South Africa's March 2006 local government elections in many ways assumed the character of a de facto referendum on service delivery. Leading into this election were two years of grass-roots protests against both the quality of service delivery and public representation of the grass-roots'...

As the urban share of Africa's population increases, the importance of understanding how food supply is shaped by market institutions has grown. However, this topic has received little attention from policy makers and researchers despite the implications of market institutions and regulatory...

This paper engages with policy on meeting development goals for water through interventions, which promote good governance. Addressing an under-researched area, we propose a new analytical framework for understanding water governance, not as a set of abstract principles, but as interlinked...

Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized...

This paper is concerned with the observation that rights-based approaches to development have tended to ignore the ways in which religion and culture shape understandings of human rights. Although religious traditions often act against the pursuit of human rights, there are also areas of overlap...

Exhibiting a highly divisive agenda postmodernism has created profound chasms across scientific communities. In development studies its radical impetus has translated into the postdevelopment perspective which violently repudiates the modernist development project. This paper crystallises two...

This paper reveals some of the silences about ‘race’ in development ideologies, institutions and practices. It suggests that these mask the perpetuation of a racialized discourse in development, its complicity with broader historical and contemporary racial projects and the effects...

The conventional view in the land reform literature does not consider distribution of ‘public’ lands to landless and near-landless peasants as redistributive land reform. Questioning the (formal) private property bias in land reform theory and practice, this paper rethinks some...

This paper explores the connections between colonialism and development in order to understand more clearly how discourses on North-South relations continue to be imbued with the imperial representations that preceded them. Beginning with a concern to examine how anti-racism can inform our...

The socio-economic impacts of microcredits on women's welfare were studied in northeastern South Africa using a qualitative semi-structured interviewing method. The study focuses particularly on the benefits, disadvantages and challenges obtained from The Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF)...