Publications

Blocked drains and open minds : multiple accountability relationships and improved service delivery performance in an Indian city

IDS working papers;211

How can public sector service providers deliver improved services to citizens within environments where inefficient and often corrupt service delivery is the norm? The following paper provides some answers to this question through examining the impact of a series of customer-focused service...

Measuring destitution : integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches in the analysis of survey data

IDS working papers;217

Through detailed discussion of a methodology developed to quantify destitution in rural Ethiopia, the paper raises a number of issues and ideas concerning the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches during survey analysis. It highlights the critical importance of using contextual...

Notes on access to justice in a megalopolis : São Paulo, Brazil

IDS working papers;181

“Toilet wars” : urban sanitation services and the politics of public-private partnerships in Ghana

IDS working papers;213

There is a continuing debate over the value of public-partnerships in providing public services in poor urban areas. Many policy-makers in the developing countries have been persuaded that the main problem with established direct public service provision lies in principal-agent problems, i.e....

International lenders’ and investors’ behaviour : what the markets tell us we didn’t know

IDS working papers;193

Drawing on interviews with international financial players based in London, New York, Chicago and other US financial centres, this paper aims to provide further information and insights into lenders’ and investors’ behaviour and their attitudes towards developing countries, and to identify...

Regulatory manoeuvres : the ‘Bt cotton’ controversy in India

IDS working papers;197

This paper asks what regulation actually means in practice in the post-economic reform context of India, taking the case of biosafety regulation and Bt cotton as a case. The last few years have been a test case for such regulations, culminating in the formal approval of Bt cotton for commercial...

Making policy in the “new economy” : the case of biotechnology in Karnataka, India

IDS working papers;196

This paper is a story of the making of a policy, one that included many different players, located across a variety of sites. By tracing the origins of the millennium biotechnology policy in Karnataka state, south India, examining the content of and participants in the debate that led up to it,...

Governing modern agricultural biotechnology in Kenya : implications for food security

IDS working papers;199

This report reviews governance issues of modern biotechnology. The study used two case studies of transgenic sweet potato and Bt maize to examine how governance issues influence household and national food security in the country. The report argues that for biotechnology to engender food...

Biotech firms, biotech politics : negotiating GMOs in India

IDS working papers;201

This paper seeks to identify and explain the ways in which different firms affected by and involved in the debate about the role of biotechnology in Indian agriculture have sought to advance their interests. It is argued that the public positions of larger biotech and agro-chemical companies,...

‘Bt cotton’ benefits, costs and impacts in China

IDS working papers;202

The overall goal of this paper is to reexamine findings of earlier efforts that analysed the effect of Bt cotton adoption in 1999 with two follow-up surveys conducted in 2000 and 2001. Our survey data on yields and econometric analyses indicate that the adoption of Bt cotton continues to...

What makes microcredit programmes effective? : fashionable fallacies and workable realities

IDS working papers;177

Who gets what from whom? : the impact of decentralisation on tax capacity and pro-poor policy

IDS working papers;179