By unearthing the connections between the literatures on participatory communication and civic engagement with the reality of postconflict peace, this article demonstrates how a communication for development (C4D) approach to engaging citizens in peacebuilding contributes to strengthening the reconstruction process at the end of the violence, while engendering a bottom up process based on dialogue and inclusivity. After offering a brief overview of the peacebuilding contexts, this article presents a theoretical discussion that brings to the surface not only the role of C4D in facilitating citizens participation in government decision making, but also its significance in creating an inclusive peacebuilding process that starts from the community. At the same time, this discussion begins to shed light on the relationship between communication for development and participatory governance.
Co-management of forest resources has gained acceptance among governments, development agencies and development practitioners as an alternative natural resources management strategy to the top-down or centralized government management approach. However, a significant methodological issue in the current literature on evaluation of co-management institutional arrangement is how to link these institutions with sustainable livelihood outcomes of the poor forest dependent communities. To address this limitation, there is need for linking co-management with the sustainability of the community, effectively for the sustainability of its livelihood. This article links two theoretical concepts—co-management and sustainable livelihood approach (SLA)—to formulate an evaluative framework for co-management of forest institutions and their associated livelihood outcomes.
This article traces the mounting interest in, and visibility of, girls and young women in development (WID) policy, especially since the turn of the twenty-first century when a ‘Smart Economics’ rationale for promoting gender equality and female empowerment has become ever more prominent and explicit. ‘Smart Economics’, which is strongly associated with an increased influence of corporate stakeholders, frequently through public–private partnerships (PPPs), stresses a ‘business case’ for investing in women for developmental (read economic) efficiency, with investment in younger generations of women being touted as more efficient still. The latter is encapsulated in the term ‘Smarter Economics’ with the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ being a showcase example. In this, and similar, initiatives linked with neoliberal development, ‘investing in girls’ appears to be driven not only by imperatives of ‘female empowerment’, but also to realize more general dividends for future economic growth and poverty alleviation. Yet, while it may well be that girls and young women have benefited from their rapid relocation from the sidelines towards the centre of development discourse and planning, major questions remain as to whose voices are prioritized, and whose agendas are primarily served by the current shift from ‘Smart’ to ‘Smarter Economics’.
The most crucial obstacle to equitable innovation and development is the tension between profit incentives and social justice. In the egalitarian tradition of social and political thought, there have been a number of theorists preoccupied with this tension. Among them Marx and Sen stand out as the most influential figures. This article evaluates their approaches and examines implications for technological innovation and economic development. The argument is that Marx’s needs-based approach is relational and therefore provides a radical resolution to the incentives–justice tension. By contrast, Sen’s approach is informational and therefore provides a policy solution to this tension. Both approaches imply that innovation and development can become more equitable through public action. However, in the case of Marx, public action assumes conflict between social classes; it aims at changing capitalist social relations and eliminating unjust exploitation. In the case of Sen, public action assumes consent between individuals; it aims at reforming public policy and eliminating capability deprivation.
This article argues that rapid agricultural growth, the benefits of which are broadly diffused, promotes structural change and economic development via a process which has, for the most part, gone unrecognized. Specifically, broad-based agricultural growth produces legitimacy for the political elite and this allows them to restructure the coalition upon which they depend. Thus, the influence on policy of the agrarian and/or merchant based elites can be reduced while that of manufacturing and export manufacturing based elites increased. Government policy can then be successfully reoriented to promote growth in manufacturing via structural change. The experience of Costa Rica is used to illustrate these ideas.
Since the mid-1990s, an ‘anticorruption consensus’ has emerged in international development policy: because corruption is taken to be invariably deleterious for investment and growth, eliminating or reducing corruption has come to be seen as a necessary precondition for development. This article takes issue with the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this proposition. To do so, it reviews and codifies an emerging strand of literature that transcends the narrow assumptions of economic models of corruption and theorizes much more carefully the social structures within which corruption takes place. This body of research, which heralds a ‘sociological turn’ in corruption studies, provides a robust framework to account for the economic effects of corruption in specific country contexts and suggests that fighting corruption per se might not always be necessary for development; in fact, it might sometimes prove counterproductive.
Research on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality has tended to focus on material transfers. This article refocuses attention on the intersection of material and psychosocial transfers, which reveals temporal and gendered complexities. It examines three key ideas emerging from the life course literature (relationality, intersectionality and intergenerationality) to shed light on how these complexities might be addressed. It is argued that a human well-being lens is potentially useful as a unifying framework to integrate these ideas, as it interrogates what living well means over the life course and how it is constructed relationally.
This article investigates whether colonialism is alive in contemporary German development cooperation (GDC) on obstetric care in Tanzania. Drawing on archives and interviews, it compares present-day interventions to German policy in ‘German East Africa’ (GEA) at the beginning of the 20th century. It argues that contemporary development cooperation can be considered colonial to a certain extent in that it is marked by a combination of racialization, developmentalism and trusteeship. However, colonial power today is fractured as German development professionals’ accounts of their work display a considerable degree of hesitancy and doubt. This article contributes to the knowledge on colonialism and development by discerning colonial power in the under-researched case of GDC as well as in the context of concrete policy and practice in a particular field of intervention.
This article coins the term ‘retroliberalism’ to describe the aid regime that has evolved out of the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) world order. This approach sees a partial return to the principles of classical liberalism with respect to the role of the state vis-à-vis the market, whilst also perpetuating a number of the principles of neoliberalism. At the same time, the rejuvenation of an active state harks back to modernization principles prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. In describing this regulatory shift we suggest that a retroliberal ‘manual’ for aid practice can be discerned. Our analysis utilizes evidence from recent reforms in a range of Western aid donors that are members of the United Nation’s DAC, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands. It also offers some comment on the increasing role and influence of non-traditional donors such as China in shaping the new regime. Ultimately, we argue that this state-led post-industrial modernization that serves to facilitate and sustain the accumulation of private capital harks back to the post-War development period.