This article enquires into the implications the modern literature on economic development emanating from international institutions has for law reform and the role of the state in the economy. The main question asked is whether regulation has a uniform role in all reform contexts or whether...

Groups and microfinance facilities are intended to produce a variety of economic, social and political outcomes. However, the debate in the development literature about their effectiveness heightens the importance of exploring whether multidimensional outcomes are actually achieved. Drawing on...

There has been a shift in many developing countries, particularly Small Island Developing States (SIDS), towards tourism as the centrepiece of their development strategy. This occurs in the context of narrowing developmental options occasioned by the end of preferential access to metropolitan...

Individuals may have different perceptions of how development interventions meet their well-being. Using the Volta Rural Water Supply project in Ghana as a case study, it was found that women and men were able to save considerable amount of time by having easy access to clean water through the...

Development studies navigate between policy and social science; between directed progress and change. However, the relative propinquity of social science and policy languages sometimes masks the difference between the two. This article discusses the relationship between development as social...

This article reviews the current state of the debate around the concept of ‘urban bias’. It first reviews Michael Lipton’s original formulation of an Urban Bias Thesis (UBT), and the initial debates that took shape in regard to his work and the work of Elliott Berg and Robert...

Poverty is often presented as an evolving concept linked to dominant development paradigms. However, changes in the meaning of specific topics comprising definitions of poverty have been largely overlooked. Therefore, the authors adopted a synchronic approach to evaluate changes contained within...

Research on sustainable development tends to focus on risk and vulnerability. This article argues for a shift of emphasis from vulnerability to resilience. It develops a Multiâ€layered social resilience framework emphasising the interactions between enabling factors and capacities operating...

This article seeks to explore the politics of an increasingly prominent African diaspora. It does so by locating the growing debate on diasporas and development in a broader political economy context to provide a historical understanding of how the African diaspora, and its contribution to...

This study applied the multiâ€layered social resilience framework in the context of an urban malaria control programme by using a qualitative approach. It was found that exchange between and within administrative levels supported resilienceâ€building processes in terms of mosquito breeding...