Energy poverty amidst abundance in Malaysia: placing energy in multidimensional poverty

In developing countries the analysis of energy poverty has been framed in terms of a nexus; linking poverty, gender, and energy as obstacles to sustainable development. This article considers the dual challenges of energy and fuel poverty in Malaysia, a middle-income country boasting high levels of grid penetration, suggesting that there are limitations to this approach in relation to articulating the relationship between energy and poverty, specifying the dynamics of energy poverty, and informing policies to address this. Locating energy deprivation in the context of multidimensional poverty offers a basis for addressing energy poverty in a wider range of spatial and temporal contexts.     

Capacity building for adaptive management: a problem-based learning approach

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.     

Business economic impacts: The new frontier for corporate accountability

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 bring about more sustainable development at the macro level.     

Reducing poverty in sub-Saharan Africa: the need for participatory governance

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.     

The power of small-scale solar: gender,energy poverty,and entrepreneurship in Tanzania

Energy poverty is a major challenge in the developing world, with an estimated 1.2 billion people lacking household electricity. Although energy poverty affects both men and women, the burden of household energy supply disproportionately affects women in low-income countries in the developing world. This article examines the impact of a women-oriented solar lighting social enterprise, Solar Sister, in Tanzania for both solar entrepreneurs and customers, demonstrating that solar lanterns positively impact household savings, health, education and women’s economic productivity and empowerment. Our study argues that Solar Sister’s approach is successful because of its explicit gender lens. Providing energy access to women translates to a pro-woman, pro-child, and pro-family development intervention.     

Developing urban space: the changing role of NGOs in Bangladesh

Rapid urbanisation has been an emerging issue in recent decades, particularly for developing countries such as Bangladesh. As one of world’s largest international NGOs, BRAC, based in Bangladesh, is transiting towards a more integrated approach for alleviating urban poverty. This article presents BRAC’s current journey for eradicating urban poverty and outlines the characteristics of urban poverty, key issues faced by the urban poor, and learning that BRAC has accumulated through its urban interventions. Introducing the concept of “coproduction”, the article identifies BRAC’s priorities to eradicate urban poverty within the context of an overall urban strategy.     

转型期中俄贫困问题比较及反贫困意义的共性分析

中俄两国曾是世界上最大的两个社会主义国家 ,转型期都经历了此前不曾遇到的各种复杂问题。尽管两国选择的转型模式不同 ,转型期经济发展速度也存在着明显差异 ,但目前两国却共同面临着贫困问题。在绝对贫困与相对贫困、贫困数量与贫困发生率、贫困的地域分布以及基尼系数等问题上 ,中俄两国具有明显的对比空间。反贫困是中俄两国转型期的共同选择。它对于维护两国的政治秩序、保障经济持续发展、提高“生活质量”的目标原则具有十分重要的现实意义。     

Is foreign direct investment good for the poor? A review and stocktake

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 that 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.     

Gender justice: the World Bank's new approach to the poor?

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, together 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 considering whether it constitutes a new approach to gender and poverty. It is argued that the World Bank's approach to poverty is unlikely to deliver gender justice, because there remain large discrepancies between the economic and social policies that it prescribes. More specifically, the authors contend that the Bank employs an integrationist approach which 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 reduction and violence against women: exploring links,assessing impact

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.     

Human Rights Disparities between Europe and the United States: Conflicting Approaches to Poverty Prevention and the Alleviation of Suffering

The US and most of Europe disagree over the validity of a human rights approach to economic development and planning. These differences manifest themselves in policy outcomes with higher protections in Europe for the poor, the vulnerable, and the weak. The US approach of limited state action, on the other hand, appears to create insecurity for the needy. Europe's success in poverty alleviation presents an ethical challenge to US reluctance to accept legal obligations to provide a basic right of subsistence to its citizens.     

NGO workers’ internalisation of the human rights-based approach in Bangladesh

The Western origin of human rights raises the question of how the human rights-based approach to development (HRBA) is understood in non-Western countries. This article explores individual practitioners’ perceptions of the HRBA in an NGO working in Bangladesh, drawing on interviews with its workers. The data suggest that participants accept the universal values of human rights and make sense of the HRBA influenced by their organisational and national contexts. Conceptualising this process as “internalisation”, this article argues that the organisational support and workers’ field experience are critical for incorporating contextual consideration into their interpretation and practice of the HRBA.     

What is Development Studies?

This article is concerned with some initial reflections on the distinctive features of Development Studies (DS). The aim is to trigger further debate, rather than attempt ‘closure’. Discussion of the nature of DS is timely because of the expansion of taught courses at various levels during the previous decade; because of sustained critiques of DS in recent years; and because DS has entered a period of introspection – illustrated by several journal special issues and events – to identify its defining characteristics. The author 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 how it opens space for alternative ‘voices’.     

Event Data on Armed Conflict and Security: New Perspectives,Old Challenges,and Some Solutions

This article presents the Event Data on Conflict and Security (EDACS) dataset, discusses the inherent problems of georeferenced conflict data, and shows how these challenges are met within EDACS. Based on an event data approach, EDACS contributes to the growing number of novel georeferenced datasets that allow researchers to identify causal pathways of violence and the dynamics of (transboundary) violence through spatiotemporal disaggregation. However, the unreflected use of any of these datasets will give researchers unjustified confidence in their findings, as the pitfalls are many and propagating errors can result in misleading conclusions. To identify and handle the different challenges to overall event data quality, we argue in favor of transparency in the data collection and coding process, to empower analysts to challenge the data and avoid cascading errors. In particular, we investigate how the choice of news sources, the handling of geographic precision, and the use of auxiliary data can bias event data. We demonstrate how the EDACS dataset design enables the analyst to deal with these issues by providing a set of variables indicating the news sources, possible sources of bias, and detailed information on geographic precision. This allows for a flexible use of the data based on individual analytical requirements.     

从粮食危机反思拉美贸易和农业政策改革

2006～2008年国际大宗粮食价格快速上涨最终酿成了一场世界范围内的粮食危机,期间美国次贷危机的全面爆发更增添了其复杂性.文章主要从供需失衡、投机活动、生物能源开发、发展中国家农业生产受到制约、市场垄断结构等方面分析危机发生的原因,同时阐述危机对拉美国家造成的负面影响:社会骚乱和政局动荡、通货膨胀攀升、赤贫人口增加、国际收支恶化,等等.拉美国家采取的紧急救助、价格控制等措施只在短期内缓解了危机程度,但并未真正解决粮食危机.对拉美国家而言,过去30多年贸易和农业发展中的政策偏差才是造成这种"富饶中的匮乏"现象的根源.因此,拉美国家应建立长期的农业发展战略,并通过集体行动纠正全球农业生产与贸易之间的系统性不平衡.     

Facilitated inter-firm collaboration in Ghana: The case of Danida's private-sector development projects

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.     

Matching services with local preferences: managing primary education services in a rural district of India

India's poorest households have particularly little access to education. Urgent reforms are therefore needed to improve the universal availability of quality basic services and universal access to those services. At least 32 million children in India are estimated to not be enrolled and attending school. These children must be brought into schools in order to meet the goal of Universal Elementary Education (UEE). Widespread support exists for the decentralization of public services due to the equity and efficiency benefits associated with it. In particular, decentralization is seen to facilitate the matching of services with local preferences, increasing the chances of meeting policy goals. This approach is explored in the context of research conducted in a village of Raichur district, where poor households' preferences with regard to school timing are analyzed. Sections consider the equity and efficiency merits of decentralization, the agenda for improving education service delivery in India, users' relationship to the education system in Raichur district, how preferences are revealed, whose preferences are important in the conflict between local and policy perspectives, preference heterogeneity in the village context, and whether aspects of education services can be selectively decentralized.     

Facilitators and obstacles to cooperation in international development networks: a network approach

This paper draws attention to the value of a network approach for understanding cooperation in international development networks. The approach emphasises the impact of social interaction, and the values, ideas, and behaviours of individuals on the achievement of development goals. Social network analysis is used to analyse the social structure and dynamics of interaction in an aid-funded development network organisation that aimed to develop optometry capacity in Mozambique. The analysis shows the value of combining quantitative and qualitative methods in a complementary way to identify factors facilitating (network consciousness and social skill) and hindering (power dynamics) cooperation.     

Poverty reduction and democratization – new cross-country evidence

The rapid decrease in absolute poverty across the developing world has received much attention. However, there have been few systematic attempts to analyse the political consequences of these developments. This article builds on the improved availability of household income data from developing countries to document a small but statistically significant impact of lagged poverty rates on a range of democracy indicators. The results hold across a battery of sensitivity and robustness tests. I also show that poverty reduction has a stronger effect on democracy than alternative predictors that are more widely used in the democratic regime transition and consolidation literature, such as average income and relative inequality (the Gini index). However, I find weaker effects of poverty on indicators of government quality and a declining influence of poverty reduction on democracy over time. These results point to more structural obstacles to democratic consolidation in lower-income regions, such as a tendency by populist leaders to exploit the economic grievances of vulnerable lower-middle classes.