paper analyses the everyday experiences of a conditional cash transfer programme, called ‘Juntos’. The findings show that social protection programmes like Juntos address certain child vulnerabilities by making eligibility for their cash transfers conditional on behaviour-related to child protection-related such as health check-ups and school attendance. However, there are other aspects of children's well-being that are not being considered, such as experiences of violence and exclusion. This paper discusses both opportunities and challenges for cash transfer programmes to play a greater role in child protection.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672956

     

  • Following the American-led invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis fled to Jordan and the international donor community initiated humanitarian assistance. Through a unique partnership, three organisations conducted participatory research with Iraqi children and their families in Amman. The goal was to understand children's lived experiences – their challenges and coping strategies – with a specific focus on child protection. A better understanding of local context had an immediate, positive impact on organisations and their effectiveness, but long-term change proved elusive. The authors explore the potential for participatory research to transform programming and the obstacles to institutionalising change.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.672959

     

  • The articles contained in this issue present a panorama of good protective intentions gone awry. International or national policies presumed to benefit children appeared in field research to be ineffective or counterproductive for the children. Depending on the situation, the problem could primarily be one of poor interpretation or implementation of a child protection policy. This is a management issue, which can be resolved by competent governance. National governments and international development programmes know how to handle such issues; the question is one of will and priority. However, in some cases, perhaps even in most cases, it appears that at least part of the underlying dysfunction was with the policies themselves, some of which might be misguided. This is a far more serious problem, since it suggests that those making the policies may know rather less about child protection – what is needed and how to provide it – than has been assumed.

    As we pointed out in the Introduction, much has been learnt and put to good use about how to protect the lives, well-being, and development of very young children. But that is not equally true for children from young middle childhood onwards. These children, especially in poor countries, have been the primary subjects of concern in the papers in this journal issue. We end by briefly reflecting on them as a group, taking into consideration pertinent thought from elsewhere, to see what lessons we might draw and consider to helpfully inform development theory and practice.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.673558

     

  • Writing on the relationships between religion and development has blossomed in the last decade or so, after years of relative neglect. Like any field of social enquiry that is both underdeveloped and closely linked to the interests of advocates and practitioners, the work available to date has encountered various pitfalls. These are outlined, to pinpoint the contribution that this special issue makes to the rapidly-evolving body of research on religion in the context of development. The paper then provides an editorial overview of the themes and papers in the special issue, which includes both research-based articles and practical notes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.686602

     

  • In mainstream development thinking, policy, and practice, religion has generally been neglected, despite its pervasiveness and importance. As a result, analysts puzzle over how best to study the complex links between religion and development. The framework outlined in this paper addresses the question – how can the presence, nature, and activities of religious people and organisations be better understood, so that they can be taken into account in development activities? It identifies and clarifies the key concepts and factors that need to be considered, explores ideas about the relevance of religion to development and social change, identifies the broad levels of analysis needed to better understand a particular context and briefly discusses some possible methodological approaches. A series of questions for analysis are suggested, investigation of which could lead to an improved understanding of the meaning of religion in the lives of individuals; the ways in which religion interacts with social and political processes; and the nature, aims, and activities of religious organisations.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685873

  • This paper argues that discussion of religion and development sees religion in over-institutionalised ways and is biased towards Christianity over other traditions. It explores this through analysis of the World Bank-sponsored study, Voices of the Poor, and the authors' own research in India. This shows that religious identities and practice can be quite fluid, especially amongst people in lower castes. People identify religion not just in terms of particular affiliations, but in relation to an underlying moral order. The extent to which religions provide welfare and moral leadership varies between religious communities and types of organisation.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685872

  • This article outlines one of the activities organised by an international Evangelical faith-based development organisation (FBDO) working in the Kibera informal settlement, an area that attracts large numbers of development practitioners, including FBDOs and Christian missionaries. Some Pentecostal and Evangelical perceptions of entrepreneurship are outlined, which are then related to current theoretical descriptions of the role of global Pentecostalism in improving livelihoods and well-being. It is suggested that local conditions in Kibera mean that little improvement in terms of livelihoods is possible. Therefore local Pentecostal adherents tend to utilise their faith and church activities in attempts to survive conditions as they are, rather than in seeking to transform them. It is suggested that members of Pentecostal churches in Kibera seek to express, understand and control, but not change, their challenging lifeworlds through their religious ideas and activities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685874

     

  • This paper explores the hypothesis that Islamic religious values and beliefs are antithetical to women's education in two cities in Pakistan: Lahore, generally believed to be a socially liberal city, and Peshawar, often regarded as the bastion of conservative values and norms. Leaders and members of selected religious organisations, and some members of women's rights and development organisations, were interviewed to ascertain their views. While there is universal support for girls' education, views on the purpose, content, and mode of delivery differ between men and women and also depend on respondents' position on the liberal/conservative spectrum. Some of the policy implications of the findings are discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685863

  • This paper takes stock of current thinking about the nature and distinctiveness of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in development. Since the 1990s, public policy-linked scholarship from the USA has sought to define and categorise FBOs. More recently, many donors have increasingly chosen to work with and fund such organisations, giving rise to discussions about how FBOs working in development should be defined and classified, and how their contribution to development should be assessed. While many of the available studies portray FBOs as having comparative advantages over so-called secular organisations, this paper concludes that such a generalisation over-simplifies reality, particularly in the absence of convincing evidence. Further assessments of the characteristics, roles, and activities of all types of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are needed to assist in the choice of development partners and to test claims of distinctiveness and comparative advantage.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.686600

  • This article presents the findings of a study of selected religious and secular non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. The study sought to identify whether, and in what circumstances, so-called faith-based organisations (FBOs) have distinctive characteristics with respect to their goals, values, organisational characteristics, and activities, compared to secular NGOs. It found that the FBOs studied are perceived by their staff, beneficiaries, and local observers as possessing some distinctive features and comparative advantages relative to secular NGOs. It argues, however, that a standardised donor preference for FBOs is inappropriate and may be counter-productive, since NGOs cannot be simply categorised as ‘religious’ or ‘secular’, there is still insufficient evidence to assess the outcomes and impact of their HIV/AIDS-related activities, and their effectiveness is influenced not only by their characteristics and strategies but also by the context in which they operate.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685868

     

  • This paper examines the position and role of religious organisations within a wider range of civil society organisations (CSOs) in two districts in Tanzania. We argue that where development agendas are externally generated and civil society is driven by supply-side factors, religious organisations are not very different from other CSOs. Whether faith adherence and religious values and beliefs lead to different kinds of development outcomes is open to question, partly because most Tanzanians claim some kind of religious motivation and partly because there are probably very few institutional settings in which religious attitudes do not have some kind of influence.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685866

     

  • ‘Faith-based organisations’ (FBOs) are gaining increasing attention within development circles – amongst practitioners, funders, and policymakers as well as academics. While some discussion has taken place over the meaning of the term ‘FBO’ in academic circles, little empirical research has been conducted as to the relevance and interpretation of the term in different contexts and what role religion plays within organisations engaged in development-related activities. This paper contributes to this discussion by comparing a range of organisations engaged in charitable and development-related activities in the city of Karachi and elsewhere in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. The findings reveal a broad distinction between local charities, which depend on individual donations for their funding, and for which religious values and beliefs are intertwined to differing degrees in their work, and professional development organisations, which rely on domestic and international institutional funding and have no apparent relationship with religion. However, not all organisations fit neatly into these two categories, demonstrating that religion operates in complex and varied ways within organisations engaged in development-related activities in Pakistan.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685867

     

  • A growing number of international networks, like those linking religious institutions, engage in development-related activities across the world. Improvements in technology and increased travel opportunities for international volunteers have given these networks new influence, with unknown implications for the trajectory of development, especially where states are weak. This paper examines the role of a transnational religious network in a newly formed nation: the Republic of South Sudan, where the dominant Episcopal Church has links with dioceses elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. Through field observations, interviews and a survey of US Episcopal Church links in other countries, preliminary evidence is presented about the real and potential impact of this emergent form of globalised solidarity.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685862

     

  • Transnational Muslim NGOs are increasingly important actors in the field of aid provision. Much of the literature has presented a rather static and homogeneous picture of this group of organisations, overlooking their heterogeneity and changing nature. Tracing the historical trajectories of transnational Muslim NGOs, this article shows how changing political, economic, and social contexts have shaped the identities, activities, and relations of these organisations. Using four specific events – the famine in the Horn of Africa, the wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and the War on Terror – as windows through which to study these trajectories, the article argues that recent history has seen the emergence of at least four types of transnational Muslim NGO: da'watist, jihadist, solidarity-based, and secularised.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685876

     

  • Civil society organisations, including those that are faith-based, are increasingly viewed as key stakeholders that can influence government policies, advocate on behalf of poor people and contribute to service delivery and development. This paper discusses interactions between religious groups and the state and how they influence society in the ethnically diverse Asia-Pacific region. Through case studies of Indonesia, Fiji, and Samoa, the paper discusses various aspects of the political relationships between religious groups and states, the roles of religion in society and the engagement of religious groups in welfare and development. It concludes that while religious organisations are socially and politically influential in all the countries considered, certain aspects of their relationships with governments pose challenges for the achievement of stability, equality, and development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685864

     

  • This paper describes attempts in Nigeria and Tanzania to build the capacity of selected religious organisations to participate in policy consultation processes, by strengthening their ability to speak effectively to governments on behalf of poor communities. These attempts arose out of enquiries into the limited involvement of faith-based organisations in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper processes which were a condition of debt relief. Two pilot projects, one in each country, set out to foster inter-faith networks for cooperation and resource sharing, increase skills in data collection and use the evidence gathered to put forward constructive proposals for future policy and practice aimed especially at poverty reduction. The submissions to government prepared by the participating organisations did appear to reflect the voices of the poor, and a workable model for future engagement in policy processes by faith-based organisations emerged from the pilot projects, although replicating it more widely is likely to depend on further external support.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685871

     

  • Legal reform is necessary but not sufficient to realise women's rights. This paper compares two campaigns for legal reform in Nigeria: attempts to domesticate the UN Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in federal law, which resulted in defeat of the bill in 2007, and a successful campaign to introduce legislation to prevent the mistreatment of widows in Anambra State. It considers the role of religion in the campaigns, by examining how the women's movement engaged with religious actors. The research shows that religious beliefs, discourses, and actors had a significant influence on the outcomes of the campaigns, in part because of the content of the proposed legislation, but also because of the strategies adopted by the campaigners and the interests of the religious bodies concerned. Despite the implication of religion in gender inequality, these cases show that religious teachings, leaders, and organisations can be allies rather than obstacles in achieving progressive social change.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685875

     

  • In the literature on the religious contribution to health and development, it is commonly stated that faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) provide from 30 to 70 per cent of all health care provision in Africa. This article tracks the sources of such statements back to the 1960s, highlighting a process of ‘broken telephone’ whereby estimates are passed on and frequently distorted by policy- and advocacy-oriented influences at both the national and international levels. This demonstrates how estimates are being wielded bluntly, often resulting in poorly substantiated claims to the detriment of more careful research, thereby weakening the empirical knowledge-base and improved practice.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685870

     

  • Christian health services (CHSs) provide a substantial proportion of health services in many developing countries. This paper outlines the results of research which assessed whether the financial pressures resulting from a decline in their traditional funding sources have compromised CHSs' initial motivation to serve the poor. The two main approaches CHSs used to increase their income in the 13 countries investigated were by improving their access to government funds through increased cooperation, and increasing user fees. Although some of the CHSs studied seem to be targeting more affluent patients to increase their income, the majority retain their commitment to the poor despite their financial difficulties.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685869

     

  • Religious and secular ideologies are hotly debated within Indian educational circles, partly in response to neo-liberal trends in educational provision, which have encouraged non-state providers, including religious organisations, to increase their involvement. The paper explores similarities and differences between educational providers affiliated with different faith traditions in Maharashtra, with respect to their educational activities and the extent to which their ethos and practices are pro-poor. Drawing on six illustrative case studies of Hindu, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist religious education providers, it concludes that although all have a stated commitment to enhancing the welfare of the poor, the ways that this is expressed in their educational activities are strongly influenced not only by their religious ideology but also by their class and gender positions.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685865

     

  • Development practice should be centred on human relations governed by a spirit of cooperation, kindness and compassion, rather than on purely economic concerns. The Sarvódaya Shramadána movement, a grassroots Buddhist-based development movement in Sri Lanka, emphasises that development practices should be more closely aligned with religious resources and principles in order to achieve a balanced and sustainable development process. The work of Sarvódaya Shramadána shows how religion is an integral element in socio-cultural situations and can play a vital role in overcoming impasses associated with growth-orientated development practices.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.686601

     

  • The role of religion in development is often neglected, whether this refers to the faith of intended beneficiaries, provides staff and volunteers with a motivation for involvement in development practice or influences the design and implementation of projects. This paper examines how Islam provides guidance for development practice, with a focus on addressing HIV/AIDS, using a South African case study. The case study highlights important principles on which two Muslim organisations (Islamic Careline and the Muslim AIDS Programme) base their operational methodologies. It shows how Islamic beliefs have influenced their approach to addressing issues related to HIV/AIDS in the South African context, where prevalence rates remain very high, the impact of the epidemic is widely felt and Islam is a minority faith.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685877

     

  • The evolution and achievements of the Eagles Relief and Development Programme in Malawi are inspired and influenced by Christian values. The strength of Eagles comes from its integration of religious teaching and values with the way it works and from its decision to work through the local congregations, despite the challenges that such integration entails. The Eagles Programme challenges the stereotype of Pentecostal churches as being preoccupied with providing charity and welfare rather than justice for the poor. This case study shows how combining an explicitly Christian approach with recognised good development practice can lead to sustainable impact in a profoundly challenging context.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.685878

     

  • The human tendency to continuously sub-divide and reclassify the way we look at our own experience is one of the signs of our creativity. In the world of development this is as true as any other field of human endeavour, perhaps even more so. The negative side to this search for definitions, and the drive to subdivide our experiences into areas we can understand and engage with, is that we create ‘silos’ – areas of study, for example, which are isolated from each other by the use of exclusive language and terms that come from different disciplines. In the endless permutations of concepts and professional vocabularies we often merely create parallel discourses – if we sat and reduced them to their essence or to first principles we would see that are often merely repetitions of ideas recast under slightly different terms.

    It seems that there is a proliferation of new development approaches. New terms appear faster than most of us can cope with, but underlying them we often find the same basic issues. For example we hear a great deal about social enterprises, governance, or accountability, which if we unpack them relate closely to discussions which have been taking place for many years on how to ensure development work genuinely enshrines the views of our clients or beneficiaries. After all, one of the reasons participation is important is precisely because it created a feedback loop from end users to development workers and planners. However whole new schools of thought are emerging as though the issue of accountability is new, or that socially driven values are unique to social enterprises. Perhaps people need to read more outside of their ‘silos’ and also go back more than a few months into the literature which already exists, if they are to contribute something new, rather than assume that because they have come up with a new name for an old issue there is nothing to be learnt from the past.

    At a time when so much development seems to be increasingly constrained by rules, procedures and top-down agenda setting, the article by Guilherme Azevedo and Henry Mintzberg is refreshing. It argues that global issues such as poverty, climate change and recession will not be resolved by the state or corporations, but through social initiatives allowing communities to resolve problems of a global origin. They take the Brazilian attitude of ‘can do’ or ‘why not?’ and trace several social initiatives which have had global impact (budget monitoring in Brazil, wind power in Denmark); calling for the ‘why not?’ attitude to be a rallying call for further socially based initiatives.

    Another side to the failure of top-down planning can be found in the article by Jesus Gastelum Lage who looks at whether social policy design actually addresses social problems. He concludes that social policy contributes less than it should to poverty reduction and linked goals, in part because it tends to work more with the interests of local politicians than along lines which could make real changes. Social policy instead tends to focus on small, incremental changes which are politically possible or expedient.

    One solution to improving development practice is given by Rinus van Klinken, who describes experiences of immersion programmes in Tanzania, whereby the immersion process is linked to overall organisational learning rather than just informing the individual being immersed in village life. This experience seemed to lead to a situation whereby staff recognised that business as usual was not going to resolve longer term issues around rural poverty, and it helped them come up with new ideas for their work related to their experiences in the villages.

    The apparent contradictions within development agencies are discussed by Payal Arora, using the example of micro-finance in a study of differences within an INGO. Arora highlights major differences in approaches of the individuals interviewed, and how they sit within a common organisation. The tension between individual perceptions and understandings and organisational ones is important in a context of changing development fashions. Thomas Davis, Kate Macdonald and Scott Brenton take this further by looking at the differences and conflicts regarding attitudes to accountability within an organisation; noting that field-based staff were on the whole more positive about existing accountability systems than head office staff.

    Several of our contributors focus on livelihoods and income-generating schemes including trade and micro-finance. Sangeeta Arora sets out to evaluate the role of state banks in India and their engagement with micro-finance in the Punjab. Noting that although many state development banks do now engage directly with small lenders/savers, they are still only a small percentage of the bank's portfolio and there are fewer women in the client base than we are used to seeing in NGO-run micro-finance initiatives.

    There are two articles looking at trade; the first by Kizito Mazvimavi et al. compares local seed fairs to direct relief distribution in Zimbabwe, noting that local distribution through fairs seems to be more economical and encouraged local seed production and sales, as opposed to the direct distribution of imported seed in the face of the economic crisis. In contrast, Abdoul Murekezi and Songqing Jin concluded that it seems to make little difference to producers in Rwanda whether they sell their coffee through cooperatives rather than to private merchants.

    Fedes van Rijn, Kees Burger, and Eefje den Belder have taken a common set of assumptions used to assess sustainable livelihood programmes and developed a multiple methodology approach to impact assessment which tries to encompass a range of needs, from ‘proving impact’ to ‘improving practices’, with reference to a case of coffee production in Peru. The methodological theme is carried forward by Syed Ahmed, who looks at how research was taken into practice within BRAC for two projects supporting the ‘ultra-poor’ and oral therapy. This experience is of particular relevance at a time when people talk a great deal about linking research to practice but are less able to show concrete examples.

    We also have another example of the importance of a holistic approach to capacity development from Cambodia, by Phum Thol et al., which stresses the importance of capacity development in encouraging organisational learning for development.

    The article by Luke Fletcher and Adele Webb covers several important global issues by focussing on debt-for-development exchanges, but going further into the politics of such exchanges. They focus on Australia and its relationships with near neighbours such as Indonesia in the context of earlier and sometimes doubtful export guarantee loans. This study also gives an insight into the movement in Australia to reduce or write off the government's loans under HIPC and other initiatives.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.705819

     

     

  • In this article, we challenge the notion that complex and resilient problems – such as global warming and poverty – will have to be resolved by governments or responsible corporations. Instead, we argue for the potency of social initiatives promoted by communities of engaged people. A variety of experiences from around the world, and especially from Brazilians with their “Why not?” temperament, suggest characteristics of the origin, development, and diffusion of these initiatives. We conclude that social initiatives, by addressing local problems of a global nature, using networks connected across communities, may be the greatest hope for this troubled world.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696585

     

  • 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

     

  • This article shares the approach and experiences of a joint immersion of two organisations in Tanzania. Immersions have a profound effect on individuals and strongly stimulate individual learning. Wishing to go beyond that, an immersion was designed with the aim of also contributing to organisational learning. With an increasingly complex and dynamic situation, organisational approaches and strategies need to closely fit within the local context. Immersions are good tools for development practitioners to appreciate this context and form an important part of the organisational learning demanded from development organisations.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696579

     

  • Debt-for-development exchanges are one technique through which to address the ongoing debt crisis in the less-developed world. This paper discusses how Australia's first debt-for-development exchange, with Indonesia, came into being, and explores future possibilities for Australian debt exchanges. It is an interesting example of how activists and advocates can successfully pursue innovative public policy solutions to development problems. More importantly, however, this paper explores the link between debt accumulation in less-developed countries and trade policies of industrialised countries like Australia.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696582

     

  • Home and field office staff disagreement often impedes international development NGOs (INGOs) from making their accountability systems more responsive to partner and community concerns. Drawing on a staff survey, and qualitative interviews across four country programmes, of a major INGO, three interlocking explanations for this disagreement are suggested: that staff perceive accountability practices differently because they place greater interpretive weight on practices most relevant to their own organisational roles; that divergent views reflect substantively different normative beliefs about accountability; and that differing assessments of accountability practices reflect a strategic misrepresentation of field country experiences as a rational response to power differentials.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696093

     

     

     

  • This paper compares the economic effects of two organisational forms of the coffee supply chain (cooperative and private processors) in Rwanda and assesses quantitatively which form has benefited producers the most. The paper uses panel data from 148 coffee-producing households. Results based on a combination of the instrumental variable method and first differencing show that there is no indication that farmers who sell to cooperative factories get more benefits than farmers selling to private processing plants.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.697127

     

  • Seed fairs were being promoted in Zimbabwe as an alternative seed distribution approach to sustain local input markets. Using data from ICRISAT monitoring surveys of 2005–06 and records maintained by non-governmental organisations, this article reveals that seed fairs were more cost effective in distributing local seed compared to direct distribution of imported seed. The article found that, in order to supply one household with a seed pack, it will cost an agency US$5.18 through seed fair compared to US$8.22 through direct seed distribution. Vouchers redeemable in retail shops are proposed as an incentive for local shops to stock and distribute agricultural inputs.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696580

     

  • Microfinance has been evolving as an indispensable tool of poverty eradication and rural improvement. At present, almost all the commercial banks have delved into the microfinance foray and offer various lucrative schemes designed for the rural poor, specifically, to carry out their own small economic activities. This paper attempts to study the extent to which the commercial banks are participating in the microfinance business. An empirical study has been carried out in the state of Punjab. The objective is to analyse the nature and extent of microfinance services provided by the banks in the rural areas of Punjab. The study also highlights the bankers' perceptions of microfinance.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696092

     

  • Development investigations focus on synergies of institutional cultures for policy and practice. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) currently enjoy a privileged position as harbingers of world culture unity. While there is contestation on INGOs as monolithic entities, few studies delve into the voices of actors within INGOs to provide for a more pluralistic perspective. This paper separates the actors from their institution by examining their different socio-cultural takes that drive them. This emphasises that as projects and visions come and go, institutional actors draw on their own philosophy that does not necessarily mirror their institution's stance. Here, the focus is on one of the most important current development initiatives – microfinance – revealing individual understandings of what is sustainability, the role of external actors, indicators of success, exit strategies, and ethical action. In spite of situating this in the microfinance area, what is revealed is that actors are motivated by their own constructed ideology, often alluding peripherally to the specifics of microfinance. This opens another avenue of enquiry as to why organisational ideologies and popular development visions such as microfinance take on such diversity of forms and outcomes. Contrary to the world culture unity model, such communication disjunctures can be useful in understanding diverse development outcomes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696583

     

  • The use of impact assessment can be characterised on a scale with ‘proving impact’ on one side and ‘improving practices’ on the other. Even though this is not an either/or scale, the two often do not combine automatically. In this article an adjusted Sustainable Livelihood Framework for impact assessment is developed that does justice to both. The use of this framework has implications in terms of a multi-method research approach, an extensive variety of data collection, and an in-depth data analysis. This is illustrated by applying the framework to a socio-economic impact study conducted for the DE Foundation coffee support project.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696586

     

  • A major challenge for the research community is to take knowledge or evidence generated from research to the practitioners for translation into tangible practice. This paper describes how an indigenous Bangladeshi NGO addressed this challenge and made use of research in developing two of its most successful projects – the oral therapy extension programme and a grants-based programme for improving the lot of the ultra-poor. A study of the projects reveals that early involvement in identifying research issues and designing studies, communication between researchers and practitioners, relevance and timeliness of research, and customised dissemination were the key factors underpinning success.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696584

     

  • Previous research has revealed that social policy design is relevant for addressing social problems, particularly for reducing poverty. However, evidence on poverty reduction exposes a sluggish trend towards achieving its main goals. This paper first reports on research examining to what extent social policy design has addressed social problems, poverty in particular. Second, this paper examines whether poverty lines have linked social policy design and social problems. Finally, this paper reveals that social policy design does not address poverty reduction and that poverty lines have not linked policy design and poverty reduction.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.696091

     

  • In our final issue of the year, at least two of the articles raise issues beyond the immediate subject they deal with. Both touch on issues around the nature of development itself, and the roles of individuals and institutions engaged in development. The first, by Carolijn Terwindt and Chris van der Borgh, is a challenging article on the shrinking space for NGOs, based on case material from Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, and the Philippines. They explore a framework which takes into account local political characteristics, the mix of pressures on NGOs, as well as the style and objectives of the NGOs themselves.
     

    We hope that some of these issues around shrinking space will be followed up in a special issue of Development in Practice being planned for 2013. Whilst some critics of NGOs have argued that advocacy and influencing have not produced the results promised in terms of real changes for poor people, it has to be noted that clearly in many countries local governments still see NGOs and civil society organisations more widely as a threat to their monopoly of power. Attempts to close the space for civil society by the state would indicate that they are indeed having a degree of success in sometimes difficult circumstances.

    The second article, by Hannah Green, explores a spectrum from philanthropy to participation through the lens of development studies students and their motivation for engaging in development. Her study is timely, given the large numbers still enrolling on development studies courses. Whether the personal motivation of the students will be rewarded through the current architecture of international development agencies is a point left for further study! The orthodoxies of the main development agencies have in many ways slipped back from the participation model that Green posits as one end of the spectrum, and the one to which most students adhere.

    We now witness a renewed focus by many aid agencies on very top-down, universalistic, service delivery approaches to development. We realise that politicians are less enamoured by talk of long-term development, transformational change, and capacity development sustainability. Instead we have the focus on short-term, concrete results. Given the attitudes of a broad range of development workers who accept the need for longer term engagement, and dealing with the causes and not just the symptoms of poverty, it would appear that there is an increasing disjuncture between those who delivery development assistance and those who pay for it.

    The perennial need to balance the empirical and pragmatic against the broader overview of policies, approaches, and motivations in development needs to be regularly reframed. With changes in many developing countries it seems that we need to question some of the approaches to development currently being accepted as standard. This is not always easy given the increasing dependence of both states and NGOs alike on a small number of official donors. There is a tendency to crowd out different views and approaches in favour of an increasingly homogenous set of approaches; approaches which often seem to owe more to a political shift in donor countries than to any real shift in evidence bases. Therefore Development in Practice will continue to look for well thought-out and evidenced articles which challenge all of our assumptions, from whichever position we take them.

    Peter Westoby and Rupert van Blerk review the training of community development workers in South Africa by a large and growing government initiative. They suggest improvements in the training, and compare existing practice in South Africa to other experiences and to 50 years' thinking and practice in this crucial area. The authors reinforce earlier conclusions that community development is only as good as the training of the staff involved.

    Several papers look at the impact of different development interventions. Max Saunders and David Bromwich share an evaluation of a programme supporting modern cooperatives in Gansu, China, noting the positive social and economic outcomes for members and how they have resolved some of the problems with previous cooperative models in China. Franklin Obeng-Odoom questions the dominant view of access to water, showing that other issues such as affordability, quality, reliability, and distribution have now emerged. Based on experiences in Ghana, Obeng-Odoom aims to counter-balance the simplistic use of access as the only indicator of success in water programmes. William Mala et al. review the commercialisation of non-wood forest products in Cameroon, concluding that by selling as groups communities can increase their income by an average of 40 per cent compared to individual sellers. The study is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about value chains and whether individual or group approaches are the most effective.

    Finally, as we come to the end of 2012, on behalf of the whole editorial team I would like to thank both all the authors and referees who we have worked with over the year, and our very many readers. Special thanks are also due to our contributing editors, our wider editorial advisory group, and our colleagues at Taylor and Francis, for their support throughout the year.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cdip20/current

  • NGOs face many types of pressures that limit and influence their activities. While in many studies these pressures and the causes and agendas behind them have been the focus of analysis, this paper provides a framework that can give insight into the ways in which the pressures play out in diverse contexts and affect different NGOs in distinct ways. It develops an analytical model that combines the local political context, the specific mix of policies and actions that restrict NGOs, and the characteristics and functions of NGOs themselves.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714745

     

  • This article documents a research project that examined the training provided within the South African National Community Development Worker Programme (CDWP), consisting of over 4,000 community development workers (CDWs). Many of the hopes of good community development work are built upon effective education and training of the workers/practitioners. To fail in educating and training CDWs is to ensure failure of programmes. The article reports on key findings from a set of interviews with CDWs within the Free State and Western Cape Provinces and then discusses key ways forward such as developing practice frameworks, capacity building, and creating a learning organisation.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714354

     

  • 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

     

  • Recently there has been a shift in development discourse from ideas of paternalism to those of participation. Set within the framework of a postmodern critique of development, this paper questions the assumption that the ideas of development still exist in the same discursive space. Using University of East Anglia (UEA) development studies postgraduate students as a case study, it considers why students want to work in development and the manner in which individual students think of and conceptualise the enterprise. It explores the role of postgraduate study in developing a conscientisation needed for truly transformative development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714351

     

  • This paper documents collective actions undertaken by forest-based associations to access better prices for their non-wood forest products via group sales. Group sales can increase the income of group sellers by up to 40 per cent compared to individual sellers. The institutionalisation of group sales reinforces social relations and cohesion as well as mutual trust. Group sales were found to be a key preliminary step in the development and growth of small and medium scale enterprises. The paper concludes that successful group sales require a strong commitment among members of forest-based associations. Key factors influencing collective actions are discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714353

     

  • This paper looks beyond the dominant view of access to water – defined as coverage. It shows that, while the spread of improved water sources has widened, problems of affordability, quality, distribution, and reliability (“deep access”) are pervasive. In turn, it argues that declarations about water in international development discourse such as “access to water has increased” can be misleading. Development in practice must look beyond “wide” to “deep” meanings of access to water.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714744

     

  • As we enter 2013 many international development agencies will be thinking about their budgets, policies and projections for the period in two years' time when the MDG deadline is reached. Although some argue that we should not be thinking too much about post-2015 as there is still much to do in terms of meeting the existing goals, bureaucracies move slowly and many decisions will be made over the coming year (and indeed may already have been made at the more senior levels). Whatever the future of international financial assistance, many of the issues and challenges of development in practice will remain with us. Development has too often been confused and conflated with international financial assistance. The removal of foreign funding will lead to considerable challenges to some countries, and some sectors within those countries, not least those NGOs who have grown up assuming foreign funding will last for ever.

    Regardless of the decisions about to be made, we do know that both technical and socio-political challenges to the development of people will remain. We expect, therefore, that Development in Practice will continue to play a role in providing space for the sharing of ideas, experiences, and opinions about development across all levels. Indeed, the withdrawal or reduction in foreign aid will add greater pressure on governments and civil society to rethink the best ways to tackle issues as wide as chronic poverty and as specific as delivery mechanisms to isolated social groups. One clear challenge will be to encourage greater volunteering and community participation as external resources shrink. Good development has always stressed these elements, but the dominance of paid professionals in NGOs has weakened our commitment to participation by communities. At the same time, recipient developing governments have seemed to be more accountable to their donors than to their citizens.

    Interestingly, Anna Wetterberg and Gary Bland explore a relatively new move in Guatemala, a shift from philanthropy to corporate social responsibility, using the case study of Alianza and an empirical review. This acknowledges the difficulty of issues around CSR in this region, where many private firms had a history of being linked to previous authoritarian regimes, but where there is now a major change in approach towards supporting long-neglected public goods such as health and education. They note that, in part because of exposure to thinking in international firms, local companies are now more engaged than previously in supporting local issues and needs.

    In “The discourse of ‘development’ and why the concept should be abandoned”, Aram Ziai outlines why we should drop the use of the concept of development as a catch-all phrase to refer to a range of often unrelated activities, in part because of “certain Eurocentric, depoliticising and authoritarian implications of the concept of 'development'.”

    An article on a community development project in Kenya by Juliet Kariuki and Jemimah Njuki discusses a progression from PRA to participatory impact assessment and using participatory impact diagrams as a way of giving new life to the qualitative aspect of impact assessment – in contrast to the push by many donors towards purely quantative data. The study also shows the advantages of the method for improved gender desegregated information.

    Francois Lenfant and Rens Rutten also describe an attempt by Dutch development agency Cordaid to experiment with participatory impact assessment using quasi-experimental designs, including control groups. This article shows how an attempt to use a certain type of evaluation methodology, being pushed by many donors, sadly had limited real value to the organisations involved, except perhaps as an important learning exercise for those interested in the utility of some of these approaches to NGOs. A further study of evaluation from the Netherlands comes from Piet de Lange, who summarises a series of studies of capacity development of both public sector and NGO programmes.

    A critical review of community ‘participation’ can be found in “‘Spoiling the Situation’: Reflections on the development and research field” by Tanya Jakimow. Jakimow explores the concept of the ‘field’ as a place where development happens with local people; looking at the way villagers are treated by NGOs and local elites in the context of rural India.

    Zakir Husain, Diganta Mukerjee, and Mousumi Dutta, also working in India, address the common issue of the degree to which women in self-help groups manage to control any income they produce, and seek to explore whether this is affected by the political party in control of the areas in which the women live.

    Julian Walker, looking at the Kyrgyz Swiss Swedish Health Programme, explores the gender-sensitive concept of time poverty and how to assess it. He concludes that we need a more sophisticated approach than merely assessing time use quantitatively; a more nuanced assessment should also assess the quality of time use and control over time.

    Dora Curry et al. provide an account of community-based surveillance of polio in Ethiopia and how volunteers at community level have been successful in identifying local cases as one means towards treatment, as well as isolating the spreads of the virus.

    Ayesha Jamal and Farasat A. Siddiqui offer an empirical study of differing rates of fertility based on the occupation and income of husbands, which contributes to our understanding of how fertility rates are linked to employment, education, and income. Whilst this India-based example is context specific, it demonstrates an approach to getting beneath the broader numbers and assumptions often made about issues of fertility.

    The first of our practical notes for this issue, by Alan Fowler, describes the World Vision-sponsored GATE approach to improved governance for NGOs, encompassing a common sense method to improve transparency, evaluation, and assessments of results and impact.

    Finally, a second practical note from Gabrielle Appleford looks at the use of ‘strengths- based approaches’ in family planning programmes. Appleford notes the advantages of techniques such as appreciate enquiry and asset-based community development which stress the positive- over the negative-based assessments of needs and deficits.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.756460

     

     

  • Latin American firms are moving from narrow philanthropy to broader engagement with development priorities. We examine this shift with data from Alianzas, a development programme promoting private contributions to health and education in Guatemala. We use Solomon's (2010) dimensions of proliferation, professionalisation, and partnering to compare firms' pre-Alianzas efforts with programme activities. Both firms with established and new philanthropic programmes engaged with Alianzas (proliferation). Most participants were willing to steer efforts towards public priorities (professionalisation) and collaborate with government (partnering). Given chronic underfunding of health and education priorities in Guatemala, we suggest that private contributions to public programmes be institutionalised.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.713324

     

  • The development field as a site for research and practice has largely escaped critical scrutiny in development studies. Accounts of the conceptualisation of the field have not been complemented with an examination of the practices that maintain the field as a site conducive to development. This paper draws on experiences working with small, local NGOs in India to examine how the field is maintained, and the underlying logic that underpins the relationship between developers and “developees”. In problematising the field, I draw attention to overlooked ethical and political implications of participatory development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.753411

     

  • Support for capacity development accounts for about 25 per cent of all international donor assistance. Yet there have been few evaluations to assess the effectiveness of this support. This paper presents the findings and lessons of an evaluation on Dutch support for capacity development that has tried to avoid some of the shortcomings of earlier evaluations. Dutch capacity development support has been effective in a number of cases. However, for sustainable capacity development it is crucial that donors reconsider their policies and practices in such a way that they facilitate endogenous capacity development, local resourcefulness, and downward accountability.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.752435

  • In 2007, Cordaid started a pilot on participatory impact assessment, intended to enhance accountability and to improve learning. The methodology was based on quasi-experimental design, complemented with qualitative research. This case study illustrates the challenges INGOs and their partners face in their attempt to find a rigorous yet, relevant, useful, and socially acceptable methodology for evaluation and impact assessment purposes. While most local NGOs participating in this pilot consider (parts of) this methodology useful for their learning, this approach proves unsuitable, costly, and inappropriate for an INGO such as Cordaid since it does not respond to its own accountability and learning needs.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.753412

  • Time poverty methodologies are a response to the failure of income-based measures of poverty to reflect gendered aspects of well-being. However, national time use surveys normally fail to examine issues around women and men's qualitative evaluation of their time uses, or the extent of their control over their own time. The result could be distorted policy responses which lose sight of the original intentions of time poverty as a tool to reveal gendered elements of well-being. This paper draws on the findings of a qualitative survey to asses a rural health promotion programme in Kyrgyzstan to demonstrate this point.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.751357

  • This article discusses the CORE Group Polio Project Ethiopia's introduction of community-based surveillance (CBS) of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) to support polio eradication. A USAID-funded collaboration among Ethiopian and US-based NGOs, the CGPP supports volunteers in education about AFP and encouraging case reporting. Volunteers also conduct active case searches, visiting community leaders likely to have contact with paralysis cases. The project's methods strengthen communities' awareness of AFP and their connection to the health system. Data indicate a near doubling of AFP reporting in project areas since the implementation of CBS, according to MOH-E (Ministry of Health, Ethiopia)/WHO statistics.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.753410

  • The paper attempts to find out fertility differential by husbands' occupational status and income level in Dhanbad district, Jharkhand (India). The mean number of children ever born (MCEB) is used to measure fertility, and monthly income as the income variable. Older and younger cohorts of women were examined separately for assessing fertility differential. MCEB was found to be high for women with husbands employed as labourers with a low monthly income. This was true for both the cohorts, but fertility levels were much higher among the older cohort. Low MCEB was found with increasing income of husbands and for those in private jobs.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.714352

  • Participatory approaches for impact assessment are increasingly becoming popular with development organisations for engaging multiple stakeholders. We present our use of participatory impact diagrams as an evaluation tool within a mixed methods impact assessment of several drought-reduction interventions in Kenya. Results show that because men and women have different roles, their experiences of interventions vary. We discuss how this methodology encouraged communities to describe various intervention outcomes including unintended impacts, often overlooked by conventional impact assessment approaches. Methodological challenges included the integration of quantitative data; opportunities for its application within the wider discipline of monitoring and evaluation are considered.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.753031

  • Who controls the income earned by members of women's self-help groups (SHG) from group activities – the women or their husbands? The answer indicates one dimension of the level of economic empowerment attained by SHG members. This paper examines whether identity of the person controlling the income earned depends upon the political party ruling the municipality where the SHG is situated. Two parties are considered – the Left Front, a coalition comprising of Leftist parties, and the Indian National Congress. This paper is based on a field study of 240 SHG members in six municipalities in West Bengal, India.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.750644

  • This paper discusses the discourse of “development” and its effects. It argues that there are good reasons for giving up the concept of development and replacing it with various other concepts. Practices that aim at improving the human condition need not be identified with the term “development”. Numerous practices which have not improved the human condition have been carried out in the name of “development”. These should not be seen as an abuse of a positive concept, but as linked to certain Eurocentric, depoliticising, and authoritarian implications of the concept of “development”.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.752792

  • Non-governmental organisations face increasing demands to be accountable and transparent. Both need sound and timely evidence. Ensuring that these demands are satisfied is a key responsibility of governance, but fulfilling this requirement is a frequent weakness. A comprehensive approach to self-analysis – known as GATE – can make governing bodies more effective by better leadership of organisational responses to such demands. GATE works by: (1) making common sense connections to visualise the links between internal operations and generation of results, reputation, and resources, which makes complexity understandable and manageable; and (2) using a question-based ‘alignment’ resource to guide discussion and decision-making.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.750645

  • This practical note explores the contribution that strengths-based approaches (SBA) can make to project design. The note outlines how SBA was understood and applied in the design of a family planning project by Marie Stopes in Kenya under the Australian Africa Community Engagement Scheme (AACES). Fieldwork findings demonstrate how SBA assists in bringing to the fore local initiatives and assets that can be built on by external resources. It further suggests that SBA can create a strong foundation for local partnership, honest appraisal, and learning.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2012.718741

  • This issue of Development in Practice brings together a number of articles which we feel reach to the most basic level of development practice, with contributions which focus on experiments, research, and experiences at the grassroots. Many development researchers now seem to be increasingly concerned with high level, often abstract, policy by government. However, it is important to remember that regardless of policies, in theory in place (often they are no more than paper exercises divorced from reality), it is through the implementation of programmes we see the real learning, impact, and mistakes that are made. Elegant policies are no excuse for inactivity and failure to implement, nor are they a replacement for programmes that work (or learning from those which do no).

    There is an increasing realisation that micro programmes and models are also increasingly relevant to the new poor in developed countries suffering the effects of recession, where ideas, policies, and practice have for many years not been tested against what actually works. Cheap credit and state welfare programmes removed the necessity for many to engage in traditions such as community credit unions, local cooperatives, and shared resource programmes – all of which have been underutilised in recent years in developed countries. As we can see from some of the articles in this issue, there may be many aspects that recession-hit developed countries can learn from. Several of our contributors have also taken a valuable longer term view of the issues and programmes they have studied, including community based health workers, water programmes in Manila, the dairy industry in Ethiopia, and a community in Niger. All benefit from being able to assess the longer term evolution of these programmes.

    Gabrielle Appleford reviews 30 years' experience with community health workers related to primary health care programmes, from the 1970s and the Alma Ata declaration, through to current experience with HIV/AIDS support. Appleford specifically focuses on the motivation of community health workers, including financial incentives. Mariana Gerstenblüth and Maximo Rossi discuss the links between “happiness” and health and other social factors in Chile and Uruguay, showing the importance to people of good health to their perceived well-being/happiness. Alexandra Towns and Daniel Potter share the importance placed on indigenous plants and fish as part of the diet of the Songhai people in Niger. They argue that by ignoring the local consumption of indigenous, often wild, products, much agricultural development can be misplaced and underestimate and fail to understand this aspect of local diet and nutrition.

    In their study of urban Ghana, Arku Arku, Emmanuel Angmore, and John-Engelbert Seddoh note the failure to live up to MDGs related to basic sanitation. Their account of the poor sanitation raises the immense challenges of poor urban settings and unmet needs crucial to reducing the threat of many diseases, as well as time and dignity lost through inadequate services. Meanwhile Petr Matous reviews the rise and fall of community based water supplies in Manila between 2002 and 2012. He outlines the original success of community based supply systems allied to a privatisation programme, and then explores why this apparently successful programme was reversed in favour of a subsidised system of individual household connections.

    Moti Jaleta et al. describe using a “hub” approach to coordinate inputs and services for the growing dairy industry in Ethiopia. The authors argue that a slower, more “organic” development of these services in line with growth in both supply and demand is one of the causes of the success of the dairy programme. In his viewpoint, Arnab Roy Chaudhury looks at the decommissioning of dams in India – Noting the problem of taking out of service older dams which, although often posing a threat to life, have an emblematic position in the country as symbols of progress, beyond their real value. Also in India, Meera Tiwari explores self-help savings groups for very poor women in Bihar. In addition to describing the functioning of these groups she speculates on the importance of savings for the agency, self-confidence, and security of these women – arguing that a reintroduction of a savings culture in developed countries in recession may be something worth encouraging to strengthen such positive traits in the new poor.

    A further development on ideas of agency and self-confidence in development is the paper by Uchendu Chiqbu on the concept of “place” in an area of Nigeria. Chigbu notes that the loss of culture and a sense of place or belonging, and the devaluing of the past and a rapidly disappearing culture, undermines local development. Lynn McIntyre and Jenny Munro's study of ultrapoor women in Bangladesh illustrates how few of the women receive assistance from the existing programmes of the Bangladesh government or from NGOs. These women are excluded from most assistance and feel that there is little they can do about it. The study also shows that although these ultra-poor women often do receive support from family and the community, this is for the most part inadequate.

    The article by Andrew Wainer argues that despite massive illegal immigration from Mexico to the USA, and considerable spending on border security, the USA has never prioritised programmes to deal with the root cause of immigration, namely rural poverty. The author shows that there are some very positive examples of what could be done to reduce rural poverty, but that until the USA prioritises dealing with the causes of poverty rather than the symptoms such programmes remain the exception.

    Finally our practical note continues the debate from the Netherlands around the evaluation of international assistance channelled through Dutch NGOs (see the articles by de Lange, and Lenfant, and Rutten in Development in Practice 23[1]). In this contribution Peter Huisman and Lieke Ruijmschoot discuss the use of the 5Cs model for the M&E of capacity building: and model originally designed by ECDPM and offered by the Dutch Foreign Ministry as the tool to assess capacity building for their framework funds to Dutch NGOs. The authors conclude that, although being obliged to accept the system as a condition of funding, in fact it has had a positive impact on the work of their alliance.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772564

     

     

  • This paper documents the exclusion from formal assistance of 43 Bangladeshi ultra-poor female heads of household, which forces women to rely on overstretched forms of informal assistance that are not culturally prescribed and are often experienced as shameful. Experiences of helplessness reinforced by dominant views of the ultra-poor as going nowhere discourage women from seeking out formal assistance. In order to overcome the effects of being deemed “beyond reach”, scholars and providers of aid must attend to persistent forms of neglect and exclusion in formal aid programmes, including the false assumption that the ultra-poor easily access prescribed informal social supports.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772118

     

  • The indigenous plants and fish of Niger are incorporated into the Songhai people's daily life but are largely underemphasised in development programmes. In this paper we describe the culturally appropriate foods of Tallé, Niger. Based on information obtained from 42 participants using interviews and focus groups, we identified 11 commonly consumed fish species, 22 plant species, and nine factors that made them culturally appropriate: taste, perceived health effects, economic value, use as snacks or staple, storability, seasonal availability, use in celebrations, abundance, and cultural identity. We conclude with a discussion of how local knowledge can be incorporated into development programmes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.771985

     

  • Improving access to water and sanitation facilities has been a priority on the international development agenda. Halving the number of those who do not have access to sanitation facilities is an MDG target. This study assessed the toilet conditions in an urban slum in Ghana. Many felt that the sanitary conditions were deplorable; they were unsatisfied with having to walk over half a kilometre before using a toilet. Government efforts to improve hygiene and address sanitation problems need to take into account financial, religious, and other factors that promote the supply and maintenance of appropriate toilet facilities and services in urban communities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772121

     

  • The Community Health Worker (CHW) literature is expansive, covering more than 30 years of interest in the concept. Despite this, understanding of CHW motivation and the effectiveness of monetary incentives is limited. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as an explanatory framework, the article outlines some of the roles and functions that CHWs have filled within health and community systems, CHW motivation, and how different factors either enhance or detract from this.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772117

     

  • Based on data from the Latinobarómetro, this study analyses data on happiness to establish the probability that an individual is happy. The focus is put on self-reported health status as a key aspect in increasing levels of happiness. The probability of being happy is econometrically estimated by probit models for each country. Results show that the main relationship is between happiness and health status. Whether this is a causal effect or only a correlation, is not clear. This issue is explored by using propensity score matching methods. These show that good health status increases the probability of being satisfied with life by between 13 and 17 percentage points. In line with the literature, we find that the relationship between age and happiness is U-shaped, with happiness at its lowest point at the age of 48.2.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772024

     

  • This article tracks the rise and fall of a community-based water supply programme in Manila, providing important insights into the issues of community participatory approaches to service provision, as well as the privatisation of basic services and public goods. The Manila Water Corporation, a private, for-profit company, developed an innovative programme to provide water to informal settlements through bulk connections, deploying the discourse of public participation to effectively transfer responsibility for distribution and collection of payments to local water users' organisations. The programme achieved considerable success, and also empowered local organisations or (more often) individuals, who used some of their increased legitimacy, influence, and income to mobilise for squatters' rights, challenging landlords and local governments. After an initial period, the company changed its policy and shifted instead to a programme that provides individual connections to informal settlements' households, supported by subsidies from the government and international aid agencies. This article chronicles and analyses the origins, growth, controversies, and eventual decline of community-based water supply in Manila's informal settlements. The article concludes with suggestions on how community-based organisations can provide water supply services effectively and equitably, discussing as well the capacity building and social transformation benefits of such an approach.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772116

     

  • This article analyses one of the causes of migration in rural Mexico through the lens of US foreign assistance policy. US aid to Mexico – the largest migrant-sending country to the USA by far – does not sufficiently take into account the conditions of rural under-development and joblessness that encourage unauthorised migration to the USA. Instead US foreign assistance has been dominated by aid to Mexico's security agencies. This article analyses how the link between rural underdevelopment and migration-pressures has not been successfully addressed by either the Mexican or US governments. The article also analyses an innovative development project that explicitly seeks to support campesinos with the goal of reducing unauthorised migration pressures in a traditional migrant-sending rural region of Mexico.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772025

     

  • Efficient input supply and service delivery may call for a hub approach where all the necessary inputs and services are supplied in a coordinated manner, either by a single supplier or by several and separate entities in a given geographical location accessible to beneficiaries. Based on experience from Ada'a milk shed in central Ethiopia, this paper assesses the evolution of input supply and service provision in the dairy sub-sector, focusing on coordination and the degree of competition among different actors at different levels in the value chain over time. Data were collected from key value chain actors engaged in provision of input supply and output marketing services in Ada'a milk shed. The major lesson is that the development of coordinated input supply and service delivery by different business entities or under a single business entity may not emerge at once, but through a gradual evolution. This depends on the level of demand for the inputs and services as determined by the degree of demand for milk and milk products, and the economies of scale input suppliers and service providers could attain from the expansion of demands for these inputs and services. Moreover, at the early stage of a hub development, collective actions and integration of services and marketing within a business organisation could be the main strategy to attain efficiency. But, once the demand for inputs and services has grown, competition among different entities will lead to more efficient input supply and service delivery. In general, where there is an increasing demand for inputs and services, there is a faster development of input supply and service provision by private actors and collective actions in a more competitive way. Role of the public sector could change gradually from provision of inputs and services to coordination, capacity building, quality control, and regulation.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772119

     

  • This article argues that the absence of a sense of place in rural Nigeria impedes development. It uses the case of Uturu to show that understanding the relationships people share with natural features and phenomena around them is important in their development. It proposes a framework constituted of rural mind, rural life, and rural character; and argues that strengthening one or the other pillar of this framework will likely lead to strengthening sense of place. Using in-depth interviews and historically informed observation, the authors show that a weak sense of place leads to poor development, and provide suggestions for improvement.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772120

     

  • The global financial crisis is envisaged to have impacted some Southern countries, including India, less severely than most countries in the North. India's expected economic growth of over nine per cent was brought down to just over five per cent. In the aftermath of the crisis, a positive growth figure itself sent optimistic signals. But in a country where nearly 80 per cent of the population – mostly in rural areas – lives on under US$2 a day with a high level of social and economic vulnerability, the effects of the crisis threaten to push many into deprivation. Yet, scattered evidence suggests the emergence of savings-led self-help groups for women amongst the poorest and socially excluded communities to overcome financial vulnerabilities. Grounded in participatory methods, the focal point this is the individual rural woman driving the well-being and the poverty agenda. The paper considers if there are lessons that can be drawn from this micro-level shift for the larger global crisis.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772115

     

  • With the ruefully anticipated breakdown of the Mullaperiyar dam in Kerala as the central issue, this article debates the decommissioning of large dams in India. Drawing on other examples of dam breakdown and decommissioning cases from India and the USA, the author argues that dams that have failed to deliver on their promises or are in an unsafe condition should be selectively decommissioned.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772563

     

  • The development sector is rife with complaints about strict accountability requirements imposed by donors. However, this paper argues that the imposition of a new accountability framework can sometimes be converted into a useful tool. This note describes how the IMPACT alliance used the Five Capabilities (5C) model prescribed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It describes the major findings from a baseline assessment, and reflections on that process. The authors argue that the operationalisation of the 5C model provides useful opportunities for discussing capacity development priorities with partners.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.772122

     

  • However important many of the interventions, community based actions, and refinements to the economic and social programmes of civil society and the state are to those people involved in and benefiting from them, we have to remind ourselves that there are underlying trends in many countries which are sadly working in negative ways. An article in the Economist (26 January 2013, p. 53) looked at recently published gini coefficient figures for China, the first such figures issued for 12 years, apparently. It places Chinese inequality levels at just below the market leaders of South Africa, Brazil, and Nigeria (in that order) and well above those of the USA, UK, and India. It is of concern that the growth rates of the BRICs have led to an increase in inequality. Of course we should note that Brazil, for many years one of the most unequal societies, is actually moving in the other direction due to the series of redistributive measures introduced by the last two governments. Is there something inevitable about economic growth which leads to increased inequality, or is it the nature of unfettered capitalism, as some argue, which leads to excessive accumulation in a few hands? I am told by some South Africans that the post-apartheid governments made agreements with the international financial world to water down the more socialist elements of the new government's policies in return for international recognition and support.

    Whether this is the case, it has to be a sad sign that post-apartheid South Africa, or China, a country formed as a socialist state, should demonstrate worse rates of inequality than more conservative autocratic countries. The abuse of power of their governments, unregulated corruption, and the ability to make excess profits, undermines many of the great things coming from civil society, and those public servants who still believe in the concept of service to their citizens. Therefore we need to ensure that the great work of development in the many spheres we witness through Development in Practice is accompanied by macro political action to ensure that development gains are spread across all citizens, not just a small minority.

    In this issue, Thomas Carroll and Jim Kinsella explore the potential for increased production and income from beekeeping in Kenya. They conclude that there are significant possibilities for increases using not only modern hives but also traditional forms of beekeeping with modest improvements in techniques, and contributing to household livelihoods, especially in areas of otherwise declining agricultural income and land access. Mary Njenga et al. look at the rapid growth of charcoal production and consumption in Kenya and the danger this is posing to biodiversity and tree cover, set against the importance of production for a large number of people and lack of competitive alternatives for the growing urban population. Precillia Tata and Cleto Ndikumagenge are also concerned with environmental degradation, highlighting incursions into wildlife reserves due to the excessive and growing dependence on natural resources (rather than farming) in the post-conflict and volcano-affected areas around Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their findings are even more relevant in light of more recent violence in this area driving more people towards urban centres and off their isolated farms. The final contribution around livelihoods is from Alexander Legwegoh and Alice Hovorka, who adapt the methodology for assessing food and nutritional security by combining orthodox methods with a political ecology approach which they feel allows an improved understanding of why households have differential access to certain foods.

    Mohammmed Sulemana, Ibrahim Ngah, and Mohammad Majid review school enrolment in northern Ghana and school feeding programmes in the context of the debate over the links between nutrition and education. They note that implementation problems undermined the programme's overall objectives. The study by Bispasha Baruah of adult literacy in the Caribbean, where illiteracy is closely linked to unemployment, especially for men, shows the reluctance of men to attend literacy classes with women and in their own community. Finding ways around this is important where male illiteracy is far greater than females’, but where far more women attended the illiteracy classes than did men.
     

    Subrata Dutta explores the social security provisions for rural widows in Rajasthan, India, noting the large number of widows (although decreasing as a proportion of all women) and the likelihood that they will have to work in more arduous jobs, are in greater poverty, and die younger than the average woman. Tamara Stenn is positive about the impact of fair trade programmes on indigenous women in Bolivia, who have been able to carry their traditional skills from a rural to an urban setting. The author argues that fair trade is more sustainable in the longer term than microcredit because it focuses on improved market access.

    In an honest account, Pia Hollenbach outlines how private donors trying to help in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and who wished to avoid the bureaucratisation of traditional humanitarian agencies, found themselves quickly dragged into the same issues and problems as those agencies.

    Finally, our practical note by Jeffery Bentley and Eric Boa describes a ‘snowman’ outline tool for the production of short notes on various agricultural techniques, which aims to ensure the best use of local knowledge and extensionists so that they are relevant to local understanding and needs.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781132

     

  • This paper explores the paradox of gift giving in privately initiated forms of post-disaster aid. The paradox emerges from the gap that arises between ideals of the altruistic gift, and its practices in the actual implementation in a complex and multi-local humanitarian aid arena. An ethnographic study of a privately initiated post-tsunami housing project illustrates the paradox. While initiators presented the project as opposite to the mundane world of development aid, they increasingly came under pressure to deliver and perform visible success, such that their practices resembled this mundane world of humanitarian aid and its logics of patronage, favouritism, and politics.
     

    The full article is available here:

    www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781574

  • This article examines the potential of beekeeping, as an appropriate livelihood strategy for smallholder farm households using the sustainable livelihoods framework. A study undertaken over a six-year period (2004–9) with over 300 small-scale farmers in Kenya's Rift Valley Province found that despite excellent revenue earning potential, honey yields and returns remain comparatively low. Compared to maize, the staple crop of most Kenyan farmers, it was found that a typical ten-hive enterprise generated earnings equivalent to 0.86ha of maize. The article emphasises the need to build human capital for beekeeping rather than just promoting modern beehives.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781123

     

  • The search for appropriate tools to assess food and nutrition insecurity is a major preoccupation for development practitioners. This paper explores the potential of complementing a mainstream measure of food security, the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), with a political ecology approach, using a case study from Gaborone, Botswana. HDDS exposes differential food access, illustrated by varying household dietary diversity scores and commonly accessed food groups, while a political ecology approach helps explains how and why households lack access to certain food groups. HDDS enriched with political ecology analysis will provide more useful conclusions to practitioners and policymakers.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781128

     

  • In sub-Saharan Africa, 72 per cent of urban and 98 per cent of rural households use fuelwood for energy. In Kenya use of charcoal in urban areas has risen by 64 per cent in two decades. Despite the charcoal industry providing employment to 500,000 people and generating over US$427 million that benefits grassroots communities, it has been kept out of the formal economies of this country. This review presents the status of the charcoal industry in Kenya, highlighting its contribution to livelihoods, production, utilisation, and implications for the environment; policy issues; and stakeholders' involvement. The review also proposes strategies to improve the sustainability of this sector.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.780529

  • High dependency on natural resources in post-conflict Goma caused severe damages to Virunga National Park (VNP) and Kivu Lake. Understanding the impacts of conflict on livelihoods and conservation activities is paramount in Goma. The main reasons for resource degradation here are heightened insecurity, theft, and uncertainty, which limit the use of far off land for agriculture. Consequently, most people depended on forest products and fish from protected areas, thereby causing higher risks of depletion of fish and park resources. High population density, few livelihoods alternatives, unpredictability, and weak state apparatus remain serious issues to be considered in resource conservation.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781126

  • This paper examines whether Fair Trade improved the quality of life for Fair Trade women artisans and their communities in Bolivia's high Andes. Grounded in the work of Amartya Sen and ethnographic study, Fair Trade is explored as a form of justice rooted in women's individual freedoms and capabilities. The intellectual merit of this paper is to examine how Fair Trade bridges women's participation in globalisation and development. The broader scope is to create a dialogue around the ethnic feminist experience and private enterprise to expand the understanding of Fair Trade as economic development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781130

  • Widows are one of the socially excluded groups in India. This study primarily focuses on the needs of widows in Rajasthan for social security, and also seeks to examine the outreach of existing social security schemes to them. The study found that a considerable proportion of widows are engaged in physically-demanding casual work. Involvement in casual employment reveals the vulnerability of widows since such employment is often considered the last resort for earning a living. Social security in various forms can play a crucial role in their lives.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781125

  • There is a general problem of enrolment to basic education in northern Ghana. Available statistics indicate that from 2000–05 only about 42 per cent of qualified applicants of school-going age in the Northern Region were enrolled in basic schools. This paper assesses the implementation of the programme in the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly. The findings showed that, whilst the programme has increased primary school enrolment, the major impediment to the implementation of the programme is cash flow constraints.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781127

  • This paper shares the findings of an assessment carried out in 2007 of a national adult literacy programme introduced in 2005 in the Eastern Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The paper discusses some social and spatial factors that may impede or facilitate men's and women's ability and desire to participate in adult literacy programmes. Surveys administered to programme participants, as well as interviews conducted with participants and programme staff, comprised the primary means of data collection.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781124

  • Writing for smallholders in developing countries is an art that demands clear prose, a sound idea, and a logical outline. Although extension agents are often unaccustomed to writing, and usually need a sympathetic editor, extensionists know the target audience better than agricultural researchers or professional communicators. A one-page, 300-word fact sheet is a suitable format, allowing extensionists to write their insights for farmers. The fact sheet must be validated by farmers, who read it and review it for prose and concepts.

    The “snowman” is a logical outline in three-parts: head (problem), middle (agro-ecological background), and main part (the solution). The middle section is the hardest for potential fact sheet authors to grasp, but it is also the most important. Anticipating the information that will convince the reader to try the recommendation requires a good knowledge of the audience. The farmers are not a passive audience. Smallholders can be engaged in logical, creative ways, even in writing.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.781129

  • Several of our articles this issue continue the ongoing debate around the roles and efficacy of participation in development. Sadly participation seems too often to be something which is increasingly side-stepped in the push for immediate results and the achievement of centrally agreed targets. We seem to be in danger of forgetting the lessons of the past; that centrally imposed, top-down objectives tend to flounder against the perceptions and priorities of people who may see issues, challenges and priorities very differently from planners and professional programme designers. At a time when many governments are at least rhetorically praising community-based resourcing and decentralisation, issues around the practice and value of participatory approaches are again of relevance.

    John Schischka reviews attempts to provide the stakeholders involved in Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI) with a participatory appraisal of the programmes they have developed. The study utilises a participatory approach to gathering the perspectives of programme participants to point to both the gains and future improvements which could be made to it.

    Víctor Marí also takes a view on the role of participation in enhancing communications within a development context. The role of communications is reviewed within an overview of the overall theoretical stages through which development thinking has gone since the early 1950s. The paper concludes with remarks on the use of community based communications as opposed to mainstream media.

    Myriam Gervais and Lysanne Rivard describe experiments using an adapted version of ‘photovoice’, where using simple camera techniques, illiterate women in Rwanda were able to articulate issues related to agricultural production in a context where men are normally the mouthpiece and focus of agricultural development – to the detriment of women, and despite their key roles in agriculture.

    Chrysanthi Charatsari, Majda Černič Istenič, and Evagelos D. Lioutas also examine the disadvantages faced by women farmers in relation to agricultural service providers, using the example of rural Greece. The paper looks at why women do not participate in agricultural educational programmes and what might be done to change this, given their interest in such initiatives.


    Iain Lindsey
    reviews attempts at collaboration at a community level in Zambia, noting that despite some information sharing and shared activities, both a lack of trust and excess competition still hinder improved coordination at this grassroots level. This clearly represents a challenge for the further strengthening of civil society.

    Sylvia Bawa looks at NGO activities in Ghana through a critical evaluation of how the outcomes of their funding relationships impact on their programme conception, implementation and sustainability within an African context. The conclusion highlights that local NGOs in Ghana are not as autonomous and independent as they perhaps should be, due to the power of external donors to set agendas and dictate priorities that reinforce previous post-colonial attitudes to development – reinforcing from a different angle the lack of participation in setting development goals.

    Tamo Chattopadhay tackles the difficult subject of education in poor urban areas of Brazil. Positive examples come from the individual efforts of teachers who can provide access to and reinforce social capital, despite the structural constraints working against their students. The author outlines a number of means through which it is possible to reinforce the efforts of such teachers.

    Willem van Eekelen reviews the latest experiences with child sponsorship, still one of the biggest forms of NGO funding in development. Whilst there have been several changes in child sponsorship since it started some 60 years ago, some of the attractions persist for individual donors. It is argued that there have been many improvements in delivery, although there are still some concerns which need to be adequately addressed.

    Muhammad Asif Kamran and Ganesh P. Shivakoti demonstrate a model for the analysis of agricultural risk in a semi-arid area of Pakistan, comparing areas with different political and cultural histories from the plains (settled) and hills (tribal). With a focus on common pooled resources, local perceptions of risk are traced.

    Tobias Denskus and Andrea S. Papan open up a discussion about blogging, what is likely to be an increasingly important area in the future, by looking at the nature and growth of blogging and trying to analyse the roles of blogs in international development. The article puts forward a set of debates and scope for further research into blogging, and many of us will often wonder what evidence or information the blogs we read are actually based on. It is sometimes hard to distinguish from a student blog based on their last essay or one from a professional outfit where a well-known ‘name’ fronts a blog written by a cast of researchers masquerading as a personal view, as opposed to a genuinely personal view on an issue that the author feels strongly about.

    The Practical Note by John Cammack shares a common problem in trying to calculate the real underlying costs of certain types of programmes. The author provides a model which can be used (mainly by small and medium organisations) to calculate whether a project is worth taking on or not, in terms of the real costs and in relation to the core costs covered or not by the contractor/donor. Our current obsession about financial accountability sometimes masks issues of equally important concern, such as the danger of running a programme at an unintended loss. Looking at the annual reports of NGOs in particular I am always struck by what they tell us about an organisation, but which is not apparently either recognised as important by the agencies or is ignored or even hidden. Recently I have seen accounts showing an erosion of reserves as organisations run at a deficit for several years, other organisations which claim to be running successfully where the accounts tell another story, or where reserve funds are not actually free reserves but are merely prepayments against future programme activities. In other words they are liabilities not assets, but are not recognised as such. Consequentially reserves are insufficient to meet the agencies' legal liabilities to staff and others.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790945

     

  • Writing weblogs (blogs) has become a substantial part of how development is discussed on the Internet. Based on research with development bloggers and the authors' own social media practice, this article is an exploratory case study to approach the impact of blogging on reflective writing, work practices, as well as knowledge management. Based on interviews with bloggers, the article undertakes an analysis of bloggers' motivations and the potential as well as limitations of blogs for different sectors of the industry, for example in academia, inside aid organisations, and in understanding expatriate aid workers. Finally, the article explores the question of whose voice is represented in blogs.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790940

     

     

  • Child sponsorship programmes have long been criticised for their conceptual and programmatic flaws. In response, organisations changed their programme designs to minimise negative side effects, or even stopped providing direct support to individual children altogether. This paper outlines the evolution of sponsorship programmes; discusses advantages and drawbacks of today's one-to-one sponsorship methods; and explores how progress may be possible. It concludes that such sponsorship programmes will never amount to sustainable development but can, if designed well, make a credible contribution to complex livelihoods in environments that lack adequate safety nets.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790936

  • Despite its recognised importance, studies of collaboration within specific communities in the Global South are rare. This paper examines the purposes and processes of collaboration between organisations undertaking development work with young people in two communities in Lusaka, Zambia. Interviewees recognised the need for collaboration given the limitations of existing provision and the fragmented organisational context. Existing collaboration was commonly orientated towards information sharing and joint provision rather than broader coordinated planning. Building awareness and understanding across organisations were viewed as key processes in developing collaboration. To enhance collaboration between organisations, it is suggested that inclusive community forums be instigated.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790938

     

  • Through two case studies, this paper evaluates the value of the feminist visual methodology Photovoice as an interactive consultation tool with rural Rwandan women working in agriculture. This exploratory study suggests that it is possible, through an adapted Photovoice process, to engage and empower women in the production of information about what is most relevant to them, and reach and engage practitioners and officials through an exhibition of participants' photographs and captions. This confirmation of Photovoice's applicability with rural women in the generation of information that captures the attention of stakeholders demonstrates its potential for reproducibility in other development contexts.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790942

     

  • This mixed research is inspired by our desire to explain why rural women are cautious in their attitudes towards agricultural extension/education. Fifty-two women livestock farmers from Thessaly-Greece were randomly selected to participate in the study. Our results indicate that at one end of the spectrum women express a high willingness to participate in agricultural extension/education programmes, while at the other end this willingness is not translated into participation mainly because of women's perception that agricultural extension/education constitutes a male dominated area. Another key determinant restricting women's participation arises from their low familiarity with education and the unpleasant experiences they recall from school.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790345

     

  • Drawing on empirical data gathered from discussions with executive directors of NGOs in Ghana, this paper critically analyses the complex multi-tier relationships between NGOs and their donor partners and how these affect outcomes of their development projects in Ghana. The paper discusses how experiences with funding agencies inform crucial shifts in NGO programming for poverty alleviation. This paper argues that, given their (NGOs') peculiar positioning in development practice, a critical appraisal of power dynamics central to NGO operations (such as funding and ownership of development projects) is crucial to proposing new strategies of engagement with NGO activity in Africa.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790935

     

  • Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI) was founded as an indigenous development agency in the Samoan village economy. The study described here utilises a participatory appraisal methodology to effectively articulate participants' perspectives on the programmes of WIBDI to provide ongoing input into project decision making. Increased income from increased sales resulted in being better able to pay for school fees, care for the elderly, the construction of infrastructure, and payment for utilities. In general becoming a producer for WIBDI resulted in increased certainty and confidence about the future for individuals and their families, and there were some indications of benefits for the village communities they live in.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790934

     

  • Since it emerged, the field of communication for development has undergone a constant process of redefinition. Since the 1990s, the importance of participation in social and communicative processes has been stressed, and studies carried out during those years focused on participation as an important component to be considered. The so-called community media are privileged forces driving the participatory communication for development approach. Since their emergence and up to the recent studies, community media have been characterised by the centrality of citizenship participation in the creation of widespread messages, and in the processes of social change that they promote.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790941

     

  • While socialisation aspects of schooling are widely considered as significant mechanisms of reproducing social inequalities, teacher contributions are rarely examined in terms of the social-relational dimensions of student outcomes. This paper employs a social capital framework to examine teacher-student engagement in two under-resourced urban public schools in Brazil. Extended interviews with teachers reveal that inspired educators do take great initiatives to transform the nature of their relationships with low-income students into sources of critical institutional and psycho-social support. The study offers critical policy perspectives on how teachers could be enabled to potentially become social capital agents for their students.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790939

     

  • The article studies how local risk perceptions are influenced by state support for provision of public goods and overall institutional arrangements for the management of common pool resources (CPRs). Purposively selected communities from tribal and settled areas with variations in access to irrigation flows (perennial and non-perennial) set up a matrix for analysis. The composite risk index was constructed by calculating an incidence and severity index based on the local perceptions. The research findings have policy implications for development planning through the identification of livelihood risks, and risks associated with the management of CPRs. 

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790937

     

  • NGOs regularly seek funding from a variety of donors, to help them to deliver worthwhile activities. Often the activities work well and a donor covers the full cost. But sometimes a successful funding proposal can make the organisation vulnerable, by committing itself to additional overhead expenditure not covered by a donor. This article looks at a system whereby the financial aspects of project proposals can be assessed earlier, before funding is applied for and accepted – providing a way of knowing the impact on the organisation and its staff, and allowing organisations to calculate the real cost of donor-funded projects.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.790943

     

  • This Special Issue has grown from the sense that important changes in the last two decades pose dilemmas and challenges for civil societies in many countries. The Issue reports on a series of studies of the evolving roles of civil society sectors and citizen initiatives in several regions of the world. This introduction identifies a series of events and forces that over the last two decades have fundamentally changed the contexts of civil society activities in many countries. These changes have catalyzed a wide range of citizen eruptions and initiatives on particular issues as well as national civil society evolutions in many countries. The papers in this Special Issue have resulted from a multi-country collective reflection organized by five civil society support organizations from different regions. They sought to identify roles, capacities, contributions, and limitations of civil society in these changing contexts using a variety of approaches to data collection and analysis. This introduction briefly describes the papers in the Special Issue. They include regional overviews, descriptions of national sector evolution, and cases of citizen activism in Southern and Eastern Africa, Asia, Southern Latin America, Western Europe and Russia. The final paper provides an overview of the lessons learned from comparative analysis across these and other cases and draws some of the implication of those lessons for practitioners and policy makers.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800842

     

  • This paper discusses the concept, contexts, evolution, contributions, and challenges of civil society in the southern Africa based on three case studies of Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It concludes by identifying common patterns and their implications for civil society and civil society organisations in southern Africa.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800840

  • This paper looks at the role of civil society in South Africa over the past 36 years. It views civil society as an integral part of a society that has undergone enormous change. It looks at civil society functioning as a part of a societal system that systematically impoverished the majority of its citizens. It traces the journey of people's struggles to survive and thrive and how these culminated in overthrowing an unjust political regime. It follows the journey through the political transition and looks at the point arrived at after the honeymoon period and the new struggle to make it work: arriving at a crossroads that, although a long way down the road, in the approach looks vaguely familiar. It ends by exploring a new way of thinking about the role of civil society that might contribute to finding ways of moving beyond systems that impoverish as a means of creating and concentrating wealth.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800833

  • The Kampala city traders' strike in 2012 provides a vivid representation of the business community presenting and representing the interests of the citizens amidst a financial crisis in Uganda. The strike came as a shock to the powerful central government of Uganda. In the context of the strike, the crossroads for civil society is related to the capacities and relationships to coordinate the wider civil society to champion citizen's issues and well-being.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800834

  • Over the past two decades the centre of gravity of the global economy and politics has shifted to Asia. The region, with its demographic, economic and political vibrancy, has changed the rules of the game globally. The region also represents extreme heterogeneity and perplexing paradoxes compared to other regions of the world; it is faced with multiple crossroads, including around poverty, illiteracy, access to water, and sanitation. It the midst of this, Asian civil society is on the rise. This viewpoint outlines its notable contributions, the multiple crossroads it faces, and future avenues.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800841

  • The changing socio-economic and political tableau in India has affected civil society. This paper investigates how the roles, relationships, and strategies of civil society organisations (CSOs) are changing in response to these socio-political and economic changes. It also looks at what new capacities, opportunities, and challenges are emerging as important for CSOs in these changing contexts.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800839

  • After decades of civil war and internal conflicts, Cambodia is on the path of democracy. The country, despite steady economic growth in the last decades, is facing challenges around poverty, exclusion, and inequality. The contributions of civil society in the past two decades, in development and deepening democracy, were significant, but civil society is now facing new challenges in the face of pro-neoliberal policies of the State. The relationships within civil society are characterised by both cooperation and competition, but its relationships with political society, media, and academia are underdeveloped. Civil society's strategies and capacities require transformations to continue to be relevant in the future.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800835

  • If there is one region whose political landscape has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, that region is Latin America. After several decades of dictatorships in many countries, the region is now engaged in strengthening the essential elements of representative democracy. Many events and developments affect civil societies in the region, and citizens and organisations are trying to respond to new or re-emerging challenges with varied forms. This article provides an overview of these events, and civil society responses.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800836

  • This study examines the student movement in Chile, which brought about the largest mobilisations since the restoration of democracy in the early 1990s. The students protested the so-called “education apartheid” created by the Pinochet regime and preserved by all democratic governments ever since, in which the formerly public education system had been largely replaced by a more massive but also expensive, highly stratified one, financed by private debt. The students' demands for free and high-quality education for all gained the support of broad sectors of civil society, which was expressed both in opinion polls and in massive participation in demonstrations.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800837

  • This article examines the Argentine LGBT movement within a framework of two longer-term processes. First, an enlargement of rights that is typical of post-transitional situations, with the Argentine peculiarity that, a quarter of a century after its transition to democracy, the country experienced a strong resurgence of the human rights discourse while judicial procedures were reopened to deal with human rights violations committed under the 1976–83 dictatorship. Second, the global widening of the concept and practice of human rights and the fight against discrimination – including those related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.802291

  • Since 2008, Europe has been mired in a series of complex and interconnected economic, financial, fiscal, and political crises, prompting citizens across Europe to erupt onto the streets to protest against cuts to pensions and public services, taxation increases, and government corruption. The current crises have resulted in profound challenges for many civil society organisations, yet they also arguably present an opportunity for many groups and have prompted the re-emergence of a more vibrant and politically engaged civil society in some European countries, as compared to the large contract delivery NGOs which have dominated recent years, sometimes to the detriment of small civil society organisations which are the backbone of European civil society However, in order to fully understand these current and emerging trends, we should cast our gaze further back. This article aims to contextualise recent trends through providing a brief history of the emergence and development of civil society in Europe, drawing on seven longer case studies from the UK, Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, and Greece. It will then discuss some of the main issues and trends, and reflect on possible future directions for civil society in Europe.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.801400

  • This paper reflects on the Occupy London encampment as an example of pre-figurative political action. The paper articulates the major media-political criticism of Occupy as “unwieldy” and “in search of a narrative” (Anonymous 2012), before drawing on case studies of two of the Occupation's components – the Tent City University and the Welfare and Well-being Group – to suggest that this criticism fails to understand the intentional choice that “directionlessness” represented. Indeed, the refusal to adopt formal leadership or any pre-defined ideological goal was a conscious strategy which pointed towards the kinds of possible future(s) desired.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.801935

  • The Netherlands have a rather large civil society. Interestingly, Dutch politicians and civil society organisations do not recognise this themselves, voicing frequent appeals for more civil society. This can be explained by the typical development of Dutch civil society through a system of pillarisation, based upon concepts of subsidiarity and sovereignty in one's own constituency, leading to a civil society that at the end has outsourced to the government important functions like financing, governing, and legitimising. Two cases (traditional and contemporary) are presented to show the consequences. Finally, lessons for other countries at civil society crossroads are drawn.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.801398

  • This paper looks at moments of citizen organisation to evoke an understanding of the new civic practices they bring to the fore. It argues that the Greek movement is shaped by an unprecedented number of citizens moving away from traditional, representative, recognised forms of citizen organisation to citizen-led, anti-hierarchical, horizontal networks that resist the consequences of the economic crisis and create alternatives to the current democratic and economic model. This movement has been nurtured by both small, diverse citizen initiatives, and mass protest and participation. The paper calls for a better understanding of the interplay between everyday resistance and significant political events.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.801399

  • The term “civil society” in Russia is often taken to refer to civic organisations and movements created during and after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and is sometimes equated narrowly with “NGOs” – registered non-government, non-commercial, or public organisations. This paper attempts to look at civil society more widely. It considers both registered organisations and more spontaneous/informal civic actions; and follows local experts in challenging the idea that Russian civil society began in 1989–91. The paper considers both recent developments on the ground, and analyses by historians, sociologists, and political scientists that go back to soviet and pre-soviet periods.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800838

  • The papers in this Special Issue are drawn from a larger set of cases of citizen activism and civil society evolution developed by the “Civil Society at Crossroads?” initiative. What can be learnt from comparative analysis across these stories? In this concluding paper we seek to identify lessons that emerged from comparative analysis across cases and to explore their implications for civil society practitioners and policymakers.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800843

  • After decades of civil war and internal conflicts, Cambodia is on the path of democracy. The country, despite steady economic growth in the last decades, is facing challenges around poverty, exclusion, and inequality. The contributions of civil society in the past two decades, in development and deepening democracy, were significant, but civil society is now facing new challenges in the face of pro-neoliberal policies of the State. The relationships within civil society are characterised by both cooperation and competition, but its relationships with political society, media, and academia are underdeveloped. Civil society's strategies and capacities require transformations to continue to be relevant in the future.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.800835

  • In this issue we have several articles which review both past experiences as well as the effects of some changing policies – fitting at a time when many future development strategies are being considered as we approach 2015, and in theory the end of the current focus on the Millennium Development Goals and what may follow them. We would expect that, regardless of the headline goals agreed internationally, those whose jobs are to turn aspirational goals into real programmes will look at the evidence of what has worked in the past.

    International volunteering was once a core part of many official agency and UN activity in developing countries. The kudos of some of the big players has weakened in recent years, with voluntary organisations in the Netherlands (SNV) and Germany, for example, turning into quite expensive technical assistance organisations, whilst others such as APSO in Ireland have been closed by their governments, and VSO in the UK has lost much of its government funding. So the article by Benjamin J. Lough and Cliff Allum provides a timely review of international volunteering – an arena which is clearly in the process of significant changes due to “a more competitive funding environment, results-based funding, and a shift towards domestic priorities”, which they see in part as a reflection of the neo-liberal development agenda.

    In light of critiques which argue that many developing country NGOs are rather poorly linked into their own civil societies and rather closer to international NGOs and other donors, Paolo Novak provides a survey of the historical development of Afghan NGOs over the past 30 years, looking at how local NGOs emerged alongside increased international humanitarian activity in and around Afghanistan. Novak notes that the basis of Afghan NGOs in a literate elite is probably inevitable given the history and involvement of foreign agencies in large humanitarian programmes over many years, starting from the refugee influx into Pakistan in the 1980s.

    Two studies have summarised experiences around key elements of African agriculture. The first, by Francis Wanyoike and Derek Baker, synthesises the evaluation of a number of livestock projects. In comparing projects they have produced some useful lessons, despite the fact, or perhaps because some 60 per cent of the projects were categorised as having not been successful. Project success was associated with size of project, diversity of direct project beneficiaries, institutional development activities, and effective monitoring and evaluation activities. The lack of reliability of government partners, and inclusion of other agricultural activities together with livestock activities, weakened their impact.

    A second synthetic study by Samuel Adjei-Nsiah et al., using nine studies from across Africa shows that the focus on technological change as a way of improving small-scale agriculture has often failed to live up to expectations. The authors argue that their research has shown the need for institutional reform for small-scale producers to be able to make progress. Given the current renewed emphasis on agriculture in Africa, it is important that these lessons be reviewed by current, and often new, donors who sometimes act as though there has been nothing done in this area previously.

    Two further contributions look at other fashionable interventions, around cash transfers and community based assets. Edakkandi Meethal Reji provides a concrete and positive example of community-based grain banks as a contribution towards improved food security of poor tribal households in India. The author notes that the simplicity and transparency of a model based on traditional values and technology, with modest injections of capital, can have a significant impact on food security.

    Morton Skovdal, Albert Webale, Winnie Mwasiaji, and Andrew Tomkins share the success of cash transfers to assist a community-based social enterprise's support for orphans in Kenya. They outline impacts including improved attendance and achievements, particularly for girls, for the orphans due to the financial support provided through these enterprises.

    Adam Burke, in his detailed study over several years, traces the lack of focus on peacebuilding approaches to the regional conflict in the south of Thailand, and explores both the constraints within aid agencies as well as the more obvious restrictions on peacebuilding from the Thai authorities.

    Kirstie Cadger and Thembela Kepe, in their work with the San of Botswana, examine a case of a relocated people who seem to have grown dependent on state and other external assistance, undermining attempts at providing sustainable incomes through their own efforts. The case studies of community gardens and their failure to take off shows once again the need to approach communities in a participatory manner which takes into account their own culture as well as recent context and history.

    Douglas C. Reeser also looks at gardening programmes, specifically those attached to schools in Belize. The title of his article, that local people “don't garden”, indicates the orthodoxy accepted by many development agencies; an orthodoxy which this article shows is misleading. The failure to understand the attitude to gardens is explored and the study concludes that whatever the good intentions of the local NGOs, the failure to analyse the situation plus the pressure to frame the intervention in a donor-friendly way led to misunderstandings of the local environment and hence a less successful programme.

    Finally Michaela Raab and Jasmin Rocha, in a study across three countries, look at how to assess the quality of service to women victims of violence. They outline a framework they have used which steps beyond the classic log frame-based form of monitoring, and which is more appropriate to an individual, case-based, service as opposed to general development interventions.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.812060

     

     

  • Communities in southern Belize have among the poorest health outcomes in the region, including high rates of under-nutrition. In response, an NGO school garden programme has been initiated to improve health and nutrition. An analysis of the programme as it relates to home garden practices and diet in two Q'eqchi' Maya communities illustrates the complexity of challenges faced by NGOs. Most notable are issues of legitimacy, cultural appropriateness, self-interest, and constructed conceptions of their target communities, all of which raise the question of what is more important: autonomous and healthy communities or the preservation of the NGO programme?

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.810191

     

  • The San of Botswana are marginalised and live in poverty. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation in two San communities, we analyse challenges facing community garden initiatives, and find that the failure of the gardens related to how the San are treated, as well as how they themselves have come to view their situation as destitute people. We conclude that forced resettlement, and historical livelihood disruption, as well as government and NGO policies of doing development through welfare (e.g. handouts), to the neglect of genuine empowerment of people, are responsible for the limited success of the community gardens.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.809695

     

  • On the basis of participatory research with service providers, service users, and external actors in Guatemala, Mozambique, and Nicaragua, we have developed a novel framework to describe and assess the quality of services for women and girls who have experienced violence against women (VAW survivors). The framework (1) provides a practical definition of quality, and (2) offers a structure to assess the effectiveness of services for VAW survivors in a development context. It can be adjusted to various situations, as well as to the different needs of service providers and of those who design, monitor, and support VAW programmes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.809696

     

  • International development agencies often promote approaches that link aid and peacebuilding. However, the gap between what agencies say and what they actually do is demonstrated by the mixed response to subnational conflict in Thailand's Far South between 2007 and 2012. Over this period, numerous agencies demonstrated little interest in addressing the conflict. Some agencies did over time try to support peacebuilding, although domestic government resistance and practical barriers generated obstacles. Conflict guidelines and toolkits were rarely used, while only a few agencies implemented the context-driven and knowledge-based approaches to local partnerships that peace promotion in a complex and politically sensitive environment demands.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.811221

     

  • African smallholders face few opportunities that can be captured through new technologies alone. Analysis of the institutional context in which they work opens new pathways for innovation. This article synthesises nine studies that attempted such analysis. Using mixed appraisal methods, the studies identify institutional conditions that explain the, often unsatisfactory, outcomes of smallholders, as well as entry points for changing them. Instead of at the farm or community levels, Participatory Innovation System Analysis seeks at higher levels to identify actors, networks and mechanisms that maintain or can change the “pervasive bias against the small farm sector” in SSA.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.811220

     

  • During the 1990s, and as part of a broader drive towards the “Afghanisation” of humanitarian assistance in Pakistan, Afghan NGOs became key implementing agencies supporting refugee-related and reconstruction activities in Afghanistan. This paper provides a detailed account of their emergence and consolidation, with a twofold objective. First, it complements and contributes to recent studies on Afghan NGOs and Afghan civil society, by providing historical insights on their trajectory. Second, it assesses such trajectory as a way of engaging with broader discussions on the role of NGOs within humanitarian operations.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.810708

     

  • The importance of livestock as a pathway out of poverty is widely recognised, but the effectiveness of pro-poor livestock development projects has been questioned. This study examines a sample of livestock development projects to draw lessons about their effectiveness and identify best practice. A large proportion of projects (60 per cent) were categorised as having not been successful. Project success is found to be positively associated with size of project, diversity of direct project beneficiaries, institution development activities in projects, and effective monitoring and evaluation activities. Lack of reliability of government partners, and inclusion of other agricultural activities together with livestock activities in projects, undermine success.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.811470

  • This paper uses findings from a survey of 19 government-funded international volunteer cooperation organisations (IVCOs) to discuss whether past and future patterns of government funding provide support for assertions of neoliberal adjustments. Findings indicate greater competition between providers, increased accountability for aid effectiveness, more private sector involvement, and an emphasis on domestic priorities with a focus on the skill-development of young volunteers. It provides examples of these changes and discusses the implications of changing patterns of government funding for international volunteering as an approach to development aid.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.809698

     

  • Given the context of failure of many of the programmes aimed at providing food security for tribal communities, this paper deals with the question, can grassroots-level experiments like community grain banks provide food security for the tribal poor? This paper examines the working of community grain banks established by Bapuji Rural Development and Enlightenment Society (BREDS) in India and concludes that community food grain banks demonstrate as an effective mechanism to ensure food security for the tribal poor, especially those who were excluded from the reach of government programmes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.811469

     

  • In this article we report on a community-based capital cash transfer initiative (CCCT) in Kenya that sought to mobilise and enable HIV-affected communities to respond to the needs of orphaned and vulnerable children. With bilateral funding, the Social Services Department in Kenya provided 80 communities across ten districts with advice and resources to set up social enterprises for the support of vulnerable children. A wide range of food and income generating activities were initiated by the communities, whose produce or profits contributed to the improved school attendance and performance of orphaned children, particularly amongst girls. We conclude that CCCT is a viable strategy for improving orphan schooling in sub-Saharan Africa.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.809697

     

  • As we approach the end of 2013 many official aid agencies will be refining their programmes and policies for the post-2015 period. Regardless of what may happen in formal consultations, most donors at least will already need to have their new approaches to development in place. These deliberations are not as easy as one might assume, given the range of factors which need to be taken into account, including the effects of domestic recession and public antipathy to aid compared to domestic spending, reducing both the support for aid as well as fuelling tensions with the competing claimants for state funds. Meanwhile there is a bewildering array of international conferences, initiatives and official statements, many of which point in totally different directions; whilst some argue for more multilateral action, others claim that a focus on supporting the private sector is the best use of scarce resources, and still others argue the case for civil society and its role in development.

    Researchers and commentators join the debate with a range of often conflicting views and options. Some of the larger official donors are already announcing new approaches whilst others, hoping for more positive economic and political changes in the future, are unable to make a decision and so are just extending current strategies for a few more years past the 2015 deadline. Some issues will not fade as easily as the ink on governmental policy statements, like the major global challenges of environmental damage and climate change, and the longer term structural causes of poverty and inequality. These will continue to provide challenges to everyone engaged in development, from individual development workers through to the largest organisations. With luck the confusion over international aid may provide more space for thinking about what we all mean by development, as opposed to an aid-defined set of ideas. Meanwhile large numbers of people will volunteer, or commit politically, practically, and financially to looking for alternatives through civil society. Many government employees and local government institutions will try to improve existing programmes as well as innovate and test new ideas.

    In this issue, the article on education in Mali by Jaimie Bleck and Boubacar Mody Guindo refers to the positive massive growth in education in the past 20 years, but notes issues around educational quality, the tension between the decline of public education and rise of private education, and an ambiguity over the goals of educational investment. We suspect these tensions could describe the crisis of education globally. Whereas earlier campaigns focussed on trying to achieve maximum enrolment, the crisis of declining educational quality is leading many to question the concept of “education for all”, if it cannot be delivered well.

    Juliet Willetts, Naomi Carrard, Joanne Crawford, Claire Rowland, and Gabrielle Halcrow explore the use of a strengths-based approach and appreciative enquiry as ways of researching and discussing gender inequality in the South Pacific. They note that such approaches have a positive role in helping communities look at gender inequality in their own context, as by stressing the positive it makes a less threatening context. They found that these approaches provided a better entry and understanding of the WASH issues than the traditional negative approaches of framing needs, problems and deficits.

    Graham Sherbut and Nazneen Hanji show that using mixed methods based on research questions and appropriate needs such as organisational learning often provides a better choice than the often overstated advantages of experimental methods. They argue that the “quality of life” studies used by the Aga Khan Foundation in its work in long-term, area-based development has been positive for these programmes on several levels, by rejecting the one-size-fits-all focus of many committed to experimental methods such as RCTs.

    Andri Soteri-Proctor, Jenny Phillimore, and Angus McCabe continue the debate started in our special issue (23.5&6) on civil society at a crossroads. This article looks at the use of street-level mapping of civil society groups in the UK, methodology that would be useful elsewhere for judging the real strength and coverage of small, “under-the-radar” civil society groups. The case studies show that such civil society groups are far more prevalent than allowed for by policymakers, who tend to stress the large regulated groups. This could be key to understanding civil society in many parts of the world. The authors then use this data to explore changes in policies in the UK, which seem to be trying to push more services down to this level.

    Monique Hennink, Carolyn Kulb, and Ndunge Kiiti have sought to understand why a Kenyan microcredit scheme seems to have taken its members further towards a more sustainable financial future than many others, which support people in the short term, but seem unable to build a longer term pathway out of poverty. They feel that the success of this particular scheme is that it goes beyond short-term savings to longer-term financial management, such that the women members gain both self-confidence and group solidarity as well as longer-term financial security through the savings scheme.
     

    The perennial challenge of how to help an organisation become a learning organisation is tackled by Barry Whately, with a discussion of the literature and examples from World Vision Burundi. In particular Whately notes the importance of a learning leadership, for the whole process to flow smoothly and to work on improving the effectiveness of the organisation.

    Anne Buffardi explores some of the issues around “country ownership” of international assistance, as proposed by current official assistance aid orthodoxies. Three models are proposed to help us analysis country ownership, each illustrating different aspects of ownership. In the case of Peru it was found that the least participatory model was still that most commonly used by foreign agencies, despite the sophistication of the Peruvian context and local institutions.

    Shaila Sharmeen looks at the different perceptions of development of a tribal group in Bangladesh held by members of the group, local NGOs, and the national government. In a situation where the government doesn't recognise the groups' rights as indigenous, local NGOs also tend to also treat them as backwards and in need of “uplifting” rather than argue for their rights under international law.

    Ksenia Gerasimova, in a study of forest management in Russia, reveals strong connections between the promotion of sustainable development, the stronger application of evaluation techniques, and involvement of the third sector. Evidence from evaluative work by WWF in Russia, amongst others, suggests that despite the constraints of Russian law and government attitudes to civil society, such links do improve overall forest management.

    In a practical note Norman Gillespie, Vasiliki Georgiou, and Sevinc Insay review attempts by civil society on both sides of the divide in Cyprus to bring the Greek and Turkish communities together, with the aim of contributing to an eventual peace between the two. They offer some of the key learning from their reviews of a range of civil society programmes on the island.

    A second practical note summarises work around the age-old debate about how to close the perceived divide between academic researchers and practitioners of development. Daniel Stevens, Anna Mdee, and Rachel Hayman share the findings of the “Cracking Collaboration” project which brought together academics and practitioners to explore how they could best work together.

    Finally, as we come to the end of 2013, on behalf of the whole editorial team I would like to thank both all the authors and referees who we have worked with over the year, and our very many readers. A list of those who have given their time and expertise to be peer reviewers this year is included at the back of this issue. Special thanks are also due to our contributing editors, our wider editorial advisory group, and our colleagues at Taylor and Francis, for their support throughout the year.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09614524.2012.705819

  • There have always been debates about the methods that should be used to inform and assess development programmes. Experimental methods have become highly advocated as agencies seek rigorous ways to show programme value. However, the benefits and appropriateness of these methods are frequently overstated. We use the Aga Khan Development Network's Quality of Life studies to show that periodic mixed methods approaches are useful to analyse programme contributions and inform area development. We argue that experimental methods should not be idealised, and that research questions and organisational learning should guide pragmatic methodological choices to inform development intervention in real-life contexts.
     

    The full article is available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.841863

     

  • Learning is a critical component of organisational effectiveness, particularly in the complex world of development NGOs. Drawing from the literature on organisational learning, this article highlights the key dynamics of a strong learning organisation and proposes an integrated ‘leverage-learning’ model adapted to the NGO context. This model integrates learning domains that are critical for greater effectiveness, or leverage. The model is then applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning culture and commitment of a specific development NGO, World Vision Burundi. The model shows promise as an heuristic tool to evaluate NGOs and help them become more effective in aid delivery.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840563

  • Given the proliferation in the number and type of development actors and an expressed desire by donors to engage them in a more meaningful way, this article identifies multiple ways in which ‘country ownership’ is manifested in practice. Through comparative case research, this article examines the involvement of five sets of actors in: problem identification, resource administration, programme design, implementation, and governance. Three donor-recipient relationship patterns emerge: ‘doctor knows best’, ‘empowered patient’, and ‘it takes a village’, each with specific conditions but overall underrepresentation of recipient country actors, suggesting that their involvement could take place more often than currently occurs.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.841862

  • This paper describes an empirical application of a strengths-based approach (SBA) to assess changes in gender equality, and draws out implications for research, evaluation, and wider development practice. We outline what constitutes a strengths-based approach and present a case study where a participatory methodology informed by appreciative inquiry was used to investigate gender outcomes of two water, sanitation, and hygiene-focused development initiatives. We consider the value and limitations of taking an explicitly strengths-based approach to assessing gender outcomes, and also propose that there are important arguments for why SBAs might be usefully applied in addressing (not just assessing) gender equality.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840564

  • This article introduces new data from Mali, including surveys of 200 university students and 1,000 citizens and interviews with 30 educational professionals, to emphasise Malian perceptions of the post-democratic educational expansion. It complements interviews with data on passage rates and curriculum from the Ministry of Education. Despite marked increases in enrolment, Malian respondents describe three major concerns about the “educational crisis”: educational quality, private/public stratification, and the ambiguous goals of education. The article raises general concerns over the reliance on narrow quantitative indicators, and underscores the need to incorporate local stakeholder voices and perspective in educational reform.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.839983

  • Within the context of acute public spending cuts and the increasing push towards localism, the UK government is increasingly looking outwards to community- and citizen-led action for solutions to long-term social problems and to take on public services. The extent to which these groups have the capacity and willingness to take on politicised roles beyond their purpose and function is, however, not well understood. By reflecting on findings primarily from a street-level mapping project, in this paper discussion focuses on the potential implications arising from grassroots' co-option.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840267

  • Microcredit is often seen as a simple solution to poverty reduction. However, its sustainability for longer-term community development is debated. This qualitative study describes a unique community-based model of microcredit in Kenya, which includes investment, emergency loans, and social support components. In-depth interviews with group members highlighted how this model fostered longer-term economic development, financial security, and stability. However, additional social and psychological benefits were valued higher than economic gains, although both were closely intertwined as economic security reduced psychological stress. This expanded model of microcredit has the potential to contribute to sustained community development amongst poorer households.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840265

  • This article discusses the potential of evaluation to help NGOs, namely the WWF (the World Wide Fund for Nature), to promote sustainable development in the Russian forest sector. Application of evaluation can strengthen two out of three main functions of NGOs – their expertise and lobbying. The third function of NGOs, as legitimisers, is difficult to perform in the Russian institutional climate. International partnerships address the issue of legitimacy and secure funding for NGOs. This international support is beneficial to a capacity building process and should promote the implementation of independent evaluation, which, in turn, can be helpful to promote sustainable development.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.842204

  • This paper aims to unpack the politics of NGO activism with the Munda – a minority Adibashi group in Bangladesh. In addition to offering microcredit, NGOs launched educational and awareness building programmes for the Adibashi. Most notably, the Munda are not content to blindly follow the instructions of NGOs – namely, to get educated, find a white-collar job, and develop identity politics – to improve their socio-economic and political positions. Rather, there is growing awareness among the Munda to gather knowledge, which helps them to consciously educate themselves to undertake new activities to improve their condition by interacting with wider society.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.841125

  • This note argues that NGOs and academics are increasingly being pushed to collaborate by their respective ‘impact’ agendas. And a growing number of individuals who traverse both worlds are advocates for a much closer relationship to facilitate the theory-data interaction that lies at the heart of knowledge creation in international development. But different cultures and institutional constraints create challenges in making this collaboration work. A number of practical pointers are outlined for overcoming these obstacles, arguing that keeping the ultimate beneficiaries in focus is the best foundation for constructing a shared agenda in development research.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840266

  • Civil society in Cyprus has a key role to play in creating spaces for dialogue and cooperation between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities. Recent research by the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC) has identified how these processes have contributed to trust and peacebuilding on the island, the challenges facing organisations engaged in this work, and how these were being addressed. It demonstrates that important steps are being taken by civil society organisations to overcome prejudices and break down barriers, and that by further developing links with local and international policymakers and institutions, civil society could be a stronger player in the peace process.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.840268

  • In the latest issue of Development in Practice, several of the contributions tackle issues around urbanisation as well as the roles and dynamics of gender within development practice and discourse. As the urban population increases at rates well above those of the rural areas, the importance of urban poverty and development requires further illumination through practical experience and discussions. And in the light of many years of debates around gender, we have two articles which question some of the assumptions of the present discourse – arguing for the need to put women first and not lose the essence of the inequality between sexes in our search for the right vocabulary and concepts, which are often not transported well between languages and cultures.

    Vidyamali Samarasinghe discusses the concept of gender and the problems of translating it into other languages and cultures, specifically in this case in Sri Lanka, where neither of the two major languages have an acceptable way of translating the concept. The author concludes that in highly gender-stratified societies it is important perhaps to first “bring women back into the debate” rather than be overly concerned with the nuances of a gendered approach, which may be less useful for practitioners than the more traditional women-centred development approaches.

    The ecohealth approach is compared to the disappointing outcomes of an urban garden programme with women in Haiti. Jennifer Vansteenkiste argues that the women's practical and strategic needs were not met by the programme due to the failure to fully recognise the gendered requirements which an ecohealth approach could have provided. The article also questions why after so many years programmes are still started which ignore known lessons in designing women-friendly programmes.

    An article by Tahmina Rashid and Jonathan Makuwira reviews traditional and modern approaches to working with women, in the comparison of traditional savings and loans schemes with modern microcredit programmes. It notes that such schemes are indeed very well established, pre-dating the modern Bangladeshi-inspired schemes. Although warning against over-romanticising traditional self-help schemes, the article does set out some of their strengths as compared to the newer models. We are left asking whether in our rush to replicate Grameen or other models, we have neglected existing experiences in credit and savings.

    A study of Kisumu in Kenya by Caroline Cage, based on the concept of social capital and the importance of organisations of the urban poor, compares NGO networks with endogenous membership-based slum federations. Cage explores whether NGOs can often reduce rather than improve the social capital by introducing a rather more directive and formal approach to organisations than community-based membership organisations. Overall she posits a more likely sustainable structure in the federations of poor urban dwellers than in the introduced models.

    Megan Hershey, looking at measuring success of NGOs working on HIV/AIDS in Nairobi, argues that despite being small, the way these NGOs engage with the communities helps determine their success. This is perhaps a more important variable than the organisational size and character of the NGO.

    In his article on handicrafts in Nairobi, John Harris notes a range of common problems including excessive competition, poor labour practices, and the practice of stealing patterns and designs, which undermine a trade that is important at both the national level and for the large informal sector. Harris goes on to explore some ways of improving the handicraft sector.

    Arun Kumar and Nivedita Kothiyal look at issues around how we classify those with different abilities. Using the example of a small factory in India where on the surface the owner offers opportunities to a diversity of employees, the authors believe that they end up being used as cheap labour in positions not necessarily reflecting their actual abilities or potential.

    The article by Emily Wilson, Josephine Reeve, and Alice Pitt elaborates on a programme to introduce re-usable pads for menstrual hygiene and its positive impact on school absenteeism during periods, using examples from Kenya.
    The contribution from Emma Crewe provides an unusually honest account of how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, the author considers how the organisation maintained positive relationships with partners despite not having much success in changing donor attitudes.

    Frik De Beer and Mirjam de Koning's article explains the nature of and tensions around environmentally protected areas in South Africa, analysing both the organisational issues and the economics of such areas.
     

    The practical note from Emmanuel Raufflet and Julian Gallardo looks at community-based entrepreneurship programmes in Paraguay. They argue that due to their larger scale of financial support, as well as a mix of skills in recipients (mixing poor and better educated) and other key factors, such programmes led to a greater impact on incomes and assets than the more common microcredit programmes.

    Finally, a review essay by Paul Perrin and Shannon Senefeld, on orphans and vulnerable children, focuses on the large numbers of OVC as a result of HIV/AIDS, and reviews an “ecological approach” to working with OVCs by adapting this model to the practice of programming for OVCs.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.868866

  • Large-scale organisations of the urban poor (OUP) are needed for greater influence in urban governance. However, where contexts are non-enabling for large-scale organisations to develop, external support may be needed. Past NGO support for building social capital has been heavily criticised for failing to address its darker side, while new forms of OUP supported by urban poor federations have been cited as more inclusive, representative organisations. This study compares NGO- and slum-dwellers’ federation-supported OUPs in Kisumu, Kenya, and finds evidence that development partners should seek to scale-up existing social capital while ensuring that networks formed are transformative for marginalised identities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867306

  • This paper examines the social and gender politics of a women's urban garden project supported by the International Organisation of Migration, in Cap Haitien, Haiti. My study highlights how the development process created an unmonitored symbolic space where society's normalised gender processes reproduced broader social inequalities, which, in turn, prevented the project from meeting the women's practical and strategic goals. Then, I discuss how the ecohealth approach, as an alternative design framework, could make symbolic space visible to be critically engaged and analysed by participants, to account for gender process, and create an emancipatory activity.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867307

  • Gender and Development (GAD) theory has been enthusiastically embraced by all leading official donor agencies as the basis for initiating women's development initiatives in developing countries of the South. Based on a field survey of women's development initiatives in Sri Lanka, this paper shows the difficulties encountered by aid-dependent developing countries in the South in using the concept “gender”, as defined in the GAD theory, in their women's development activities, especially at the local community level.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867303

     

  • Microcredit/finance as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women in developing countries has been a darling of developed countries. The success stories from microcredit borrowers from Bangladesh, India, and Africa, and global endorsement of microcredit programmes have largely ignored local indigenous initiatives managed by groups of women in rural and urban areas. Evidence from fieldwork in Pakistan and Malawi suggests that although systematically recorded history of such indigenous initiatives is lacking, women in these settings would attest that there exists generational knowledge about such small-scale, group-based micro-lending which can be used to enhance livelihoods in rural households.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867927

     

  • NGOs receive praise and criticism for their international development efforts, but more work is needed to measure their contributions. This article lays out the contributions of local NGOs to HIV-prevention efforts. It draws on data from a survey of young people's experiences with NGOs to demonstrate the reach of several local HIV-prevention NGOs in Nairobi, Kenya. It argues that even small NGOs are capable of making measurable contributions to development in their fields. It also shows how factors such as education levels, religiosity, and discussions about HIV/AIDS can support NGO efforts by encouraging youth to participate in HIV-prevention programming.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867304

     

  • This paper summarises pilot work by Irise International to develop an acceptable and replicable solution to menstrual hygiene management (MHM) in East Africa based around the manufacture of a reusable pad. The paper presents a theoretical justification for the approach and the results of pilot work used to develop it, including baseline menstrual hygiene practices and their relationship to school absenteeism in schoolgirls in western Kenya, the short-term impact of training girls to make a reusable product on school absenteeism using a partial preference, parallel group randomised control trial, and an assessment of the acceptability of the approach.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867305

  • Grounded within the substantive conception of ableism (Wolbring 2008), this article explores the prejudices and discriminations that arise out of many different forms of ableism: of bodily abilities/disabilities, gender, social structure, and economic organisation. It illustrates the processes and outcomes of ableisms deployed on the shop-floor of a multiple-award winning small-scale manufacturing unit in India. By employing a number of persons with disabilities, single women, and widows, and with plans for engaging juvenile delinquents in the near future, the manufacturing unit has seemingly created opportunities for “empowerment” of those subjected to discrimination. However, the outcomes are not necessarily so.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867302

     

  • Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights reformed various rituals and created different management practices internally, as well as maintaining its long-established solidarity approach with partners, but only managed to challenge the donors’ controls to a limited extent.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867308

     

  • This article presents findings on observed productivity constraints of handicraft firms in Nairobi, Kenya. The goal is to help NGOs, intergovernmental organisations, and national governments in their efforts to foster local handicraft industries in Africa and beyond. One-hundred and two respondents were interviewed about their business, cost structure, hiring practices, and other intra-industry relationships. This article points out a number of practical problems hindering productivity and limiting livelihoods, including problematic labour practices, conditions of adverse selection, the context of proprietary information in small scale manufacturing, and the tendency of the industry toward hypercompetition.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867478

     

  • In many cases protected areas in South Africa have been established with little or no regard for communities living in or adjacent to them. The new challenge to protection of biodiversity is to find an equitable balance between conservation, beneficiation of the new land owners, and “balancing the books”. This article discusses the Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve as a case study to illustrate some of the potential outcomes that co-management of protected areas can offer towards income generation, and highlights challenges towards success: it asks, can co-management be financially sustainable for both the conservation agency and the land claimants?

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.866214

     

  • Research has shown that programmes that take a holistic approach to addressing the challenges of orphans and other vulnerable children (OVC) are more likely to achieve sustainable outcomes. However, OVC programme staff can feel overwhelmed by the challenge of designing holistic approaches due to realities on the ground. The paper introduces an adaptation of Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of development. The framework is designed specifically to assist programme staff in constructing more holistic and integrated OVC responses by translating an established theoretical background into an approachable way to better conceptualise and support OVC intervention(s) across multiple systems and multiple sectors.

    The full article is available here:

    www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.866215

  • Community-based entrepreneurship projects have been advocated as a potential approach to alleviate extreme poverty as they provide opportunities for income generation and capacity enhancement. This practical note provides an overview of the PRODECO project undertaken jointly by the Paraguayan government and the World Bank (1999–2008) in three southern departments of Paraguay (Itapúa, Misiones, and Ñeembucú). It describes and analyses the context, scope, operations, and results of this project, and identifies five main lessons related to frequent challenges faced by this approach; on size, access to skills, distance from government agencies, pace, and technology.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.867301

     

  • This issue includes several articles which in different ways look at perennial issues around agricultural, rural development, and related water management matters. Regardless of the terms used over the past decades it still appears that in practice this is an area where there are no simple answers. As at least one of our articles (see Singh below) shows, approaches which at one time were considered very successful are later regarded as having failed. Were they ever as successful as previously claimed, or as much a failure as later concluded? One of the issues faced by practitioners trying to implement the latest model is a failure to take a more holistic view of rural development, and some our papers encourage taking a wider and longer term look at factors determining food security.
     
    There are still answers to be developed and discovered as to why so much agricultural development does not improve the livelihoods of many poor rural people. Is it purely an issue of asset shortages (land capital), poor natural resources (soil, water, climate), or as some still argue, one of basic ignorance of possible alternative farming techniques? Perhaps it comes down to the vagaries of the modern market place (transport, financing, infrastructure, etc.), or that few countries have ever managed to achieve national development based on small-scale peasant agriculture, however much many people globally depend on this form for at least their subsistence? Possibly the best we can do in Development in Practice is to continue to encourage the sharing of a range of different experiences, in the hope that we can improve our learning and improve our practice in the future.
     
    Manpriet Singh, Janwillem Liebrand, and Deepa Joshi consider the contested views of what has been successful in participatory irrigation management by comparing primary analyses of two irrigation management transfer schemes in Nepal, with work of other researchers on these and other projects. The authors show that the contrary claims of an earlier ‘success’ and now conceptual ‘failure’ of these policies, reflect the shifting concerns and priorities of policymakers, rather than the contextual, complex realities of irrigation management on the ground. They note the move by donors away from participatory schemes towards a new orthodoxy of public private partnerships in asset management.
    Maria Torri explores the class and caste impacts on home gardens in periurban Bangalore, particularly how higher caste women's access to larger gardens leads to their greater use of medicinal plants.
     
    Ann Le Mare, Christina Makungu, and Christine Dunn use a livelihoods analysis to better understand why malaria continues to lead to high levels of mortality and morbidity in an area of Tanzania. Their study demonstrates that constraints on livelihoods have limited the ability of villagers to follow health advice from professionals, thereby reducing their ability to avoid malaria and other problems.
     
    Jean-Christophe Castella and Bounthanom Bouahom provide an overview of the emerging role of cooperatives in Laos after the previous dominance of large, state-run collective farms, as the country seeks to develop a more plural approach to agriculture; within this approach cooperatives may provide a bridge between small subsistence farmers and larger state enterprises.
     
    Hector Calix de Dios, Heather Putnam, Santos Alvarado Dzul, Wendy Godek, Susanne Kissman, Jean Luckson Pierre, and Stephen Gliessman look at food security and food sovereignty in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Despite some positive factors such as access to land and water, they conclude that changing cultures leave most households insecure and lacking in sovereignty over production decisions. This leads to a situation where infant mortality is high at the same time as adult obesity is a major health problem, due to high calorie foods and a move to processed foods with a low level of local food diversity.
     
    Syed Atahar takes a long-term view of the Jamuna bridge project in Bangladesh, which opened in 1998 but has been almost 10 years in preparation and construction. Atahar looks at the current status of those involuntarily displaced by the bridge in the 1980s and 1990s, and finds that despite attempts for the first time in Bangladesh to apply compensation rules, many of the displaced are worse off than previously, due to poor practice, ignorance, and official corruption.
     
    Cheryl McEwan and Lilian Nabulime describe the use of popular art using locally available materials in facilitating discussion on health aspects of HIV/AIDS in Uganda.
     
    John M. Luiz reviews lessons from the social compacts between the state, business, and civil society in various parts of the world, and brings these lessons to bear on the development of the state and economic growth in Africa. He notes the failure to institutionalise the compact in most parts of Africa, and the potential dangers of short-term populism or unsustainable approaches to the compact. Given the crisis of such compacts in developed countries due to recession, there are important lessons we can adapt to future African future policy-making, both from developed country systems as well as existing experiences in South Africa.
     
    Sian Nicholas provides a framework for faith-based organisations working in peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Given the accusation that faith is often a cause of conflict, it is important to review the role played by many faith groups in conflict reduction.
     
    Robert C. Mizzi discusses the importance of pre-departure briefings for international development workers to focus more on issues of differences in sexuality and sexual preference. Mizzi argues that development agencies have been slow at introducing guidance and advice on lesbian, gay, bi, and transsexual (LGBT) issues in their briefings.
     
    Finally, in a practical note, Gillian Fletcher, Kyaw Thu, Pyae Phyo Maung, Naw Margueritta Mu Yeh Hpeh, and Kyaw Myint share their experiences with the Paung Kyu approach to capacity development, an approach based on a form of action learning within the difficult context of Myanmar/Burma.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.886673

     

     

  • Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of “failure” than “success”. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few “successes” in the assessment supporting a “failed” PIM, shows how such policy-driven evaluations, when defining success, overlook incongruities between policies, institutions, and the evolving dynamics around class, caste, ethnicity, and gender. Without exploring the dynamics of practice, the process of “cultivating” success and/or failure in evaluations provides little insight on how irrigation management works on the ground.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.885494

     

  • Over the past few decades home garden research has emphasised the promotion of home gardening for nutritional and other welfare benefits for the poor in urban areas. Still, the urban communities who cultivate plants in their home gardens are in general represented as rather uniform groups, and no distinction is made in terms of caste, ethnic groups, or social class. This article asserts that social stratification represents an important aspect that needs to be taken into account while devising educational programmes and community projects for the promotion of home herbal gardens in urban areas.
     
    The full article is available here:
     
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.892570
     
  • In the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture, smallholders in Lao PDR need to get better organised to match market demand in terms of product volume and quality. This paper investigates the conditions for the emergence of cooperatives from existing farmers' groups. Our study revealed the importance of social networks and power relations as a factor of cohesion within groups. Local leadership plays a crucial role in connecting group members to the village and district institutions. Recommendations are provided to improve group management rules as a pre-requisite to turn groups into farmers' cooperatives.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.885495

     

  • In a study of food security and sovereignty (FSS) in 22 indigenous Mayan communities in Yucatán State, Mexico, a participatory action research (PAR) methodology was combined with an analytical framework comprised of 10 FSS indicators to measure food security in the study area and identify strengths and weaknesses of the analytical framework. While some of the FSS indicators were approaching satisfactory, the majority were only partially satisfied, and food self-sufficiency was for the most part unsatisfactory. It was also found that food security indicators are relatively easier to measure, while sovereignty indicators present challenges in terms of defining progress.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.884540

     

  • This paper examines connections between sustainable livelihoods and the ability to deal with health risks, in the Kilombero Valley in Tanzania where rates of mortality and morbidity from malaria remain high. Application of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) to a narrative of daily lives demonstrates that villagers have experienced a reduction in assets, income, and capital, which limits their ability to follow health promotion advice. The focus on livelihoods highlights possible local developmental interventions that could have a significant impact on improving the health and well-being of the villagers, with potential relevance to other places in the Global South.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.892571

     

  • The notion of a social compact between government, business, and civil society as a basis for long-term economic development and growth underpins economic models in many industrialised countries. The search for a new social order is pressing in developing countries where high levels of economic growth exposes the growing gaps between those who participate economically and those who are left behind. This creates new interest groups and alliances and sees old social orders collapse. Finding ways to bring about more inclusive development in developing countries through a social compact is the focus of this paper.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.885496

     

  • Faith leaders and their congregations have been recognised as holding the potential to engage positively in peacebuilding activities in a post-conflict context. Alongside this, faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) have the ability to engage with these constituencies to increase the peacebuilding impact of their activities. This paper presents a framework of faith engagement for FBDOs to work with local faith leaders and people of faith to develop the peacebuilding impact of development activities. A reworking of Anderson's “Do No Harm”, it encompasses the areas that FBDOs need to address in order to be effective peacebuilding actors in a faith context.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.884996

     

  • In 1998 the Jamuna Multi-Purpose Bridge (JMB), the largest infrastructure development project in Bangladesh was completed. Huge numbers of households were affected by the project and many were displaced. Only a handful of displaced people were resettled by the project. The JMB was the first development project in Bangladesh that included resettlement activities as an integral part of the project and introduced a resettlement action plan. In principle, the Revised Resettlement Action Plan endorsed the primary principle of Operational Directives 4:30 of the World Bank. The resettlement project's core objective was to improve the living standards of project-affected persons above their previous level, or at least reinstate their pre-project standard. To meet the goals, various grants and supports were given as compensation. The project has earned international admiration as an example for other projects to follow. This study investigates the extent to which Jamuna Multi-Purpose Bridge's compensation-based resettlement succeeded in reconstructing displaced households, and identifies discrepancies between policy and practice. It concludes with major findings and comparative analysis on the compensation principle, and provides opinions based on information gathered from the field.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.887660

  • This paper argues for the importance of enabling dialogue between women and men about taboo subjects of sex and sexuality in HIV/AIDS prevention. It reports the findings of a project that sought to use art (specifically sculpture) for creating dialogue between women and men in rural Uganda. It then provides suggestions for HIV/AIDS practitioners on how to use everyday objects to stimulate similar discussion about sex and disease prevention between women and men. We argue for the utility of art and everyday objects where literacy rates are low, or where modes of communication and information-sharing are predominantly orate.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.884539

     

  • This qualitative study investigates how pre-departure orientations of two aid agencies in Kosovo grapple with themes related to sexuality and gender-difference. Through a series of in-depth interviews with eight gay male aid workers and an analysis of official texts, the author's findings suggest that institutions operate on heteronormative values that may explain why troubling encounters occur in the workplace. As a result, study participants must navigate through these encounters without much support, information, or direction from the agency. The author suggests that aid agencies adopt a policy shift towards intersectional, whole-person inclusivity in their efforts to prepare aid workers.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.885493

     

  • It is well known within international development practice that the terms “capacity building” or “capacity development” are often used but infrequently (and inconsistently) defined; whether in funding applications, program strategies, staff training programmes, or field work. This article outlines the way in which one development organisation working in Burma/Myanmar wrestled with the issue of meaning, and practice, in relation to capacity development; it also reports on the resulting “Paung Ku model: encouraging change through learning.”

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.884995

     

  • In this issue we have a number of articles which discuss approaches to evaluation, all of which reject simplistic and purely quantitative approaches to evaluation often now being forced on organisations by risk-averse donors. Given how little evidence there is that some of the instrumentalist approaches to both programme implementation and monitoring and evaluation systems have improved the delivery of development assistance, we should ask who in fact is gaining from the persistence of their imposition. Large sums are now being expended on “scientific” evaluations which are very unlikely, or have already failed, to produce findings of use to practitioners or even to improve the value for money of financial assistance.
     

    Repeatedly our articles in Development in Practice seem to show that adjusting to context, whilst also incorporating lessons from practice, can lead to sustainable changes. Several donors who use excessively complex methods because they can be used by civil servants eager to avoid risk and controversy, are distorting the world of monitoring and evaluation and undermining the importance of these processes in actually helping to improve performance and learning of those more directly engaged. The undoubted success of some of these methodologies in tackling simple single variable issues such as guinea worm eradication, or polio vaccination coverage, is to be recognised, but to move such methods into multi-variable, multi-stakeholder and complex social, political, and cultural environments seems to be obviously inappropriate.
     

    Alison Mathie and Brianne Peters describe a fascinating experiment in the evaluation of a social innovation programme in Ethiopia, bringing together communities, an INGO, an academic group, and a private, flexible “venture philanthropist”. The evaluation was designed to help improve decision-making within the programme, rather than to ensure compliance with donor-driven priorities.

    Vasiliki Tsourtou, Korina Hatzinikolaou, and Christina Chatzinikolaou provide a rich description of a multidisciplinary approach to working with street children and adolescents in Athens. Of particular interest is the use of theatre to achieve an understanding of the lives of these young people, and review their needs and contacts with authorities.

    Bronwyn Myers, Rohan Fisher, Sam Pickering, and Stephen Garnett describe a still rare occurrence of a post-project evaluation held seven years after the programme funding ended, in this case of fire management in eastern Indonesia. They conclude that much of the original work has continued successfully, especially where local farmers see the value of the fire management approaches; however, they note that some of the higher technology-based systems have been harder to maintain and in a few communities land tenure disputes undermined the original programme.

    Heather Creech, Leslie Paas, Gabriel Huppé, Vivek Voora, Constance Hybsier, and Helen Marquard carried out a large survey over several years of small-scale green economy-based enterprises and initiatives directly relating to the small enterprises. They concluded that, despite successes, they could contribute far more if constraints on access to technology and research were improved and certain gendered barriers removed.

    Roberto Belloni reviews civil society strengthening in Lao PDR since 2006, and stresses the importance of the first major Decree on Associations in the country as it opens up a greater recognition of the importance of civil society in developmental terms. Belloni notes the sensitive approach taken by INGOs by adopting a “systems approach” to avoid swamping the newly emerging civil society with donor-imposed goals. This again reinforces the message of the need to adjust approaches to specific situations rather than blindly follow donor-based priorities.

    We also have two reviews which take a historical approach to issues consistently challenging and inhibiting development, in Nigeria and Haiti respectively.

    Daniel Agbiboa provides an historical and socio-political analysis of the consistent entrenchment of large-scale corruption by those dominating the state in Nigeria. He notes the “recycling of corrupt elites”, often with military backing, that has consistently constrained the development of the country despite its abundant natural resources, echoing those who write of the “resource curse” of such abundance, if not used within a strong governance framework. Romanovski Zéphirin discusses the issue of development failures in Haiti over three decades, including the apparent inability to assist in state institution building and other developmental processes encouraged by United Nations agencies. Thus, although Haiti has remained a focal country for a great deal of aid, the problems identified in the early 1990s remain today. Zéphirin's alternative proposal to the current aid system is one which would access the large remittance income received by Haitians (calculated at eight times the size of aid flows) by creating diaspora bonds for investment programmes.

    Ruth Jackson illustrates the importance that a very simple, cheap technology (clean birthing kits) can have in reducing maternal and infant mortality in Ethiopia, where home births are still the norm and where few are attended by trained birth attendants. She discusses issues around ensuring such technologies are disseminated, resourced, and used.
     

    Tricia Petruney, Aurelie Brunie, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Patricia Wamala-Mucheri, and Angela Akol describe practical and useful lessons from a capacity building partnership in Uganda between an INGO and local NGO.

    Finally, H.M. Ashraf Ali uses ethnographic approach to review issues around microcredit in the Chittagong hills of Bangladesh. Ali argues that women still experience a relationship of dependency verging on oppression from the staff of microcredit agencies, which reflects existing gendered relationships with their male relatives and therefore reinforces power inequalities. This is illustrated with a repressive system of loan collection from often destitute women, although a large proportion of the funds awarded to the women were used by but not repaid by their male relatives. This article once again reminds us that the blanket assumption that microcredit is always a positive influence should never be taken as proven.

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.902918

  • In fieldwork with children and adolescents working on the streets of Athens, Greece, the authors applied a multidisciplinary methodology, through which participants were empowered to articulate their own voice. This article discusses some indicant themes which emerged through participants' narrations and through their active engagement in Theatre-for-Development: (1) the role of family attachment and social networks promoting the continuity of children's cultural identity; (2) their perception of working on the streets as a vital need to contribute to family income; and (3) the way young subjects resituated themselves both in their relation with the mainstream culture and within their own culture.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899996

     

  • Using data from a recent ethnographic research project on microcredit, power, and poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, this article demonstrates that the relationship of women with both NGOs and male relatives is one of dependency and subordination. Gendered power relations, embedded in NGO practices and socio-cultural gender norms, influence the female borrowers to accept the domination of the fieldworkers and their male relatives. This article examines how and why NGOs create power inequalities between fieldworkers and female borrowers, why the fieldworkers dominate a group of women, and why these women continue to participate in microcredit programmes.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.896877

     

  • This article explores three NGO projects that assemble and distribute clean birthing kits in Ethiopia. It contrasts the government's health strategy that aims to increase skilled birth attendance, with local realities as most women in rural and remote settings give birth at home, often in unhygienic conditions, and without skilled assistance. Many health facilities are also unable to provide hygienic conditions for birthing women. The findings indicate that clean birth kits have assisted the NGOs to effectively promote clean delivery at home or in health facilities, and to encourage antenatal care, and early referral to emergency obstetric and new-born care.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899321

     

  • Since 2006, international organisations in Lao PDR have worked closely with local actors in order to foster the creation of an enabling environment for civil society. By conceiving of civil society development as a system involving a number of closely-connected actors and levels, international actors have been able to contribute to both the adoption of a Decree on Associations, which for the first time in Lao history regulates the civil society sector, and to the organisational strengthening of the few existing domestic organisations. This paper evaluates the impact of international actors' initiatives and assesses civil society's prospects for engaging in human rights work.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899995

     

  • To achieve a top-to-bottom growth of the “green economy”, incentives and enablers need to be identified for those micro enterprises working at the grassroots level. A three-year study of 1,300 social and environmental enterprises in developing countries reveals how they are developing new products and services for their communities, using new business models. But their scale-up is hampered by lack of access to research and technology support and gender barriers, as well as challenges with complex partnerships, progress monitoring, and financial viability. A large pool of innovative ideas remains untapped and an opportunity to build a sustainable economy is being missed.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899561

  • The extent to which project outcomes are sustained years after development projects have ended is not routinely investigated. This study assessed the long-term impacts of a fire management project in eastern Indonesia seven years after the funding ended. Post-project evaluation increased understanding of the factors determining sustainability of project outcomes and links to development impacts. The continuation of community fire management and agroforestry groups was linked to demonstration of benefits to farmers and multi-level engagement. Activities had ceased where ownership was disputed. Some long-term impacts were outside the original aims of the fire project, including district government agencies applying fire mapping skills to other development issues.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899320

     

  • Nigeria's abundant natural resource endowments should earn the country's bragging rights as the “Giant of Africa”. Instead, 52 years of corrupt practices among the often recycled ruling elites in post-independence Nigeria have crippled this giant and turned what should be one of the country's strongest assets – its vast oil wealth – into a curse. This article critically examines the concerns for corruption as an enduring obstacle to Nigeria's development writ large. After providing a historical trajectory of corrupt practices in Nigeria from the mid-1980s to the present, it discusses some of the recent corruption scandals in the country, in particular the issues surrounding the US$6.8 billion that was drained from Nigeria between 2009 and 2012 in the fuel subsidy scam. The conclusion makes a case for the reworking of a pervasive system in Nigeria that “pardons” corruption and “recycles” corrupt rulers.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899559

     

  • Acknowledging debates about what constitutes effective and useful evaluation practice, this paper explores the particular challenges of evaluating an innovative approach to community development for multiple stakeholders with different interests and different levels of confidence in particular evaluation methodologies. The innovation – applying an Asset Based approach to Community Development (ABCD) in an Ethiopian context – presents further challenges to evaluation because of its open-ended nature and problems of attribution. On the other hand, the culture of risk-taking encouraged by the supporters of innovation provides the space for genuine lessons to be learnt about failure as well as success.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.899560

     

  • Remitting outweighs foreign aid by a rate of more than eight times, resulting in a skewed perception of the Haitian economy and consequent hindrance to development. Endowing Haitian state institutions and civil society by strengthening the potential role of migrants’ remittances in regional socio-economic reconstruction could prevent some of the mistakes uncovered in previous development policies from recurring in current nation-building initiatives. The funding gap of the United Nations’ short term funded projects could be bridged with a long term commitment of a new migrant class of investors to finance productive projects and endow regional participatory institutions.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.902427
     

     

  • Despite a recent surge in popularity, critical gaps remain in effectively building the capacity of organisations through global development projects. Two non-governmental organisations, FHI 360 and Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), established a partnership focused on strengthening CTPH's organisational capacity to conduct high quality monitoring and evaluation and to effectively advocate for integrated population, health, and environment work. To help inform the design and implementation of future capacity building programmes, the partners describe their lessons learnt as illustrated through the five key capacity building steps: stakeholder engagement and partnership formation; capacity needs assessment; capacity plan design; plan implementation; and evaluation.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.897687

     

  • Climate change is real, it is happening, and it is man-made (IPCC WGI 2013). We also know that we have already put so many greenhouse gas (GHG) pollutants into the atmosphere that we will see significant and long-term change that we need to adapt and adjust to (IISD 2014). It is fundamentally important for all development practitioners to understand these impacts and to get to grips with the challenge of how and when to adapt to climate change.

    As this special issue went to print, the international science community gathered to discuss their understanding of climate change impacts and to produce an update of the assessment that was made five years ago (IISD 2014).

    There are plenty of grim presentations1 of what the extremes of the possible climate scenarios will throw at us over the next 100 years, but not all change will be disastrous; some change will be beneficial, but much of the change will happen at an unprecedented rate that will require the best possible analysis and understanding of how and when we should adapt to climate change.
     

    This is particularly important for development practitioners as we invest in ensuring that poverty is reduced and eliminated and the well-being of everyone is improved. Many countries and communities around the world are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but developing economies may on one hand be less resilient to the impact, but could on the other hand be in a better position to make their development climate smart by adapting at the right time and in the right places to make the most efficient use of their economic resources.

    The articles in this special issue shine a light on the complexity and the multi-dimensional aspects of climate change adaptation. They gather some of the experiences of addressing climate change impacts in a development context. I would like to highlight a few facets of adaptation and development that are covered by these articles. These are aspects that I believe are important for actions and for the debate and discussion of priorities and approaches.

    Dealing with uncertainty

    When development practitioners are faced with decisions that involve adaptation to climate change we must balance a series of uncertainties. We do not know how effectively the world community will address the need to reduce GHG-emissions or how fast low carbon technologies2 will be introduced – how well we, as a world, will be able to mitigate further climate change. We know that we are currently on a pathway slightly worse than the ‘business as usual’ scenarios (IPCC WGI 2013), but we also know that efforts to reduce emissions are accelerating in the industrialised countries and that growth in carbon emissions is slowing. This could be consistent with the reduction scenarios in the IPCC report on the physical climate science (RCP 2.6 and RCP 4.5), but only if additional and significant action is taken over the next few years

    In addition, climate sensitivity is uncertain with temperature increases ranging from 1.5–4.5°C. This range was lowered slightly by the IPCC report in September 2013, compared to previous years' assessments. Finally, the global science community is just beginning to understand how nature and people react to such changes, and the most recent IPCC report on climate impacts was released as this special issue went to press. There is still a huge range in assessments of the economic impact of additional temperature increases of approximately 2°C, putting global aggregate economic losses somewhere between 0.2 and 2.0% of income. Losses will accelerate with additional warming. A recent World Bank (2013) report estimated global adaptation costs to be in the range of US$70–100 billion per year in developing countries from 2010 to 2050. This figure is often disputed, but probably still the most accurate estimate that exists. Both of these estimates are still incomplete and have recognised limitations. The headlines from the latest IPCC (2014) report (the Summary for Policy Makers of the Working Group II report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) show that:

    This is the most comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the impacts of climate change ever produced, reflecting the consensus of hundreds of the world's leading scientists, based on more than 12,000 peer reviewed articles and agreed by more than 120 governments following an extensive review process.

    The impacts of climate change are expected to slow down economic growth, erode food security, and make poverty alleviation more difficult.

    Unmitigated climate change poses great risks to global food and water security, human health, natural ecosystems, and economic development. The poor and marginalised are most vulnerable. Urban areas, low-lying areas, and emerging hotspots of hunger are most at risk.

    Effective and inclusive climate change adaptation can help to build a richer, more resilient world in the near-term and beyond.

    Adaptation is essential in dealing with the risks of climate change, but there are limits to what adaptation can achieve, so urgent action is also needed to reduce emissions.

    Effectively dealing with the impacts of climate change is about good risk management.

    Many of the articles in this special edition address parts of this complexity of uncertainty. Last year, DFID published a Topic Guide on decision-making under uncertainty (Ranger 2013) to help practitioners avoid the worst trap of all: to defer, avoid, or delay decisions because of the uncertainty of some aspects of change and adaptation.

    To begin the issue, Wheeler sets out the imperative for investing in better climate adaptation and resilience as part of development assistance programmes. Ranger et al. look at the quality of those decisions by major funders and address how these organisations fare when it comes to assessments of the vulnerability of the people they provide assistance for.

    Making good vulnerability assessments

    With the uncertainties that exist, it can be a challenge to ensure good vulnerability assessments as a foundation for development interventions. Two articles look into the experience of vulnerability assessments in two different settings where only limited research has taken place: fragile and conflict settings and the emerging area of urban development. These pieces by Vivekananda and Smith and Papchristodoulou et al. both explore areas where practitioners are in need of more research, particularly as both are likely to be the target of more development interventions in the future.

    Resilience

    Three articles follow on from this to help us understand how building resilience to the impacts of climate change plays a central role in safeguarding development outcomes. Moench links the vulnerability assessments to a framework for analytical assessments and an iterative planning process developed for urban processes but with wider application for all climate resilience interventions. Rai et al. offer interesting insights from Bangladesh, one of the countries with perhaps the most developed experience in building resilience to weather variability and climate change.

    The adaptation deficit

    Khan's article on basic services for resilience opens an interesting angle that involves a rapidly-evolving concept: that of the adaptation deficit. This is the notion that interventions that need to be made irrespective of climate change impacts, either because they represent good practice in managing natural resources or a requirement for human well-being, will in themselves be effective measures to adapt to climate change and create resilience. The first paper by Sharma et al similarly explores how a focus on improving local governance systems, an important development goal outside climate change, creates the foundation for good climate adaptation. For many years, the joint UNEP/UNDP Poverty and Environment Initiative (PEI) has explored this area, and the paper by Latif et al. has collected useful learning from several areas covered by the programme.

    Urban and rural

    Several papers address the particular context of urban development, as mentioned above and the two contexts (urban and rural) in which interventions to build climate resilience take place are explored in three papers. Kutter and Westby look at the holistic landscape approach to ensuring well-integrated rural interventions. The second Sharma et al. paper also focuses on the experience in the rural context.

    There are distinct differences in the approach needed in rural and urban climate change adaptation, and both are essential for a good understanding of effective climate resilience. Karanth and Archer offer a useful contribution to addressing these twin pillars of adaptation.
     

    Notes
    Guest Editor
    1 For example, see “Official prophecy of doom: Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy”, in the Independent Online, Tuesday 18 March 2014

    2 Renewable energy, emission reduction technology, such as carbon capture and storage and energy efficiency measures.
     

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.914466

     

  • This paper discusses the evolution and application of the Climate Resilience Framework (CRF). The framework focuses on the roles of systems, agents, institutions, and exposure in climate resilience and adaptation, and supports planning and strategic policy development using iterative shared learning techniques. Conceptual foundations of the CRF are explored, along with its application in a range of implementation and research contexts, including: urban planning (Asia), food systems (Nepal, Central America), and post-flood recovery (Pakistan, USA). These illustrate how analysis of system dynamics and agent behaviour in different institutional contexts can be used to identify points of entry for building resilience.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.909385

     

  • Leave no one behind. That is the key message for reducing poverty worldwide from the recent report, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development”, from the High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-20152. High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 Development Agenda. 2013). It is a bold aspiration, and one that lays down a grand challenge to all those involved in some way with international development and poverty reduction. Many difficult and complex factors need to be addressed to achieve this goal; foremost amongst these is climate change.

    The full viewpoint article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.907774

     

  • Official development assistance currently totals around US$130 billion per year, an order of magnitude greater than international climate finance. To safeguard development progress and secure the long-term effectiveness of these investments, projects must be designed to be resilient to climate change. This article reviews 250 projects for three countries from two development organisations and finds that between 2% and 30% of these may require action now to “future-proof” investments and policies. Both organisations show improvements in the recognition of climate change in projects, but many projects are still not future-proof.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.911818

  • To understand resilience to climate and environmental changes in fragile and conflict-affected societies is particularly important but equally challenging. In this paper, we first develop a conceptual framework to explore the climate-fragility-conflict and climate-resilience-peace nexus. Second, we discuss approaches to promote pathways from climatic changes to peace. We draw on the relevant literature and International Alert's experience in fragile and conflict-affected societies to stress the key role of resilience. To build resilience, climate, development, peacebuilding, and government actors would have to overcome bureaucratic and institutional barriers and cooperate across thematic and regional silos.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.909384

     

  • This paper draws on the results from a recent World Bank-funded project designed to inform policy-making and climate change adaptation planning in small and medium-sized cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus was on floods and landslides, which are the two most common climate-related risks in cities across the region. The project allowed the application of the Urban Risk Assessment (URA) tool developed by the World Bank and the drawing of valuable lessons which may also be applicable to the many methods and tools available for climate change adaptation planning in the rapidly urbanising cities of developing countries.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.907773

     

  • This paper examines how mainstreaming of urban climate change resilience – a crucial consideration in an increasingly urbanised world – is occurring at both the city and national scale, using the case of an internationally-funded resilience-building initiative in India. Surat city's newly-established Climate Change Trust illustrates the importance of an institutionalised mechanism for coordinating and sustaining climate initiatives. Concurrently, climate resilience is being mainstreamed into the national urban development agenda, through a network of Indian institutions. These two nascent mechanisms offer avenues for local city-level experiences to inform national directives, driving and sustaining the urban climate adaptation agenda across India.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.911246

     

  • Bangladesh is one of the first least developed countries (LDCs) to develop a long-term climate change strategy, the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP). Two funds were set up after developing the BCCSAP, one using government resources (BCCTF) and the other using donor resources (BCCRF). This paper uses the “building blocks” framework to analyse changes that occur when progressing from planning to finance and implementation by comparing the BCCRF and BCCTF. This analysis reveals how governance enablers are influenced by political economy dynamics that steer funding decisions and implementation outcomes, and provides lessons for countries pursuing climate resilience.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.908822

  • Global competition for natural resources is intense and the supply of those resources is increasingly more constrained by climate variability and change. Governments and international development agencies have the dual responsibility to meet the socio-economic needs of the poorest and most vulnerable people while preserving and enhancing their natural capital. These responsibilities often are at odds with each other and different stakeholder groups have prioritised one over the other. This paper suggests that the landscape approach provides a solution for stakeholders to achieve climate change mitigation, adaptation, and poverty reduction goals, though not without some trade-offs.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.907241

  • In a transect along Indus River after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, this article explores the relationship between the use and duration of use of basic services, among those who recovered well and those who did not, using non-parametric statistical testing in a quasi-experimental design. The research shows a clear and strong correlation between access and duration of usage of certain services before the disaster, and the rate of recovery in each location. This analysis demonstrates a relatively robust and cost-effective methodology to identify and prioritise development interventions that build resilience against climatic shocks that are not undertaken at the cost of poverty reduction.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.908823

  • Policies developed at national levels can be unresponsive to local needs. Often they do not provide the rural poor with access to the assets and services they need to allow them to innovate and adapt to the ways that increased climate variability and change exacerbate challenges to basic securities – food, water, energy, and well-being. In development deficit circumstances, common pool resources are important for climate adaptation purposes. In order for climate adaptation actions to deliver resilience, local perspectives and knowledge need to be recognised and given due priority in formal planning systems. Basing formal adaptive development planning on local strategies can support and strengthen measures that people have been tested and know to work. Local climate adaptation through collective action can address current increases in climate variability, future incremental changes, and the need to transform existing systems to deal with qualitative shifts in climate. These types of adaptation can work in cumulative ways. The results of local adaptation collective action that have benefits of low rivalry between users while being highly inclusive can be considered “local public goods”. Evidence is beginning to emerge that when local governance systems facilitate high levels of participation in planning collective action for climate adaptation, and direct access to resources for implementing local plans, “local public goods” can be created and common pool resources better managed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.907240

     

  • The economy of Odisha is primarily agrarian. Over 80% of the population of Odisha live in rural areas, where levels of poverty are higher than in the state's towns and cities. They depend for their livelihoods on farming and collecting forest products. During the dry season, many migrate elsewhere in Odisha and nearby states in search of temporary work as labourers. Odisha has the highest proportion of inhabitants from scheduled tribes and scheduled castes of all the states in India (39.9% compared to 24% nationally). These groups are marginalised and experience high rates of poverty, low levels of education and poor health. They are highly vulnerable to climate change, due to poverty and dependence on climate-sensitive livelihoods in a vulnerable region. The Western Odisha Rural Livelihoods Project sought to reduce poverty by improving communities' water resources, agriculture, and incomes. Communities were involved throughout and are now better able to respond to climate variability (both droughts and heavy rains). The Government of Odisha took full ownership of the project and state and national governments subsequently adopted approaches used by WORLP.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.911817

  • This paper examines mainstreaming environment and climate change into development policy, planning, and budgeting. It looks at why we should integrate environment and climate and outlines challenges and successes. One result is that governments’ progress pro-poor and equitable development. Governance gains are important too: co-benefits include more transparent decision making and better cross-government working. Ultimately, the impact of mainstreaming has increased awareness, changed perceptions, and improved the way inter-sectoral decisions are made, especially in climate adaptation. This supports countries to achieve their sustainable development ambitions – lessons which could be applied to a post-2015 development agenda.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.911819

     

  • Development theory and practice in developing countries are dominated by the power of Western ideas, worldviews, actors, tools, models, and frameworks. Consequently, the resulting development interventions may too rarely be locally rooted, locally driven, or resonant with local context. Another reality is that theories and practice from developing countries rarely travel to the Western agencies dominating development, undermining the possibility of a beneficial synergy that could be obtained from the best of the two worlds: West and developing countries. There are many reasons why the experience of locally driven development is not communicated back to global development actors, including but not limited to the marginal role of Southern voices in global fora. Perhaps the greatest unwelcome and unintended outcome is that by trying to create, or perhaps better said, “clone” development in developing countries in the image of Western “development”, development efforts defeat their own purpose through undermining their own relevance, legitimacy, and sustainability.
     

    To access the pdf version, please follow the link below:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938616
     

  • Contemporary development issues are not new. All groups of people, based on their worldviews and contexts, found ways of addressing these societal problems. By their nature, solutions were relevant, legitimate, and sustainable in their contexts. A prerequisite for effective development practice is to understand and respect the roots of African culture. There needs to be a “rootedness” to change and development. Exogenous ideas and practices of potential benefit to Africa must build from the inside out, not outside-in, as an imposition. This article illustrates how African societies have viewed and dealt with these socio-political issues from within.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.937397

     

  • This article aims to provide knowledge and practical guidance to managing and implementing within the framework of endogenous development. The paper gives a theoretical overview of endogenous development, linked to issues of globalisation and poverty, and ongoing work among European institutions and academics that suggest shifts in Europe from exogenous to endogenous development approaches. It then makes a case for a paradigm shift – an African alternative to modernisation and development, namely endogenous development – using experiences with two NGOs in Ghana and Zimbabwe to locate theory in practice. The paper concludes with some empirical pre-requisites for conducting endogenous development with rural communities.

    This article is prompted by the requests of my students at the University for Development Studies, Ghana, for knowledge and information, and practical guidance to managing and implementing within the framework of endogenous development. I start by giving a theoretical overview of the concept of endogenous development and link it with current issues of globalisation and poverty. I briefly mention current work among European institutions and academics that suggest shifts in Europe from exogenous to endogenous development approaches. Encouraged by such developments, I then make a case for a paradigm shift – an African alternative to modernisation and development, endogenous development. I bring to light the experiences with endogenous development in two NGOs – CECIK (Ghana) and AZTREC (Zimbabwe) – in order to locate theory in practice (praxis). I conclude by providing some empirical prerequisites for conducting endogenous development with rural communities, which demonstrate one way of conducting experimentation with farmers within the context of endogenous development.

    The full article is available here: 

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938615

  • The reflection that follows is unusual in a peer-reviewed journal, but it is here because the shaping of development policy and practices comes not just from data analysis, but also from the stories of people who are experiencing the psycho-social and cultural traumas many face as they are thrust into a globalised world. We think of the colonial experience in Africa, particularly after 1885, as having devalued and destroyed African history and culture. This story from Charles Banda, born just as independence was coming to Africa, suggests that whatever damage the colonial powers did to African societies, the process of destruction may have, in fact, accelerated in post-colonial Africa. The overlay of new structures, institutions, and cultural practices from the colonial period – for example, the adoption of Christianity – did not totally displace African traditions. African culture may have to some degree been insulated by indirect rule and other colonial governance patterns. Post-colonial Africa has experienced turbo-charged change, as multiple effects of globalisation, including information technology, migration, and commercialisation, crossed national borders and eroded local ways of doing things. Banda, speaking as one who has experienced this, reflects on what this rapid change means for African families and communities. This is a personal story, not often heard as we consider “development”. We could find many other such personal reflections, different in the details, but similar in the concerns of disorientation from one's heritage. Though the contexts may differ, the concerns may not be so different from those of certain generations in the developed world, who are also seeking to find meaning in a globalised world.

    Still, this does not answer the question of why this reflection should appear in a journal of development practice. As older generations mourn the loss of traditions and practices that regulated behaviour and gave life meaning, or the loss of language, religious traditions, and communal identity, new generations are thrust into an individualistic market society. Banda's reflections offer clues on how to draw on the past to build the future. The postscript addresses this.
     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.939060

     

  • Reflective and theoretical, this article explores the foundations and principles of African philanthropy and juxtaposes them with pan-African-led development. It pays particular attention to new continental initiatives, such as Agenda 2063. It points out that African philanthropy, by its definition and practice, is the foundation for development. This is because the identity of an African is premised on philanthropic notions of solidarity, interconnectedness, interdependencies, reciprocity, mutuality, and a continuum of relationships. No one embodies these better than Nelson Mandela in his demonstration of the link that exists between pan-Africanism and African philanthropy in the development process.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.937399

     

  • Wicked problems are complex problems that are seemingly impossible to solve. However, an analysis of selected traditional African philosophies provides insight into how certain traditions may be applied in a practical sense to address social and environmental problems. Further, many newer collaborative and ‘wiki’-based solutions provide a natural way for Africans and other global actors to participate in lessening the impact of global wicked problems. Ushahidi and the Geo-Wiki Project serve as examples of organisations that have provided a platform for this type of open development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.934786

     

  • Implementing change is far harder than making policy pronouncements that call for change. Rwanda, in the 20 years since the 1994 genocide, has made substantial progress in turning around its economy and in meeting key Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Real GDP in Rwanda grew at a rate of over 8% per year in the past years, the percentage of the people living in poverty has dropped by 14%, and UNDP reports that Rwanda is on track to meeting many but not all MDGs by 2015. Rwanda's progress in economic and social spheres stands out in Africa, where many countries, despite commitments to the MDGs, lag behind on performance. The difference in Rwanda is the leadership's attention to implementation, and the incorporation of endogenous practices, particularly into planning and accountability. This article is based on observations of practice at national and community levels and of policy design and implementation. It is a by-product of a study of the impact of different approaches to community health delivery systems in Rwanda, completed as part of the author's doctoral dissertation, and also of the author's experience working within the government in Rwanda.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.936366

     

  • Agricultural innovations are increasingly emerging from African research scientists. This paper looks at an innovation developed by animal scientists at the University of Agriculture Abeokuta in Nigeria. They identified a method for drying cassava peels, which creates an income source for rural women, reduces environmental waste, and raises the income of goat herders by transforming the cassava waste into animal feed. Initially funded by a World Bank grant, this paper addresses the challenges of securing donor funding for local innovations and presents an argument for a new model of development that supports locally driven solutions to current development issues.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.937396

     

  • International development aid is driven by actors steeped in Western neo-liberal theory and practice. Africa has largely received failed Western aid, administered mainly through international NGOs in neo-comprador relationships. This article calls for African-centred and -led development, revitalised through endogenous development (ED) praxis. Using a water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector case study from Ghana, the article theorises Africa's WASH development within the context of globalisation and the politics of knowledge production on Africa. It shows how ED provides African people with self-determining and culturally relevant development necessary for WASH justice and improved health and livelihoods.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.936367

     

  • This practical note examines the implementation approach of African Development Solutions (Adeso) in Somalia, a country which is recovering from over two decades of conflict. It discusses how their endogenously derived targeting method, known as ICBT, is implemented and the way it challenges social norms for positive outcomes. Cash-based response is analysed as a recovery method as well as a way to engage community participation, particularly with marginalised groups. Implementation challenges are highlighted to explore the relationship between traditional and globalised (Western) value.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938614

     

  • The paper examines how the perceived ownership of a water resource negatively influenced local people's attitudes towards payment of potable water tariffs and exacerbated conflicts between water users and service providers in the Dalun community of the northern region of Ghana. The paper presents a case study of how community participation and endogenous approaches to conflict resolution contributed to payment of water tariffs. The findings show that the establishment of a tri-water sector partnership (TWSP), consisting of the Ghana Water Company Ltd (GWCL), private sector development practitioners, and community water boards, led to positive mediation of water tariff conflicts using the institution of chieftaincy. Alternative, endogenous conflict resolution methods combined with modern methods in a tripartite partnership showed promise as an approach to managing conflicts in water projects and in broader poverty reduction efforts.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.940852

     

  • Endogenous African governance systems are criticised for excluding women. This critique ignores several realities that women have played roles different from those of men. This article examines the roles that women play in endogenous governance structures of patrilineal and matrilineal ethnic groups in rural areas in Malawi on leadership, violent conflict prevention, and transformation. It argues that these endogenous governance systems inherently contain features that enable women to actively participate and play powerful leadership roles, though men dominate in terms of numbers and authority. These gender patterns do not seem to change much despite the changing political, social, and economic environment.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938613

     

  • The gap between theories and the actual practice of development is often great, but the gap between concepts of endogenous approaches and the practice of endogenous development may be hardest to bridge, particularly when the funding agency is a global actor. Nathalie Tinguery, Country Program Coordinator for US African Development Foundation (USADF) in Burkina Faso, reflects on her experience of incorporating values and goals into her development practice of working with communities and for an international funder. She describes how she remains focused on endogenous development, what this means in her development practice, and what it is about USADF policies and practice that make this brand of endogenous development possible. Views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official positions of USADF.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.939947

     

  • Economic and social development has occurred through the millennia. The post-World War II and post-colonial periods have ushered in a new era of donor-led development assistance policies and of professional development practice. Since the 1950s, development has been conceived of as rich and technologically advanced countries helping poor countries develop – a delivery system of development. The dominant development priority has been economic growth as opposed to livelihoods and social/human development. With some interesting exceptions, development, seen as development assistance, has been largely top down, or exogenously driven. In recent decades, scholars, practitioners, and even donors have called for participatory approaches, building on local institutions, culture, capacity, and local ownership. There remains a gap between the rhetoric and the practice of development. If we want to move from top-down, exogenous development to development that encompasses endogenous approaches, we must understand the barriers posed by practices in both donor and recipient country development organisations. This paper explores the barriers and possible remedies open to practitioners, policymakers, and academics at different levels.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.937398

     

  • Most African states like The Gambia use European languages for state activities and formal education. Africa has been a global pilot site for “transplanted” development initiatives with apparently consistent outcomes: failure, medium triumph, or unsustainable “success stories”. Its natural resources have been fully exploited, perhaps at the expense of resources like mother-tongue languages. Sidelining mother-tongue languages as the medium for the translation of the voice of the state, explains the gap in cultural relevance of many borrowed development initiatives, but also the neglect of workable endogenous practices. Africa must look inwards and exploit its indigenous language assets to benefit sustained development.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.941789

  • More than 50 years after independence Africa is yet to move from colonial to post-colonial identity – and to entitlement to determining its own destiny. Increasingly, however, African development thinkers and practitioners are questioning the dominance of externally driven, mostly Western models of development, which they believe have done little to date toward bringing about self-reliant sustainable development. We have observed successful patterns of endogenously led development in East Asia and Brazil. In Africa the papers included here suggest emerging new patterns of local leadership and of resurrecting and renewing cultural and traditional strengths to support modern development. Endogenous development, while a sometimes awkward term, is a concept increasingly informing practice.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938617

     

  • More than 50 years after independence Africa is yet to move from colonial to post-colonial identity – and to entitlement to determining its own destiny. Increasingly, however, African development thinkers and practitioners are questioning the dominance of externally driven, mostly Western models of development, which they believe have done little to date toward bringing about self-reliant sustainable development. We have observed successful patterns of endogenously led development in East Asia and Brazil. In Africa the papers included here suggest emerging new patterns of local leadership and of resurrecting and renewing cultural and traditional strengths to support modern development. Endogenous development, while a sometimes awkward term, is a concept increasingly informing practice.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.938617

     

  • How do projects grow? How do they fail? What accounts for their changing fortunes? This paper uses the archives of a 1970s modernisation scheme to explore the life cycle of a long-running project, concerning the production of leaf protein in Nigeria. It argues that archives can be very useful for understanding success and failure, and encourages practitioners to take an interest in the story of past projects, even those that failed. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, it argues that alliances are key to understanding project lifecycles, suggesting that practitioners focus on strengthening local relationships, rather than seeking answers in universal management templates.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.950191

     

  • This paper examines how three sustainability factors (water supply, regulatory policy, local management) are affecting the sustainability of a community water supply project in Kenya. Findings show that after 10 years the project is at a threshold of sustainability – it may yet fail. Changing rainfall patterns and additional withdrawals from new projects are threatening available water supply. The community is resisting compliance with water sector reforms including those intended to benefit community-managed projects. Community management deficiencies and a lack of supportive external relationships are impeding project continuity and sustainable local water management.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.944485

     

  • Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) has become a new paradigm in post-conflict development. It combines infrastructure restoration with introducing good governance at the local level. Recent evaluations show that governance objectives are not easily met and significant change cannot be demonstrated. This paper adds to this argument on the basis of ethnographic research on a CDR programme in eastern DRC. It seeks to find explanations for the lack of demonstrable governance impact in the content and implementation of training. It identifies room for improvement by better adjusting capacity building to locally prevailing accountability mechanisms and by coordinating capacity building with other development programmes.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.944484

  • During the past few years within South Africa there has been a proliferation of state-led community development initiatives tasked to form community-based cooperatives. It is into such a context that research was conducted during 2011–13 into how South African community development workers understand and conduct their professional practice in relation to cooperative formation.

    Findings from the research consider issues such as: a dilemma of statecraft – working within instrumental contexts; the emotional work required of the practitioner; and, finally, confusing the developmental process. The discussions contribute to both theory-building and practice wisdom, while also contributing to South African cooperative policy.

     

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.943155

  • The problem of poverty pockets in middle income countries has been identified as a major constraint for realising the Millennium Development Goals. There is an international need to develop programmes that alleviate poverty of identified populations without incurring their dependency on external aid. Aiming at developing such a programme, this article introduces the Japanese post-war Life Improvement Program and analyses the potential of its application to contemporary developing countries for poverty alleviation in a self-sufficient manner, intending to empower women. Issues such as gender relations, evaluating impacts, and linking practices to larger programmes and policies are also discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.952273

  • This paper argues that religion influences the ways that people think and speak about corruption, typically leading to condemnation. However, it is also argued that, in a systemically corrupt country, such condemnation is unlikely to influence actual corrupt behaviour. Based on fieldwork in India, the paper finds that existing anti-corruption policies based on a principal-agent understanding of corruption, even if they incorporate religious organisations and leaders, are unlikely to work, partly because people consider “religion” to be a discredited entity. Instead, the paper argues that if corruption were to be seen as a collective action problem, anti-corruption practice would need significant rethinking. Despite its current lack of influence, revised policies and practices may see a role for religion.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.942215

     

  • This article explores perceived shifts in roles for NGOs and religious actors after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority with the 1993 Oslo Accords, using original data from a survey of more than 1,000 community members in the West Bank and Gaza. The survey data show a centralisation of requests for assistance from the Palestinian National Authority, with a decrease in requests from local government, NGOs, and religious actors after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority. The support the empirical findings lend to theories of government and voluntary failure is discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.952272

     

  • This article explores perceived shifts in roles for NGOs and religious actors after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority with the 1993 Oslo Accords, using original data from a survey of more than 1,000 community members in the West Bank and Gaza. The survey data show a centralisation of requests for assistance from the Palestinian National Authority, with a decrease in requests from local government, NGOs, and religious actors after the creation of the Palestinian National Authority. The support the empirical findings lend to theories of government and voluntary failure is discussed.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.952272

     

  • The proliferation of NGOs, particularly in developing countries over the last five decades, has prompted debates on the extent to which NGO services have been able to match the priorities of disadvantaged groups such as low castes and ethnic groups in Nepal. This paper explores the development priorities of villagers from a village in Nepal (Thecho), and their views regarding the match between services offered by NGOs and those priorities. Additionally, the paper highlights the importance of NGOs understanding contextual realities while implementing development activities.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.950190

     

  • In South Africa, local economic development has become the focus to overcome obstacles such as low skills, low entrepreneurial culture, weak support mechanisms, and spatial marginalisation, which lead to high unemployment and poverty. With conventional approaches having little effect, local communities are looking for innovative approaches to their economic challenges. PACA methodology prepares an action-oriented diagnostic of the local economy to initiate economic development initiatives. It mobilises local stakeholders to take an active role through fast analysis and action learning. This article assesses how the PACA approach implemented by George Municipality was applied, and what advantages and limitations were experienced.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.953036

     

  • Projects introducing improved stoves that save firewood and reduce emissions and indoor smoke address real needs but have often not succeeded as expected. One of the reasons may be that lessons have not been learnt effectively. We reviewed the only available comprehensive list of principles for stove project design. We modified it, and added more principles based on literature and our own experience. Our list consists of 20 principles covering the areas of awareness creation of multiple benefits, stove design and variety, participation of the beneficiaries, production modes, role of subsidies, and the necessity of accurate assessments and reporting.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.952274

     

  • In 2008, an NGO showed videos about rice to farmers in 19 villages in Benin. A study in 2013 showed that farmers remembered the videos, even after five years had passed. In most of the villages at least some farmers experimented with rice farming or with new technology after the video screenings, which attracted large audiences of community members, including youth and women. Some of the villagers also visited extension agencies to get rice seed, and occasionally to seek more information. Farmers can benefit from agricultural learning videos shown by organisations with little previous agricultural experience. Videos do not necessarily need to be facilitated by an expert who knows the subject. Sometimes the video can speak for itself.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.942216

     

  • As we move into 2015, many people will be considering the future of development, not least because of the inevitable fanfare which will be planned around the reviews of the Millennium Development Goals and their successors. Behind the high profile meetings and announcements will be a parallel set of debates around the future of aid and development. It is a fact that many countries that have attained middle-income status are now or have already faced reductions in international cooperation. Although some loan programmes may continue through the likes of development banks, concessionary grant funding is being reduced in many countries. This must inevitably lead to a discussion on the nature of development in a post-aid world, a discussion which may be more important than those around new global goals. New priorities are already emerging for the traditional donors, for example around what some call global public goods, often environmental, whilst others are more concerned about security issues, with poverty becoming less centre stage. The governments and citizens of developing and emerging economies may also be reconsidering their own priorities and approaches for the future. During the past year Development in Practice has encouraged special issues and other contributions on climate change and adaptation as well as endogenous forms of development in Africa. These pointed to new priorities as well as alternative thinking around development in Africa.

    As a development journal, we would like to encourage contributions of experiences, practices, and approaches which reflect the changing landscape of development, as due to funding and other changes the landscape moves to being less about international cooperation and more about local issues and negotiations between the state and its citizens. We are aware of many areas of new experimentation in development, such as the encouragement to the private sector to invest in various sectors including infrastructure and social services. Other governments, including India, are encouraging enhanced corporate social responsibility and others are contracting out the supply of services. Civil society groups continue to develop a myriad of niche interest groups covering everything from specific illnesses to local governance concerns, and are engaging in obtaining improved state services, providing alternatives to orthodox service delivery mechanisms, and democratic renewal. The changes and challenges confronting civil society were noted in the civil society at a crossroads special issue last year (Development in Practice 23.5&6). We could list so many new initiatives which can be brought together under the general rubric of development, and therefore we welcome contributions which explore these and other topics for forthcoming issues of Development in Practice, recognising that the face and practices of development will inevitably continue to change in coming years.

    Continuing our increased interest in climate change, the article by Syed Rahman and Mokbul Ahmad provides a valuable review of the six Mekong Delta countries in terms of financial support for climate change mitigation and adaptation. In light of inadequate financing, recommendations are produced for donors, recipient governments, and civil society groups. Giles Dobson discusses the tension between formulating a wider regional approach to maritime conservation and local participation by indigenous groups in areas they felt that they had historically been excluded from. The development of a partnership acceptable to both scientists and local groups for managing such areas is elaborated.

    Paul Kishindo, looking at “The unfinished village police unit”, gives a very practical review of why a project failed to be completed in rural Malawi. Kishindo concludes that attempts to maintain the previous practice of enforced participation could not compensate for the lack of enthusiasm for a programme which did not fit the majority view of what was a priority investment.

    Peer Ghulam Nabi reviews the coordination, or the lack of it, of aid efforts during and after the 2005 earthquake in Indian Kashmir. The article places an emphasis on NGOs, noting the complexity of programmes in a contested area where the political legitimacy of the military and local government is not accepted by all.

    Azadeh Chalabi develops an approach which brings together theoretical issues around a human rights approach to development with the practical elaboration of national human rights plans and planning. The article proposes a matrix underpinned by concepts of respect, protection, promotion and fulfilment of a range of commonly accepted rights.

    Debdatta Pal discusses issues around competition between formal and informal credit providers, specifically the tensions between credit and consumption for farm households.

    Cathy Green, Miniratu Soyoola, Mary Surridge, and Dynes Kaluba describe an evaluation of a training programme for community based maternal health volunteers which they show has had a number of positive impacts. The authors contend that this particular approach is suitable for wider use and scale elsewhere.

    Marguerite Hughes provides an enlightening analysis of Irish media coverage of NGOs in development, noting the predominance of references to their accountability over other issues such as legitimacy, and focusing on the donor perspective rather than other stakeholders.

    Ponsian Sewando explores value chains for cassava in Africa, providing some insights as to which the crop has failed to fulfil its commercial potential, despite its importance. Terry Leahy and Monika Goforth describe successful programmes to boost food security through sometimes unfashionable subsistence and low technology approaches, rather than the increasingly mainstream push towards more commercial solutions.

    In the much neglected area of policies towards research and development for emerging economies, Ahmed ElObeidy argues for increased investment and attention to effective R&D through national strategies in Arab countries. The article reviews such a proposal through the role of the private sector, entrepreneurship, a more enabling environment, and university leadership.

    Finally, on behalf of the editorial team, I would like to thank both all the authors and referees who we have worked with over 2014, and our very many readers. A list of those who have given their time and expertise to be peer reviewers this year is included in this issue. Special thanks are also due to our contributing editors, our editorial advisory group, and our colleagues at Taylor and Francis, for their support throughout the year.

    The pdf version of the article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.970762#.VI6nKC...

  • It has been widely believed that commercialisation is the solution to food insecurity in rural Africa. Project designs have attempted to set up agricultural cooperatives and encourage entrepreneurial farmers. Yet the problems revealed in the 1950s are still widespread. In a counter-perspective, some have argued for the relevance of subsistence and low-input agriculture. This article examines three NGO projects in South and South-eastern Africa which prioritise food security through household subsistence, using low-input technologies, along with an encouragement to produce a surplus for cash. We look at what these projects share and why their strategies work.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.969196#.VI6qIC...

     

  • This article examines a training approach for community health volunteers which increased access to maternal health services in rural communities in Zambia. The effectiveness of the training approach was evaluated in an operations research component. Skilled birth attendance rates increased by 63% from baseline over a two-year period in the intervention districts, out-performing increases recorded in control sites at statistically significant levels. As a low-cost, high-impact intervention which shows good sustainability potential, the approach is suitable for national level scale-up and for adaptation for use in other countries in support of maternal and new-born health goals

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.957165#.VI6ruy...
     

  • Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) countries lack sufficient funds to combat climate change. The growth of projects under the clean development mechanism (CDM) is not consistent in the region and the relation of that growth to national GDP is not equivalent either. The disbursement of climate funds promised by different countries and donor organisations to different countries in GMS region is very low. A few countries have relied more on external funds to combat climate change, while some have developed their own funds. A strong database and involvement of civil societies might help the region better utilise these climate funds.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.965131#.VI6ssi...

  • This article is based on a field study carried out in Indian-administered Kashmir after the 2005 earthquake. In this analysis of how non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) engage and coordinate with one another and with other disaster response agencies during post-disaster relief and rehabilitation operations, it can be concluded that NGDO coordination was ineffective. The research points out that, even though there is coordination among the international and national NGDOs, local NGDOs are seldom engaged in the overall coordination processes. The paper advocates developing coordination among the humanitarian agencies as a pre-disaster initiative for a more effective collaborative humanitarian disaster response.

    The full article is available here: 

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.964187#.VI6tYC...

  • Applying the “human rights-based approach to development” (HRBAD) in practice is the biggest challenge facing advocates of human rights and development. This article seeks to bridge between. HRBAD at a theoretical level and the National Human Rights Action Plans (NHRAP) at a practical level in order to not merely provide a tool for putting HRBAD into practice but also to prepare a theoretical foundation for NHRAPs. To integrate HRBAD into NHRAPs, the whole conceptual space of development is mapped into a matrix called a “Substantive-Procedural Matrix of Development” (SPMD). This matrix helps states develop their plans within the road to development. The utility of this matrix as a heuristic will be demonstrated in the case of the right to health.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.968529#.VI6uDy...

  • Extremely weak R&D has a negative impact on growth and development in Arab countries. Developing a better R&D strategy could enhance capacity and effectiveness of R&D. The failure of the previously developed strategies in Arab countries was due to lack of vision, incorrect identification of R&D priorities, and disregard consulting stakeholders. This article discusses the challenges of developing R&D national strategies in Arab countries including identifying R&D priorities, managing stakeholders, assessing the current situation of R&D, and defining objectives of the strategies.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.966654#.VI6uui...

  • Based on a quantitative content analysis of Irish Times newspaper articles, this study investigates how Irish relief and development NGOs were linked with the concepts of legitimacy and accountability in newspaper coverage between 1994 and 2009. Key findings included that NGO accountability received more coverage than NGO legitimacy, and “principal-agent” approaches to NGO accountability received more coverage than “stakeholder” approaches. Employing the media theories of agenda-setting and priming, one can infer that Irish Times readers might be more likely to evaluate Irish NGOs in terms of accountability than legitimacy and to consider NGO accountability in principal-agent rather than stakeholder terms.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.968837#.VI6vpy...

  •  In New Zealand indigenous participation is identified as a means to achieve effective environmental conservation and indigenous empowerment. This article suggests that within current frameworks the scope for meaningful authority and control to be devolved to indigenous communities is limited. The Mimiwhangata project demonstrates the importance of participatory processes in confronting policy shortcomings. Although the successful implementation of culture-centred conservation offers a conservation model both accommodating state-led goals and providing for indigenous cultural empowerment, structural change is required within conservation policy to achieve this outcome.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.964186#.VI6wRi...

  •  This study was conducted to examine the cassava value chain and determine strategies for enhancing farmers' profitable participation in the chain, to reduce poverty in Tanzania. Data were collected from 98 farmers from three villages of Morogoro rural district. Profit and marketing margins along the cassava value chain were computed. A linear model was estimated whereby farm size, experience, total family labour, group participation, non-crop livelihood sources, and food insecurity were the main determinants of profitability. The emerging recommendation was for farmers' participation in profitable cassava value chain strands by strengthened coordination, improved cassava varieties, and enhanced agronomic practices and processing technologies.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.966653#.VI6w5y...

  • Community self-help has been the principal strategy for creating social infrastructure in rural Malawi since independence. One rural community in Balaka district, southern Malawi, embarked on a project to construct a police unit as a response to rising incidents of crime. Begun in 1999, the project remains unfinished. There seems to be no interest in completing the work. This paper finds the explanation in the manner the project was initiated and how the village community was involved in its execution.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2013.753030#.VI6xei...

  • Using clues from transaction cost economics this note develops an intertemporal agricultural household model to explain the demand-side credit rationing from formal financial institutions in agrarian economies. The model employs ex-ante transaction costs, namely search cost and negotiation cost to explain this phenomenon. The model shows that with market failure an agricultural household's production decision is not separate from its consumption decision. This is when the policy analysis household approach, which includes simultaneous decision making in production and consumption side, becomes essential.

    The full article is available here:

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2014.965130#.VI6yMi...