Female ownership of land is not a panacea in developing countries
By Ralitza Dimova
Contrary to conventional wisdom, giving ownership rights on land to women may not be a welfare enhancing panacea in poor agricultural settings. When women have less access to complementary resources such as credit, labour or marketing channels than men, female ownership of land alone would not help them enter into productivity enhancing agricultural sectors and generate income in such sectors. If women control land, while men control all remaining resources – and asset ownership is insecure in an environment of market and institutional imperfections – the outcome for the household as a whole is likely to be negative.
These are the key findings of a new publication by Ralitza Dimova, Sumon Bhaumik and Ira Gang in the Journal of Development Studies.
Can “authoritarian developmentalism” be tested at the ballot box?
By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam
//
The May 24, 2015 Ethiopian election is an archetypical political process where authoritarian developmentalism went to the poll seeking procedural democratic legitimacy for its less inclusive economic growth and severely restricted civil and political rights of citizens. The final results of the elections will tell whether the state-to-family level structures of control, harassment and indoctrination will be strong enough to extend the 99.6 per cent domination of the ruling party over the national parliament.DEVELOPMENT BOTH AS INSTRUMENT AND IDEOLOGY
Feeding back findings: Disaster risk reduction in urban Bolivia
by Gemma Sou
In March 2015, I am glad (and relieved) to report that I passed my PhD viva. Four years of grit and determination culminated in inevitable questions such as “What is your theoretical contribution?” and “Why did you choose a social constructivist approach?” All valid questions I absolutely agree; however, they significantly differ to the questions which I was confronted with this May when disseminating findings in my case site. Nevertheless, this experience was one of the most nerves wracking and rewarding of my research so far.
The silencing of violence against women
By Tanja Bastia
Last Tuesday Mo Hume came to Manchester to speak at the development@manchester seminar series. The seminar series has been running for five years and each year invites around ten internationally renown speakers on international development (see link for this year’s programme http://www.seed.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/idpm/whatson/dev@manchester/ ). Mo is a political scientist at the University of Glasgow (http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/staff/mohume/) with a longstanding research experience in Central America. Her paper drew on her longitudinal research on gender and violence in El Salvador, which she began in 2000 as part of her PhD research.
Global Governance and the Politics of Aid
David Hulme gave the plenary presentation at the University of Bradford’s Symposium: Global Governance and the Politics of Aid.
The website for the symposium can be viewed here.
Should academics change the world?
David Hulme is Executive Director of Brooks World Poverty Institute, CEO of ESID Research Centre, and Professor of Development Studies
A recent keynote I delivered at the University of Oslo asked me to think about the role of academics in society…so I mulled on ‘should academics change the world’?
There is a general moral argument that all human beings whose needs are secure should seek to reduce the suffering of other human beings – that the poor in any part of the world should be assisted by those with the means to help them. From this perspective, if an academic’s work can help individuals, groups or states, they have a responsibility to provide assistance.
Improving labour conditions in the computer industry
by Khalid Nadvi and Gale Raj-Reichert
Many leading global brands, like Apple and Hewlett-Packard, source components from, and have their products manufactured by, a variety of independent suppliers. These suppliers undertake production in many locations across the world in vast global value chains. Ensuring that these suppliers meet international standards on labour, health and safety and environmental impacts is an increasing challenge for the global brands in the computer industry. These pressures are often accentuated by campaigning non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions seeking to ensure better working conditions, and by governments keen to enforce public regulations. There has been substantial progress by the leading brands to engage with their first tier suppliers on such concerns. However, little is known about how labor standards and codes of conduct are addressed by second tier suppliers found at the lower tiers of global value chains, where the governance of labour conditions can be extremely challenging. Are private or public measures more successful in reaching suppliers down the global value chain? This question is addressed in a recent paper by Dr Khalid Nadvi and Dr Gale Raj-Reichert from the Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM) at the University of Manchester, “Governing health and safety at lower tiers of the computer industry global value chain” in the journal Regulation & Governance (the article is offered as open access and is free to everyone).
The challenges of managing development differently
Pablo Yanguas is a Research Associate at the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) research centre.
On April 2nd ODI hosted a group of aid practitioners and public sector researchers gathered for the purpose of discussing whether the “Doing Development Differently” (DDD) agenda can in fact be managed by development organisations. It seemed like a very necessary step after the “Doing Development Differently” Manifesto and ODI report, which have focused on changing the basic assumptions and discourse of aid, as well as providing some supporting evidence. The last panel of the day was tasked with debating whether the institutional barriers to DDD could in fact be overcome. Having worked on a similar question for political-economy analysis, I was invited to participate in this conversation, and this is what I had to say.
High Quality Education for National Development
David Hulme is Executive Director of Brooks World Poverty Institute, CEO of ESID Research Centre, and Professor of Development Studies
Education is still considered a key strategy for reducing poverty by the poor. Universal primary education was included as a Millennium Development Goal, and it looks as though the new Sustainable Development Goals will aspire to provide pre-primary, primary and secondary education for all. This emphasis on quantity however is not enough. We need to ensure quality. Alongside this, education should not just be thought of as a poverty reduction tool but as central to national development. Higher education is costly but essential as national development requires a proportion of the population to be highly skilled. Like it or not public investment in the education of non-poor people has to be an element of the education budget.
Social accountability or social transformation? Working ‘with’ and ‘against’ the grain
By Sophie King
Social accountability has become an important ‘buzzword’ among development actors seeking to understand the forms of state-society relations that may be supportive of better public services. Malena and McNeil (2010: 1) define it as: ‘the broad range of actions and mechanisms beyond voting that citizens can use to hold the state to account’. The trouble is that the focus has become the mechanisms, rather than the inequality and social and political relationships shaping public goods expenditure and quality.