Politics is central to development discourse, yet remains peripheral. And, over some twenty years, a civil society narrative has not fulfilled its potential to ‘bring politics back in’. Reasons can be found in conceptual confusion, in selectivity in donor thinking and policies...

Development is about people’s lives and their opportunities to use and enlarge their desirable human potentials. This article aims to switch the focus in design, implementation and evaluation of projects, from only an abstracted conception of ‘the project’ and the goods which...