Five cases of failure within group-based microfinance programs are presented. I argue that group performance turns not only on the program's lending policies and cost structures--important as these ...are--but on the nature and extent of social relations (a) among potential and actual group members, (b) between group members and program staff, and (c) among program staff. Failures teach us important lessons regarding how (as opposed to why) these programs work in happier times. Those seeking to replicate microfinance programs, especially at the rate envisioned by the Microcredit Summit, need to pay serious attention to these institutional junctures.
Rule of law orthodoxy -- legal transplants from high- to low-income countries -- has endured despite persistent critiques. A key reason for this, the researchers argue, is the absence of positive ...theories of praxis that can instantiate essentially contested concepts such as rule of law. They discuss the emergence of one nascent alternative, the World Bank's Justice for the Poor program, locating it within broader turns to experimental approaches to development. In doing so, they argue that rule of law reform must be understood in the context of the politics of the relationship between development experts and the domestic political forums in and through which rules systems emerge. As such, a primary task of external agencies is to help forge and sustain such forums, to recognize the deep imbrication between the process norms of these forums and the nature of the rule of law being produced, and to ensure that the empirical foundations on which ensuing deliberations rest are both sound and accessible.
Understanding the efficacy of development projects requires not only a plausible counterfactual but also an appropriate match between the shape of impact trajectory over time and the deployment of a ...corresponding array of research tools capable of empirically discerning such a trajectory. At present, however, the development community knows very little, other than by implicit assumption, about the expected shape of the impact trajectory from any given sector or project type, and as such is prone to routinely making attribution errors. Randomisation per se does not solve this problem. The sources and manifestations of these problems are considered, along with some constructive suggestions for responding to them.
Brazil is a country of sharp disparities. The gap between the richest and the poorest citizens is one of the largest in the world. Inequality in Brazil is well-known, but its low mobility is not. ...Until now, few studies have sought to investigate how forms of social exclusion constrain socioeconomic mobility. Why do particular groups remain excluded and trapped in poverty for generations? What do Brazilians themselves think about income inequality and social mobility? This study explores these issues, provides a set of options to redress them, and promotes a national dialogue for action.In addition to reviewing pertinent literature, Social Exclusion and Mobility in Brazil examines the changing income dynamics among homogeneous groups over a 20-year period. With respect to mobility, it tracks changes in the relative positions of social groups with similar characteristics. The analysis derives factors affecting the probability that certain groups will continue to lack equal access to the economic, cultural, and political resources that would improve their living standards.The current political climate in Brazil offers a unique opportunity to open a new and more informed conversation on the dynamics of exclusion and mobility. This book contributes to that conversation.
An analytic framework for tracing three waves of efforts to provide key public services in developing countries is provided. Persistent (though not universal) failure has been the product of (a) the ...imperatives of large bureaucracies to discount decisions that are
inherently both discretionary and transaction-intensive (and thus less able to be codified and controlled), and (b) good and bad reasons for believing that, because modern bureaucracies underpin rich country prosperity
now, simply adopting their institutional form elsewhere is the surest way of facilitating development. Contemporary debates regarding the merits of incorporating more “participatory” approaches into public service delivery are best understood in this context.
This symposium presents selected contributions to two panels held at recent Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) conferences to explore the potential usefulness to planning of the ...concept of social capital. Its purpose is to stimulate for readers of the Journal the kind of lively and fruitful discussion enjoyed by those who attended the conferences. The contributors summarize the development of the concept and consider alternative definitions of it. This lays the foundation for a broad conversation about whether and how planners can invest in social capital formation in ways that will improve the well-being of the disadvantaged. Mirroring the conference panels, the authors use the interplay of concept development and practical examples to test and illustrate the possible usefulness of different ideas about what social capital is. They discuss why it is important and how it functions in society.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The salience of the concept of “empowerment” has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence ...from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups’ capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. “Deliberative contestation” refers to marginalized groups’ practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites’ monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used “mobilizational contestation” to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.
Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop–based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates ...how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity. This in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks, which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity. Analysis of data on classifications of export structure, controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance, shows that point source– and coffee and cocoa–exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators. These governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter. Countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse—relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms—do not show the same strong effects—and have had more robust growth recoveries.
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