World Development Perspectives最新文献

Despite considerable efforts made by development scholars and practitioners to address women’s subordinate status, gender inequality remains pervasive. Feminist scholars have advocated for a reframing of the notion of women’s empowerment that shifts away from a purely economistic approach to one that encompasses individual consciousness, resource access, and collective action components. Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) present an opportunity to address such goals. Yet, evidence of how SHGs can leverage their collective power to generate positive change and transform perceptions of women’s abilities remains scant. Using process tracing, we demonstrate how women’s collective decision making in the public sphere can lead to women’s empowerment by illustrating how a group of SHGs in West Bengal, India formed a group identity and leveraged its power to execute community-based initiatives. This involved: (1) the establishment of trust, unity, and solidarity among group members via effective leaders who emphasized the consistent participation of all members in group activities; (2) the development of the SHGs’ sense of self-sufficiency and their legitimacy as decision-making bodies within their community through a self-led project to establish a grain bank in their village; and (3) the exercise of that legitimacy and developing sense of authority via organization around a controversial goal—alcohol prohibition—that sought to change male behavior for women’s benefit. We conclude that public decision making by SHGs working collaboratively at scale can lead to enduring empowerment because it can put women in a position to challenge patriarchal norms.

How should we understand social progress, and how should it be measured? These questions have engaged social thinkers and scientists for many decades. In the context of the growing dominancy of national and international indices, the paper advances a strong dual-necessity principle in the conceptualization and measurement of social progress. At the heart of the strong dual-necessity principle is a profound yet neglected conviction that, from a political-normative point of view, the two components of the concept – subjective (representing people’s actual attitudes) and objective (representing external standards of development) – are necessary and only jointly sufficient. The paper defines the principle and initiates assessment and evaluation of it. The paper demonstrates ‘concept structuring’ and exhibits how the distinctive strong dual necessity structure may result in different rankings of countries’ social progress. Hence, it highlights the advantage of having this principle readily available and accessible for researchers, politicians, bureaucrats, and other interested agents and institutions.

Value chain research increasingly seeks to assess the inclusiveness of value chains to better understand how to promote equitable and pro-poor development. This trend is especially relevant for small-scale fisheries value chains, which provide livelihoods, food security, and a social safety net for rural poor in many countries. Despite recent efforts to assess value chain inclusiveness, substantial knowledge gaps persist in small-scale fisheries value chains with respect to distribution of and access to benefits within and across different value chain nodes, particularly in the midstream (e.g. traders and processors). This study addresses this important research gap by utilizing an access mapping approach concerned with the distribution of benefits along the value chain for usipa (Engraulicypris sardella) in Malawi. Using a mixed methods approach, this analysis utilizes quantitative survey data (n = 929) at various nodes of the usipa value chain (fishers, processors, wholesalers, retailers), as well as qualitative focus group data (n = 60) and key informant interviews (n = 6), all collected in 2019. In line with the Structure-Conduct-Performance Paradigm, this study identifies value chain actors’ roles (structure), analyzes processes (conduct), and assesses the distribution of and access to income and in-kind benefits for different actors both within and across value chain nodes (performance). We calculate net income (revenues – expenses) for individual actors in each node of the value chain and find that (a) access to and distribution of income benefits from usipa vary substantially at group and individual levels; and (b) actors’ net income from the usipa value chain is negatively affected by unequal power distribution, price volatility and trade institutions, inadequate market infrastructure, social relations, and gender dynamics. This study advances approaches to study value chain inclusiveness, emphasizing the need to attend to variation and drivers acting at multiple scales, ranging from whole value chain structure to individual traders.

Using a multinomial endogenous switching regression model, this study examined the factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt multiple integrated technologies and then estimated the effects of adopting integrated farm technologies on farm yield, farm income, and household food expenditure. The results showed that adopting higher-order suites of technologies provides higher dividends to farmers in terms of farm yield and income relative to a single technology adoption. Among different integrated technologies, the study found that the technology mix involving crop and soil innovations exerts the greatest impact. Further findings from the study, however, shows that there are no statistical differences in food expenditure from adopting higher-order packages of technologies, albeit the impacts being positive. This could explain the diversion of additional gains obtained towards investing in family assets, child education, and health expenditures. In addition, the study suggests that the level of education of the family head and access to credit significantly influence the decision to adopt multiple integrated technologies. The study provides suggestive evidence for a shift in policy design for the country’s farm productivity coupled with investment policies that promote access to credit and education, especially among rural communities.

This article intends to understand the impact of resettlement and upgrading in the context of Coimbatore, a second-tier city in India. It aims to explore the effects of these housing policies on the urban poor's daily lives and lived experiences by data triangulation. It describes these effects concerning residents’ social networks, livelihoods and commute, infrastructure and maintenance as well as process participation.

Most concerns raised for both resettlement and upgrading – such as destruction of livelihoods and social networks - that have so far primarily been investigated in bigger cities, are found to also apply for housing projects in this second-tier city. To a certain degree, location is an exemption here as three of the four investigated colonies are located near the city center, thereby enabling most of their residents to walk to work and many amenities. Public land in such a central location was thus available to the Urban Local Body (ULB). However, this land was found to be of low quality and rather unsuitable for construction. Overall, the lack of agency vested in residents during planning and implementation gravely contributed to several different projects’ deficiencies.

Exposure to environmental stressors during early childhood can significantly impact a child’s development and educational outcomes. In this paper, we examine the effects of exposure to unimproved sanitation in the surrounding environment during early childhood on primary school enrollment later in life in Bangladesh between 2007 and 2014. While Bangladesh has made significant progress towards eradicating open defecation, the country still suffers from inadequate access to improved sanitation. Additionally, although policies aiming at improving primary school enrollment have been in place since the 1990s, many children of school age were not enrolled at the appropriate time during the period studied. Using a pseudo-panel dataset for children aged six to nine compiled from the 2007, 2011, and 2014 DHS surveys, we find that children exposed to a higher proportion of unimproved sanitation in their community early in their life are less likely to be enrolled in primary school at the time of survey by about five percentage points on average, indicating delayed school enrollment. This effect is more pronounced for children aged six and seven than those eight and nine, likely because parents of children experiencing poor health or cognitive development delay enrolling their children in school until they are slightly older or healthier. Our results are robust to potential omitted variable biases and are further supported by additional analyses on matched samples. Taken all together, our findings highlight that increasing coverage of improved sanitation facilities can help improve school enrollment rates. However, this should not only occur at the household level alone but also should extend to cover all households in the community to ensure achieving maximum benefits. The findings indicate that the provision of safer sanitation facilities is not only good by itself but also is crucial for achieving improvements throughout the human capital development cycle, including health and nutrition, as well as education.

In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the central government operations were paralyzed, and municipal officials became even more important as they were more readily able to respond to their constituents’ needs during this time of crisis. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) five-year post-earthquake Limyè ak Òganizasyon pou Kolektivite yo Ale Lwen (LOKAL+) program aimed to bolster the capacity of municipalities – beyond this disaster event – through revenue mobilization activities, within quake-affected and non-quake affected areas. The intended outcome of this effort was to improve local public service delivery throughout Haiti.

Nearly all participating LOKAL+ municipalities experienced increased local revenue collection, particularly in property and business taxes, from 2012 through 2017. However, the impact of these increases on public investment spending was not evident even though this was a stated objective of the program. To evaluate whether public services improved in two of the nine LOKAL+ localities, due to USAID’s local revenue mobilization efforts, I employed a case study analysis using descriptive statistics, in-depth interviewing, and content analysis.

The findings revealed modest public service improvements in one of the two case study sites. However, the political climate within which LOKAL+ was executed – mainly, the unlawful installation of interim executive agents throughout the country at the time – had an observed impact on the study’s findings. The implications of country-specific political economic realities on the timing of donor-led local governance efforts are underscored, as Haiti continues to navigate compounding political crises – including the assassination of the President in 2021 – since the end of the LOKAL+ program.

This study explores material, relational and subjective elements of wellbeing as micro-level gendered impacts of COVID-19 policy responses on agro-based livelihoods. Using a test case of rural Zambia, we apply a mixed methods research design and draw data from household surveys, household case study interviews, group discussions, and multi-level interviews. Results show gendered impacts at four significant levels of granularity: markets and material wellbeing, household provisioning, labour and care burdens, relationships and social networks, and disruptions to membership organisations and social initiatives. Production and processes leading to market disruptions lead to a gendered reconcentration of economic activities around men who flex financial muscle and flout COVID-19 guidelines respectively. Women on the other hand are squeezed out of production and market circuits, quickly loosing livelihood strategies and getting relegated to unpaid and invisible household work. Whereas women endeavour to find ways to support their families, such as attempting to maintain group savings initiatives, low levels of policy satisfaction, including declining production and market dynamics limit actions towards inclusive and equitable forms of COVID-19 recovery in rural geographies. We call for holistic interventions that consider community patterns of livelihoods and how they are impacted by the pandemic, necessitating a focus on gender sensitive initiatives that are locally driven, build resilience and empower women.

While the number of impact evaluations has increased in international development, the use of evidence has remained an issue. This study investigates and conceptualizes how a development agency can use evidence to improve and expand its development programs, taking the case of the Indian NGO “Pratham.” In a series of experiments with researchers, Pratham developed and refined their learning agenda to search for a better strategy to improve children’s foundational learning. Pratham has also regularly conducted a nationwide survey on children’s foundational learning. Data from the nationwide survey demonstrated the problem in children’s foundational learning, and evidence from experiments showed an option for an effective strategy to address it. The search, learning, and communication cycle using data and evidence, conceptualized from the case of Pratham, would enhance the effectiveness of development agencies to better support educational development.

This paper uses a theoretical model to explain the patterns and determinants of labour market participation behaviour of young urban women in India. Based on the National Sample Survey (NSS) data and through probit regression results, it argues that the labour market participation decision of young women is an outcome of the joint utility maximization behaviour of their family. The standard of living of the family, market wage, other family characteristics, including the number of children, adult women in the family, elderly members, and occupation, and gender of the head, etc., are significantly determining their labour market participation; apart from women’s individual characteristics like age (experience) and level of education and training. The empirical result also reflects that the “discouraged worker effect” is stronger than the “added worker phenomenon”. Hence, measures to create jobs in modern services could help boost the stagnant female labour force participation in urban India.