The concept of green growth implies that a wide range of developmental objectives, such as job creation, economic prosperity and poverty alleviation, can be easily reconciled with environmental sustainability. This study, however, argues that rather than being win-win, green growth is similar to...

Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to develop capacity in Africa with mixed results....

In 2008, the Government of Zambia reformed its mining tax regime for large-scale copper mines through a unilateral legislative change. The country went from having one of the lowest average effective tax rates and government take to be above the average. We focus on a particularly controversial...

Cities - especially those with substantial poor populations - will face increasingly severe challenges in tackling the impacts of global environmental change (GEC). As economic dynamos and increasingly important population concentrations, cities both contribute substantially, and often are very...

Those fragile states whose stagnation is so tenacious despite generous aid programs, and substantial and costly interventions, are stuck in a 'fragility trap.' Caught in a low-level equilibrium, trapped states appear to be in a perpetual political and economic limbo that can last for years and...