This paper is concerned with the recent history of microfinance, both for itself and as a case study of the evolution of development ideas and activities. Doing justice to this history, and to all those involved in it will not be easy. Rather than aiming for a full narrative this paper asks what...

It has become common knowledge that international organizations (IOs) are struggling with local ownership of their peacebuilding and development interventions worldwide. This happens despite the local turn which gained momentum in recent years in peacebuilding research and practice. Drawing on...

Why does a state like Peru, dedicated to fulfilling development goals and sustained good macroeconomic performance, appear incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic? Using the case of maternal mortality, this paper argues that the tremendous impact of the pandemic is rooted in the adoption...

The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at...

This paper is intended to analyse two leading approaches that have guided international efforts to promote peace and development in conflict-afflicted fragile states since the 1990s, namely peace-building and state-building. In a relatively recent development, a growing number of donors has...

The 1990s financial crises triggered many changes to the design of the international financial system, the so-called international financial architecture. While much affected, developing countries have had very little influence on the changes, which the formulation of the new Basle capital...

The emergence of a globalised knowledge economy, and the contemporary views of innovation capacity that this trend enables and informs, provides a new context in which development assistance to agricultural research and development needs to be considered. The main argument in this paper, which...

We examine the properties of alternative monetary policy rules in response to large aid surges in low-income countries characterized by incomplete capital market integration and currency substitution. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that simple monetary rules that...

This paper is concerned with the recent history of microfinance, both for itself and as a case study of the evolution of development ideas and activities. Doing justice to this history, and to all those involved in it will not be easy. Rather than aiming for a full narrative this paper asks what...

This mixed methods study investigates why fewer than one in five impact evaluations integrates a value-for-money analysis of the development intervention being evaluated. This study distills four main insights from combined analysis of 33 semi-structured and unstructured interviews, surveys of...