World Development Perspectives最新文献

This article assesses the application of the problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) approach to public financial management reform in six African countries. It draws on primary data collected using a mix of interviews, overt participation observations and a short survey. PDIA responds to shortcomings in orthodox approaches to reform and technical assistance in developing countries. It stresses local solutions to local problems, achieved through experimentation and adaptation. The principles of PDIA are appealing, but its empirical assessment is in its infancy. This study aims to fill part of this gap. Findings show that PDIA delivers results in the short-term, particularly in cases where there is an influential authorising agent and dedicated team. Progress was less forthcoming for reforms that required high level political buy-in from senior officials. The approach does exceptionally well to develop staff capability, transferable skills, and local empowerment to solve local problems, thus potentially benefitting future reforms.

This article investigates previously unexplored predictors of banking agents’ activity using a primary dataset of agents operational in a rural setting in India. We measure banking agents’ activity using their monthly transaction count and regress it on seven predictor categories. We provide evidence of the role of operational practices, agents’ commitment, resources, support, and market characteristics, in agents’ banking activity. We also identify specific factors that drive superior performance by the agents. The findings inform policy-making groups and implementing agencies of agent banking on agent selection criteria, best practices, and supervision mechanisms to ensure the agent banking model’s effectiveness.

Research into how changes occur in repeated human practices, or ‘institutions’, is expanding rapidly. Yet there is still only limited understanding of how institutional change involves social networks. To address this gap this paper proposes a new Network Communication Framework, which predicts how ‘bottom-up’ and ‘bottom-top’ institutional changes can arise through interplays between state and civil society networks. While ‘top-down’ institutional change requires perfect compliance with state policies by a civil society network in a ‘strong state’, bottom-up institutional change can occur in a ‘weak state’ when a civil society network has high autonomy and adapts to a vacuum in state institutions at local scale by devising new informal institutions itself. Bottom-top institutional change, proposed here for the first time, can occur when a state network has a moderate ability to enforce its formal institutions throughout a country and a civil society network has moderate autonomy, and members of the two networks jointly negotiate new hybrid informal institutions. This paper reports evidence from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria for: (a) a bottom-up change by a clan network in its traditional land rights institutions which enabled it to sell communal land to an oil company; and (b) a bottom-top change in timber harvesting institutions, negotiated between members of a logging network and an informal government network (comprising staff of the state forestry department), which allowed loggers to extract more timber than permitted under formal state institutions. The example of bottom-up institutional change reported here leads to higher environmental impacts than under the original informal traditional institutions, showing that autonomous bottom-up change is not always as environmentally benevolent as previously assumed, though environmental impacts will vary according to circumstances. The example of bottom-top institutional change has higher environmental impacts than under perfectly implemented formal state institutions. This is likely to be typical of bottom-top changes generally, and shows that it is difficult to treat overlogging as ‘illegal logging’ if state personnel are complicit in its operation.

Accelerating the education of children and reducing child labor in agriculture remains an important development pathway to preventing intergenerational poverty and achieving the sustainable development goals. While several studies have analyzed the impact of ecological stressors on yield, income, and food security, there is limited understanding of the linkages of prevailing ecological shocks to child education and farm work. In this paper, we examine the effect of ecological shocks of pest and weed invasion on children’s school attendance and working hours on the farm using the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS). We employ a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model that corrects for selection bias and endogeneity originating from both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The results show that double shocks (pests and weeds) reduced the number of children attending school by 11% and increased children’s on-farm working hours by 0.75 h. Comparatively, the decline in the number of children attending school due to weed invasion (0.88) is higher than the decline due to pest invasion (0.43). Furthermore, weed invasion increases children’s on-farm working hours by 0.05 h while pest invasion reduces children’s on-farm working hours by 0.08 h. Increasing access to improved agricultural technologies bundled with credit and policies are critical to reducing the threats from ecological shocks and improving farmers’ welfare. To avert the decline in school attendance and children’s working hours requires training farmers to reduce the practice of continuous cropping and to embrace crop rotation and fallow to reduce the spread of pests and weeds.

The centrality of community involvement in tourism activities has been widely recognized globally by practitioners and stakeholders alike. Within this recognition community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives have been widely accepted as a favorable form of tourism activity—especially when promoting pro-poor and sustainable strategies for marginalized communities. Arguably, the success of CBT initiatives is underpinned by the participation of communities in the planning, development, and managing processes that bring them about. Supporting these assumptions is the theoretical link between participation and empowerment, where community participation leads to the empowerment of community members. Over the years, however, existing studies have also provided ambivalent accounts suggesting the complexity of these relationships is not well understood. As several studies have pointed out, tourism participation does not invariably and naturally result in empowerment. In contributing to the existing discourse, this study explores the nexus between participation and empowerment by proposing a revised participation-empowerment model. The resulting model suggests that while communities require some level of empowerment to participate effectively in CBT, through continuous interaction they can increase their level of participation along with their level of empowerment.

In India, forest rights of forest-dependent communities are democratized and decentralized under the Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA). This paper attempts to explain the weak performance of the community forest resource rights recognized under this legislation. We begin by discerning the enabling and impeding factors that have influenced the operationalization of the community forest resource rights. We found that support from civil society has been crucial in building collective action and social capital. Technical, financial and bureaucratic hindrances in addition to a conflicting regulatory framework were the major barriers. We conceptualized the framework of rights-based polycentrism by combining the rights-based approach and polycentrism, and using this lens analyzed the design of the community forest resource rights. We found that the legislation falls short of making the state accountable and repositioning the role of the forest department as a duty bearer. The Act assigns responsibilities of biodiversity conservation, protection of catchments, sustainable resource use and preservation from destructive practices to the local communities, without provisioning additional funds or functionaries. Also, the state has not played an enabling role by building agency, capacity and institutions, and continues to be substantially invested in local forest management decisions. We opine that unless these design gaps in the legislation are plugged, it will result in rights-based responsibilization and adversely impact the scaling up of decentralized forest governance. Other developing nations can also benefit from using the rights-based polycentrism lens to strengthen the design of their sustainable forest management policy.

In rural areas of developing countries, private transfers are shared for altruistic reasons, to mitigate negative shocks (insurance motive) and in exchange for services. However, when public and private transfers provide similar benefits, an overlap exists, potentially crowding-out informal mechanisms. In this paper, we test whether an exogenous increase in household income, due to transfers by the Hunger Safety Net Program (HSNP) to pastoralist households in Northern Kenya, reinforces or dampens the redistributive dynamics associated with private transfers. We exploit the experimental implementation of HSNP to control for endogeneity with the randomly provided unconditional cash transfer. We show that an HSNP-induced rise in household income by 2,000 Kenyan Shillings is associated with a non-negligible decline in the total value of private transfers equivalent to 12% of the income increase. For transfers given, we show that the HSNP transfer leads to increased sharing equivalent to 11% of the income increase. Testing for non-linearities, we identify a significant reduction in the value of private transfers received at low levels of the income distribution. Concomitantly, we identify a positive relationship between income and transfers given that is most pronounced among poorer households. We further show that we possibly observe altruistic, insurance and exchange related sharing motives coexisting among Northern Kenyan pastoralists. The identified crowding-in and -out effects have implications for the design and efficacy of social programs beyond Kenya, demonstrating that traditional transfer dynamics are altered due to public programs.

The paper argues that political economy factors have hindered the development of the oil palm value chain in Ghana, which has consistently underperformed despite significant policy support and the sector's strategic importance to the national economy. These factors include political instability between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, as well as the emergence of a competitive clientelist political settlement since the country's return to constitutional rule. Drawing on key informant interviews and documentary sources, the paper demonstrates that policies over the past two decades have failed to address the peculiar nature of the value chain, which is bifurcated into a smallholder/artisanal sub-sector and an estate/industrial processing sub-sector. Since the 1990s, one aspect of policy failure in the sector has been the ‘paradox of good intentions’ that arises from the simultaneous pursuit of economic transformation and inclusive development in a political context described by some scholars as 'strong democracy, weak state'. The logic of electoral competition shortens politicians’ time horizons, predisposing them to prioritise highly visible distributive policies (like input subsidies) over structural reforms (like land tenure issues or solving market frictions). Consequently, despite almost two centuries of continuous policy support, the sector’s productivity remains at the same level it would have been if it had been left to operate without any state assistance.

Abandoning some neoliberal reform tools, but not the goals, liberal policymakers have devised forms of economic governance to support private investment through, paradoxically, the use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The article builds on a pragmatist perspective of institutional evolution by describing the syncretism in Mexico's 2013 electricity reform as an exemplary case of structural reforms for de-risking investment through the strategic use of the national SOE. The case shows that the technical and legal segmentation of electricity supply can accommodate different risk distribution arrangements in which state ownership is useful to (1) rein-in the capacity of the dominant company to exercise market power, (2) shoulder the costs of maintaining a subsidised tariff structure for retail consumers, and (3) underwrite the expansion of infrastructure with an uncertain economic future. Structural reforms can use SOEs to relocate private risk in the state's ledger and making state de-risking the most important mechanisms to drive investment, and not market competition. The article argues for the need to develop a sector-specific understanding the role of SOEs within liberal economic programs, but also the need to develop a critical perspective, for instance, through Daniela Gabor's Wall Street Consensus concept, to focus on the historical distributional consequences of these arrangements which can result in the progressive private control over the electricity sector.

Science and technology play a fundamental role in driving social progress and economic growth in today’s rapidly evolving world. Yet, despite considerable advancements, the gender gap in science remains a harsh reality, particularly for African women. This inequality directly impedes their invaluable perspectives and contributions to scientific advancements and innovations. Africa’s development requires significant investment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and leadership. This opinion piece delves into the gender disparity prevailing in STEM, emphasizes the challenges that African women experience, highlights the immense potential that African women possess, and finally advocates for immediate efforts to bridge this gap.