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Why have so many countries in Africa adopted social protection programmes over the past decade? This book challenges the common assumption that this phenomenon has been entirely driven by international development agencies, instead focusing on the critical role of political dynamics within specific African countries.
This book provides a systematic analysis of the political processes shaping the distribution of social transfers in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. After more than a decade of construction, Ethiopia is filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a controversial dam with the potential to transform the hydrology and politics of the Nile Basin. The GERD is the culmination of a dam building boom carried out over three decades and a key pillar of the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front's (EPRDF) efforts to bring about an Ethiopian 'Renaissance'. Dams, Power, and the Politics of Ethiopia's Renai...
In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives: ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing that can influence policy.
Inequality is one of today's greatest challenges, obstructing poverty reduction and sustainable development. As the power of elites grows and societal gaps widen, institutions representing the public good and universal values are increasingly disempowered or co-opted, and visions of social justice and equity side-lined. This book explores the roles of elites and institutions of power in the deepening of social and economic cleavages across the globe, by asking how inequalities have reshaped structures from the local to the transnational level, and what consequences they have wrought. In addition, the contributors present examples of peaceful processes of policy change that have made societies greener and more socially just, levelled out social stratification, and devolved power and resources from elites to non-elites, or towards marginalized or discriminated groups. Based on cutting-edge empirical research, the chapters in this volume bring together conceptual thinking and a number of case studies from the Global North and South, combining different levels of analysis and a range of qualitative research methods to present solutions for closing the inequality gap.
Mobile phones are close to ubiquitous in developing countries; Internet and broadband access are becoming commonplace. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) thus represent the fastest, broadest and deepest technical change experienced in international development. They now affect every development sector – supporting the work of hundreds of millions of farmers and micro-entrepreneurs; creating millions of ICT-based jobs; assisting healthcare workers and teachers; facilitating political change; impacting climate change; but also linked with digital inequalities and harms – with the pace of change continuously accelerating. Information and Communication Technology for Developme...
In 2018, Ethiopia and the world were in the throes of 'Abiymania', a fervour of popular support for the divided country's young, charismatic new prime minister. Arriving as if from nowhere, Abiy Ahmed, a Pentecostal Christian, promised democratic salvation and national unity. For his role brokering a historic peace with neighbouring Eritrea, he received the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Hailed at home as a prophet and abroad as a liberal reformer, Abiy was all things to all men. But his democratic revolution wasn't quite what it seemed. Within two years, Ethiopia had lurched into a devastating civil war, threatening state collapse. By 2023, genocidal fighting had killed hundreds of thousands in th...
In the early 2000s, Chinese demand for imported commodities ballooned as the country continued its breakneck economic growth. Simultaneously, global markets in metals and fuels experienced a boom of unprecedented extent and duration. Meanwhile, resource-rich states in the Global South from Argentina to Angola began to advance a range of new development strategies, breaking away from the economic orthodoxies to which they had long appeared tied. In China’s Wake reveals the surprising connections among these three phenomena. Nicholas Jepson shows how Chinese demand not only transformed commodity markets but also provided resource-rich states with the financial leeway to set their own policy ...
When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few been able to sustain growth over decades? This book provides a novel conceptual framework built from a political economy of business-government relations and applies it to nine countries across Africa and Asia, drawing actionable policy recommendations.
This timely book makes accessible to a broad audience the ideas, principles and practicalities of establishing effective social protection in Africa. It focuses on the major shift in strategy for tackling hunger and vulnerability, from emergency responses mainly in the form of food transfers to predictable cash transfers to the chronically poorest social groups. The first part of the book comprises nine theme chapters, covering vulnerability, targeting, delivery, coordination, cost-effectiveness, market impacts, and asset effects, while the second part consists of fifteen social protection case studies. The continuous interplay between these two parts makes for a unique contribution to the c...