East Asia and Pacific Cities : Expanding Opportunities for the Urban Poor
Urbanization in East Asia and the Pacific has created enormous opportunity for many. Yet the rapid growth of cities can also create challenges as national and local governments try to … Continue reading
Beyond the Tyranny of Averages: Development Progress from the Bottom Up
Relying on averages is worsening inequality within countries. A new AidData report looks at whether aid financing reaches the poorest regions and finds that donors are missing the mark…policymakers often … Continue reading
Urban Design in the Global South: Ontological Design in Practice
Paul James – Urban design tends to remake nature with the modern neatness and cultural flatness of a computer-generated verge pattern. However sensitive to cultural difference, various individual designers may be, … Continue reading
Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions
Buntaine et al – We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently … Continue reading
Big data is people!
Rebecca Lemov – We live in what is sometimes called the ‘petabyte era’, and this pronouncement has provoked much discussion of the sheer size of data stores being created, as … Continue reading
A tale of three cities, or: The smart city as will and category error
Adam Greenfield – By leveraging the decentralizing tendencies that appear to be implicit in our networked technologies, and the configurations of power they in principle give rise to, we can … Continue reading
Measuring poverty and wellbeing in developing countries
Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct … Continue reading
Civic Tech in the Global South
Civic Tech in the Global South is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of … Continue reading
Reading Development 