Twenty reasons why local knowledge will remain relevant to development

Local knowledge has continued to gain popularity among development practitioners in the last four decades. However, the future of local knowledge seems hazy to some academics and researchers, perhaps due to the methodological challenges in operationalising local knowledge in development research. Rather than appropriate its full potential for sustainable (global) progress, renditions on the relevance of local knowledge in development research agenda have largely become rhetoric. Nonetheless, this viewpoint outlines 20 pertinent reasons in support of the relevance of local knowledge and why it has a future in development theory and practice.     

Everyday health security practices as disaster resilience in rural Bangladesh

Health security is a relatively new concept in terms of how it is practised in disaster-prone locales. We observed 10 rural households in Bangladesh for four months using informal interviews, field diaries, and observation. The findings suggest that the everyday practises of health security involve the capabilities of “caring for themselves” in resource-constrained contexts. Understanding how households care for themselves prior to and during disasters presents an opportunity to examine how improved health might reduce the effects of disasters, ill health, and poverty. Some interventions are proposed to improve health security for poorer households in general and women in particular.     

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.     

Promoting inclusive development in Ghana: disabled people’s and other stakeholders’ perspectives

This article highlights barriers to inclusive development from the perspective of disabled people, as well as staff of NGOs and government agencies. A qualitative study was conducted between August 2011 and September 2012, and in September 2013, in rural and urban areas in Greater Accra and Eastern regions in Ghana. The research shows that inaccessible public infrastructure and services, negative attitudes of service providers, little political will, limited capacity of development agencies, and lack of multi-agency coordination in the disability development sector were barriers to disabled people’s inclusion and participation in development processes.     

Poverty and vote buying: Survey-based evidence from Africa

Alongside the spread of democracy in the developing world, vote buying has emerged as an integral part of election campaigns. Yet, we know little about the causes of vote buying in young democracies. In this paper, we analyse the sources of vote buying in sub-Saharan African. Using data from the Afrobarometer, we focus on the impact of poverty on vote buying at the individual- and country-level. Results from multilevel regressions show that poor voters are significantly more likely to be targets of vote buying than wealthier voters. This effect increases when elections are highly competitive. Thus, micro-level poverty seems to be an important source of vote buying in Africa and has major implications for the way electoral democracy operates.     

Land restitution and income generation in protected areas in Mpumalanga,South Africa

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?     

Environment and climate mainstreaming: challenges and successes

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.     

Managing rural landscapes in the context of a changing climate

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.     

Shifts in perceptions of NGOs with the creation of the Palestinian National Authority

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.