Our research on governance, power relations, participation and citizen engagement, informs change processes in pursuit of social justice and social change. With power and politics central to our analysis, we support the generation of new evidence that contributes to improved processes for good governance, citizen engagement, empowerment and accountability.
We pioneer new ways of working with governments, communities, activists and academics, to understand the complex relationships and processes that exist across states, markets, and citizens, and between formal and informal institutions, to tackle issues such as digital inequalities, women’s participation and empowerment, decentralisation and local governance, rapid urbanisation, migration, taxation and domestic resource mobilisation, food security and hunger and nutrition. These draw on our extensive expertise in complex approaches to how change happens. Through our research and policy partnerships we are also bringing new insights on the role that rising powers and emerging economies such as China and Brazil have in relation to global governance and tackling development challenges such as sustainability and poverty. Our world-renown participatory research has a particular emphasis on systematic social exclusion facing women, people living in extreme poverty, people with disabilities, slaves bonded labourers, indigenous peoples and others. We advance cutting edge methodological development in action research, participatory visual methods, participatory mapping, participatory statistics, participatory Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) amongst others.
In alignment with the ‘leave no one behind’ framing of the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development, the PMA programme is working with groups of people living in poverty and marginalisation to strengthen processes of citizen-led accountability.
The International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) provides research evidence that supports developing countries in raising domestic revenues equitably and sustainably, in a manner that is conducive to pro-poor economic growth and good governance.
This project aims to create the knowledge needed and provide opportunities for women’s rights organisations and other gender justice defenders to counter the backlash and address the erosion of gender objectives within development.
When citizens and communities in fragile settings don't engage with public authorities to solve their governance issues, what do they do instead and why?
When marginalised people do engage, make claims and demand accountability from public authorities, what are the roles, strategies and...
Under what conditions does women’s social and political action contribute to the strengthening of women’s empowerment and lead to accountability outcomes that promote gender equity in contexts of fragility, conflict and violence?
Women's political agency is limited in multiple ways...
How and under what conditions do struggles over energy access in fragile and conflict affected settings empower marginalised groups to hold public authorities to account – both over energy and more broadly?
Energy prices, subsidies, and availability have very often become...
This book questions the dominant approaches of the professions, disciplines and bureaucracies concerned with rural development. New frontiers can be opened up by breaking out of, and reversing, many of the ideas, values, methods and behaviour normally dominant in disciplines and departments, by...
It is little more than three years since the Berlin Wall began to crumble. In that time, the political context and content of development aid to the Third World has changed rather dramatically.
This book presents an analysis of the political motives and pressures behind China's market-oriented economic reforms, the politics of the reform policy process and the impact of economic changes on China's ruling ideology, political and governmental system and state-society relations. The...
One of the least contentious issues in post war development thinking was the form of public administration. There were disputes about the boundaries between public and private, but not about how the public sector should be run.
After 1971 state-dominated rural services collapsed in Uganda. This study sets out the reasons for that collapse and the recent transformation of service provision under the National Resistance Movement government, and evaluates the performance of local government, the private sector,...
Robert Chambers, Mick Howes and Mark Robinson are among the authors of 20 essays which draw on both Northern and Southern NGO experience to review the strengths, weaknesses, problems and opportunities presented by these and other options, illustrated with case studies.