Social funds have been one of the main manifestations of the World Bank's move toward promoting projects with a participatory orientation. Supporters of social funds argue that participation in social fund activities builds community social capital. Critics of the Bank's use of social capital...

Is development best achieved by going for growth, or does specific attention need to be paid to directly improving human welfare? In contrast to the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, the World Bank has stressed the growth approach. Recent work has reinforced this position by arguing that...

Why do people participate in community projects? Game theory approaches based on the prisoners' dilemma suggest that people will not participate even if they would have been better off had they all done so. This paper adapts an argument of Bates to show how a system of enforceable fines can...

The Community-Based Nutrition Component of the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Project sought to improve nutritional status through nutritional counselling and supplementary feeding for malnourished children and pregnant women. This paper presents a theory-based impact evaluation of this...

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Poverty is now commonly recognised as a multi-dimensional concept, but there is less agreement about whether such recognition matters for poverty reduction policies in practice. This article argues that it does matter, as income is an input measure rather than a welfare outcome, the correlation...

Aid is widely perceived to have failed at poverty reduction. The last decade has seen a renewed focus on poverty and a number of changes in aid management. Will these improve aid's effectiveness at reducing poverty? The adoption of the International Development Targets is an important rallying...

An extensive literature evaluates the content of conditionality, but the design of conditionality has received less attention. This paper presents a general framework of conditionality, which allows donor and recipient preferences for policy reform and aid to vary, in which previous...