Education has a prominent position in the current Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework; targets on schooling are attached to two of the goals. However, from a human development perspective, the narrow framing of the education targets and indicators in the MDGs had perverse consequences,...

Higher education has entered centre-stage in the context of the knowledge economy and has been deployed in the search for economic competitiveness and social development. Against this backdrop, this highly illuminating Handbook explores worldwide convergences and divergences in national higher...

The Handbook illuminates complex facets of the economic and social provisioning process across the globe. The contributors – academics, policy analysts and practitioners from wide-ranging areas of expertise – discuss the methodological approaches to, and analytical tools for,...

This article considers how the capability approach has been linked with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and poses the question derived from a number of critical commentaries as to whether the approach has provided a robust enough critique of the exploitative relations associated with...

MDG3 on promoting gender equality and empowering women had a target for eliminating gender disparity in education by 2005. This target will be missed. Elaine Unterhalter highlights how, despite this failure, MDG3 has prompted a diverse discussion of meanings of gender equality and education, led...

Agricultural adjustment policies in sub Saharan Africa have not delivered substantial increases in agricultural growth. We examine alternative explanations for this and argue that transitions and thresholds in agricultural growth processes are not sufficiently recognised and understood in...

There is widespread concern at continuing and deepening poverty and food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa and the lack of broad-based economic growth. There is also debate about agriculture's role in driving pro-poor economic growth, some arguing it has a critical role while others see it is as...

The benefits of livelihoods thinking and approaches are widely recognised. This paper focuses on an important gap in much of the conceptualisation and application of "livelihood approaches", a lack of emphasis on markets and their roles in livelihood development and poverty reduction. The...