Decentralized governance has enjoyed limited success in promoting popular livelihoods and political voice among informal actors. Explanations have tended to focus on sources of disempowerment <italic>from above</italic>, where informal collective action is overwhelmed or sidelined by more powerful government or...

This article applies organisational sociology to provide an empirical analysis of the roles that two different types of Turkish migrant organisations, headquartered in Germany, played after the 2011 Van earthquake in Turkey, and their different levels of commitment to the traditional...

This article examines the emergence of carbon standards and labels, with a focus on China as one of the key drivers of the future global economy. The article attempts to answer two questions. First, as Chinese firms take on more substantive roles in global production networks, how do they deal...

There is a growing recognition that the "Rising Powers", namely the emerging economies, in particular, but not only, China, India and Brazil, whose economic dynamism has begun to transform the contours of the global economy, will bring about radical shifts in global governance. A critical...

What does "good governance" mean for the World Bank and to what extent has the organisation been successful in diffusing the paradigm worldwide? The Bank focused primarily on economic aspects of governance in the 1980s and progressively moved to emphasise its political dimensions towards the end...

This article analyses Brazilian involvement in private labour and environmental governance. It does so by mapping the local actors participating in three recent international initiatives-the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the ISO 26000 Working Group-and exploring the...

Using data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyse the relationship between economic and social globalization and six measures of institutional quality, thereby testing Montesquieu's doux commerce thesis, that economic...

The method of randomisation has been a major driver in the recent rise to prominence of empirical development economics. It has helped uncover patterns and facts that had earlier escaped attention. But it has also given rise to debate and controversy. This paper evaluates the method of...

The paper analyses growing inequality in the rising powers, concentrating on the situation in China and India. It describes the various processes that are currently underway to reduce inequality in these economies. These processes include a combination of tightening the labour market, as best...

Long-run growth is about the structural transformation (diversification and upgrading) of the economy, itself a function of the accumulation of capabilities that allows a country to produce new and more unique products. In this paper, we develop an "Index of Opportunities" for 96 non-high-income...