The emergence of the transitional economies (TEs) in Eastern Europe and Pacific Asia have brought a new dimension to the development debate. Initially, events in Eastern Europe were depicted as confirming that there was no viable alternative to the market economy and the neoliberal perspective...

Land tenure reform has been advocated as an instrument of development in sub-Saharan Africa since before Independence, based on a neoclassical economic model promising greater agricultural productivity as a result of titling. This in turn, it was suggested, would promote land investments, credit...

Recent scientific outputs suggest that climate change is likely to cause shifts in the global pattern and intensity of flood events, in some regions increasing the exposure of populations to severe flooding. Potential future risks underline the importance of research and intervention work aimed...

Set within the context of re-conceptualizing poverty to emphasize its multidimensionality, this paper argues for the need to extend existing debates on livelihood security to incorporate notions of physical and personal security, manifest in the form of violence and conflict. In turn, it...

Insofar as gender is still so often equated with women alone, the move from Women in Development to Gender in Development has changed very little. Men as a human category have always been present, involved, consulted, obeyed and disobeyed in development work. Yet men as a gendered category in a...

This paper attempts an eclectic synthesis on long-term growth, which integrates two standard models - the neoclassical model with the endogenous growth and export-led model of growth. A vector autoregressive (VAR) model has been used for India from 1950 to 1995 using Johansen’s...

The field of development studies owes a great debt to Amartya Sen. This paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Sen’s account of ‘development as freedom’. It considers how Sen has developed his arguments in terms of four key ‘spaces’: what he calls the...

Despite 30 years of study, international development policy appears to be little closer to generating protection to vulnerable people from the preventable losses of disaster. Part of the reason for a lack of progress has been the sidelining of disaster in development studies. Disaster events...

This is the first of two surveys of the World Development Report series. Here we focus on the discursive strategies adopted by the Reports. We begin by setting the Reports within the wider milieu of development theory and practice. Behind the pragmatic, problem-solving image that the Reports aim...

This paper reviews the current state of literature on peri-urban research in sub-Saharan Africa. This research has been led by multi-lateral and bilateral development agencies that have sought to find a role in urban development. The review finds that the donor-driven research has remained...