Book review: Kelly, Anthony and Westoby, Peter. 2018: Participatory Development Practice: Using Traditional and Contemporary Frameworks. There is an emerging recognition that many of the ideas, practices and approaches within development studies and practice can replicate colonial attitudes, be paternalistic and disempowering, and may entrench marginalization. The emergence of a wide array of participatory methodologies […]
Tags: #Development Practice #Development Studies #Gandhi #Participation #Participatory Development Practice
Yuen Yuen Ang’s “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap” (2016) is an excellent read and should be essential reading for all development studies students and actors. This book challenges many assumptions that have long been repeated as mantras in research and practice. The author summarizes the book as one that “investigates how China escaped the […]
Tags: #China #Development Studies #How development occurs #Inequality #Participation
Edited volumes do not tend to have staying power as a publication – collections of essays pass like most academic articles. Rarely does an edited volume remain an essential reading for decades. “Ethiopia: The Challenge of Democracy from Below” edited by Bahru Zewde and Siegfried Pausewang (2002) is one of those books. A number of […]
Tags: #Democracy #Ethiopia #Governance #Participation #Power
Corbett, J. and Cochrane, L. (2017) Engaging with the Participatory Geoweb: Exploring the Dynamics of VGI. In Volunteered Geographic Information and the Future of Geospatial Data edited by C. Campelo, M. Bertolotto and P. Corcoran. IGI Global. Abstract: Maps were historically used as tools of the elite to maintain and expand power and control. The development […]
Corbett, J., Cochrane, L. and Gill, M. (2016) Powering Up: Revisiting Participatory GIS and Empowerment. The Cartographic Journal http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2016.1209624 Since 1996, participatory GIS (PGIS) has facilitated avenues through which public participation can occur. One of the ways practitioners articulate social change associated with PGIS interventions has been to qualify success using the term ’empowerment’. This […]
‘Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics’ is a five-year research project financed by the European Research Council (2016-2021), led by Dr Martijn Koster. This research project investigates ethnographically how brokers position themselves in participatory urban governance. It examines their practices, discourses and networks, both in and outside officially sanctioned channels […]
Tags: #Brokers #Democracy #Ethnography #Governance #Participation
Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist at Yale, developed the world-systems approach, which he has written about and developed for more than four decades –first published in The Modern World-System in 1974. In 2004 he authored World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction as a means to present the theory in a concise way, largely for those unfamiliar with […]
Tags: #Capitalism #Immanuel Wallerstein #Interdisciplinary #Participation #World-system
“In the old South Africa we killed people. Now we’re just letting them die.” – Pieter-Dirk Uys In her 2003 book, ‘Letting them Die’: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail, Catherine Campbell describes how “the best-intentioned programmes, even when they achieve high levels of mobilization of the least-powerful sectors of small local communities, may have […]
Tags: #Failure #International development #Participation #social capital #Stakeholders
Cochrane, L. and Tamiru, Y. (2016) Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program: Power, Politics and Practice. Journal of International Development 28(5): 649-665. Abstract With one third of the population living in poverty and millions experiencing chronic food insecurity, the government of Ethiopia faces difcult and complex challenges. One of the most robust and effective social protection […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Participation #Politics #Power #Productive Safety Net Program
Rosalind Eyben spent a career as a practitioner in international development and then as an academic on the subject. Her 2014 book, “International Aid and the Making of a Better World: Reflexive Practice” is one of the few books that critically self-analyzes a personal trajectory. Unlike some personal journals/journeys of aid workers, this focuses upon […]
Tags: #Gender #Human Rights #International development #Participation #Reflexivity