This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life...

This paper sheds light on the complex recovery governance in Ukraine by providing a snapshot of the evolving national recovery actors' networks and examining them within a multi-level governance framework, using interviews, social network analysis, and a sense-making workshop. It highlights the...

This paper explores how the concept of resilience has been used in development studies. Set amidst the rise of resilience in sustainable development, it offers insights for scholars and policy-makers, alike. Sampling 419 resilience-oriented journal articles from 2017-22, it uses Kuhnian...

The Brazilian Ministry of Social Development's co-operation with sub-Saharan Africa has shifted from an initial engagement in cash transfers to a recent engagement in food and nutritional security. This paper aims at understanding the main drivers for such shift considering lessons drawn from...

This paper examines the effect of education aid on primary enrolment and education quality. Using the most recent data on aid disbursements and econometric specifications inspired by the general aid effectiveness literature, we find some evidence that donors' increase in funding has...

In a 2017 UNU-WIDER project, 'Forced migration and inequality', one of us collaborated on a comparison of Afghan and Vietnamese refugee resettlement across four Western countries. In the light of the Taliban return to power in August 2021, we revisit the contributions of the Journal of Ethnic...

Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the...

Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa's development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization funds are often necessary, but entail...

While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using a regression discontinuity in time approach....

Donor support for decentralization comes in two main categories: recommendations at the policy level and project activities at the programming level. At the policy level, donors promote decentralization by recommending greater autonomy for subnational actors. That is, they advocate for reforms...