Sustainability

Compensating for Institutional Exclusion? Lessons from Indian Government and Non-Government Credit Interventions for the Poor

This paper conceptualises poverty as the product of multiple, and frequently interlocking, forms of institutional exclusion and focuses on the exclusion of the poor from mainstream financial institutions in India in order to analyse the rules, norms and procedures by which this occurs.

Naila Kabeer

Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic

Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use.

Melissa Leach

Sustaining the Soil: Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation in Africa

Indigenous soil and water conservation practices are rarely acknowledged in the design of projects. Instead, the history of soil and water conservation in Africa has been one of imposing external solutions without regard to local practice.

Ian Scoones

Commons and Collectives: The Lack of Social Capital in Central Asia’s Land Reforms

IDS Working Paper 40

Current debate about land and agrarian reform in the post-Soviet Central Asian republics tends to be couched in terms of stark choices between state, collective and private ownership. There is little discussion of the full range of potential tenure arrangements in the 'middle ground' between...

Banking Policy in Botswana: Orthodox but Untypical

IDS working papers;39

Financial sector policy in Botswana was unusual. In most other African countries, newly independent governments intervened extensively in the ownership, management and credit allocation of domestic banks.

Privatisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress and Prospects During the 1990s

IDS Working Paper 41

Privatisation of state-owned enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is accelerating, according to this study, and has already progressed much further than previous reports have indicated. Up to now, the analysis of the privatisation in sub-Saharan Africa has been based on very incomplete and...

Organisational Issues in New Forms of Multi-Sectoral Planning

IDS working papers;42

Despite current ideological and philosophical objections to planning, it survives in new forms, generating Policy Framework Papers, Poverty Assessments and Food Security Strategies.

Simon Maxwell

Surplus Labour and Productivity in Chinese Agriculture: Evidence from Household Survey Data

IDS working papers;43

This paper investigates whether the concept of surplus labour adequately characterises the labour conditions facing rural Chinese households, and whether, therefore, it affects household labour allocation decisions.

Local Heroes: Patterns of Field Worker Discretion in Implementing GAD Policy in Bangladesh

This paper examines how field workers use their discretion to interpret and implement policy in rural credit programmes in Bangladesh, looking in particular at differences in attitudes and practices between women and men field staff.

Anne Marie Goetz

Fuzzy Entitlements and Common Property Resources: Struggles Over Rights to Communal Land in Namibia

IDS Working Paper 44

This paper addresses some conceptual difficulties of applying the entitlement approach to contexts such as common property regimes, where overlapping institutions or groups of individuals all exert valid claims over a single resource endowment, and where claims on resources are socially...

Stephen Devereux

When Livestock are Good for the Environment: Benefit Sharing of Environmental Goods and Services

IDS Working Paper 45

Livestock producers are coming in for increasing criticism world-wide on the grounds that livestock production is bad for the environment. But the environmental consequences vary widely, depending on the specific local circumstances.

Does European Aid Work? An Ethiopian Case Study

IDS working papers;46

The future of European aid is being hotly debated. This paper presents the results of a major evaluation of EU aid to Ethiopia over the period from 1976 to 1994. It concludes that the effectiveness of aid has varied. Some, perhaps most, 'worked', but some did not - for reasons partly internal to...

Simon Maxwell