Health sector decentralization has been widely adopted to improve delivery of health services. While many argue that institutional capacities and mechanisms of accountability required to transform decentralized decision-making into improvements in local health systems are lacking, few empirical...

This article presents a synthesis of five country studies of the sustainability of U.S. government-funded health projects in Central America and Africa. The studies reviewed health projects with a comparative framework to determine which project activities had continued after the donor funding...

Despite increasing knowledge about technical aspects of Primary Health Care (PHC), there has been as yet only limited research into political and administrative influences on the effectiveness of PHC programs. A three-stage model of the policy process is developed as a framework for organizing...

A dominant perspective in social capital research emphasizes a "structural" dimension of social capital, consisting of network connections, and a "cognitive" dimension, consisting of attitudes toward trust. Correspondingly, membership in organizations (i.e., membership density) and general trust...

Compared to neighboring countries, the Philippines has high fertility rates and a low prevalence of modern-method contraception use. The Philippine government faces political and cultural barriers to addressing family planning needs, but also legal barriers erected by its own policies. We...

Decentralization has long been advocated as a desirable process for improving health systems. Nevertheless, we still lack a sufficient analytical framework for systematically studying how decentralization can achieve this objective. We do not have adequate means of analyzing the three key...

Studies of social capital have focused on the static relationship between social capital and health, governance and economic conditions. This study is a first attempt to evaluate interventions designed to improve the levels of social capital in post-conflict communities in Nicaragua and to...