Rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture
The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, … Continue reading
Unaffordable and Undrinkable: Rethinking Urban Water Access in the Global South
In 2015, UNICEF and the World Health Organization reported that over 90% of the world’s population used improved drinking water sources. But new research suggests the indicators used by UNICEF/WHO … Continue reading
Urban Informality as a Site of Critical Analysis
Across the Global South, the realities of urban informality are changing, with implications for how we understand this phenomenon across economic, spatial, and political domains. Recent accounts have attempted to … Continue reading
Food safety and nutrition for low-income urbanites
Equitable access to healthy food is a critical challenge in urban Asia. Food safety governance promotes modern supermarkets over more traditional markets, but supermarkets are associated with unequal access to … Continue reading
Inequality, good governance, and endemic corruption
Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a … Continue reading
Cities Made of Boundaries: Mapping Social Life in Urban Form
Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish … Continue reading
What’s in a Word? The Conceptual Politics of ‘Informal’ Street Trade in Dar es Salaam
Focussing on policies towards urban street trade in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in this paper I illustrate how despite the widely acknowledged limits to its analytical usefulness, the contested and … Continue reading
Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary
“Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary” is a stimulating collection of over 100 essays on transformative alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, … Continue reading
The State and the Origins of Informal Economic Activity
Understanding the root causes of informal economic activity is crucial for the effective governance of the informal sphere. Precisely what these root causes are, however, is subject to significant debate. … Continue reading
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