This book offers a collection of original, state-of-the-art essays addressing various aspects of the economic analysis of inequality, deprivation, poverty measurement and social polarization, at both the theoretical and empirical level. Written by leading authorities in the fields of distributional analysis and normative economics, the respective chapters present detailed overviews of cutting-edge literature, as well as stand-alone research. Compiled as a tribute to Satya Ranjan Chakravarty's lifetime contributions in the fields of normative economics and distributional analysis, it represents an indispensable resource for researchers, policymakers and doctoral students working on issues pertaining to income/wealth distribution, social inclusion and poverty reduction.

Taking a forward-looking approach, this book critically examines the issues and dynamics central to Africa's problematic development and situates these issues within the contents unique cultural, political, economic, and social milieu. Moving away from a simple litany of problems bedeviling Africa's economy, the book is the culmination of several scholars' efforts to identify specific causative factors. Each chapter delineates a specific issue, demonstrates the role it plays in overall development, and speculates on probable ways to meet the challenges it poses. The major conceptual and epistemological constructs considered include the tamed African State, social capacity, management of change, reconceptualized gender roles, and economic integration.

Although the contributors' various approaches diverge and disagree, the epistemological variations contribute cumulatively to an understanding of the issues at the root of Africa's slow pace of development. While traversing the spectrum of issues that affect development, the book uniquely points out that the management of change is pivotal to fostering development. The authors' efforts provide a useful base for future research and help to chart a course of action leading to success in the 21st century.

The world of trade is changing rapidly, from the 'rise of the South' to the growth of unconventional projects like fair trade and carbon trading. Beyond Free Trade advances alternative ways for understanding these new dynamics, based on historical, political, or sociological methods that go beyond the limitations of conventional trade economics.

Focusing on transboundary river systems and their basins, the authors explore the fresh water crisis of Himalayan Asia. While the region hosts some of the world's mightiest rivers, it is also home to rapidly modernizing, increasingly affluent, and demographically multiplying societies. This combination ensures both the depletion of water resources and the increase in disputes over ownership of transboundary river waters. In a thorough investigation, based on extensive field research across Asia, the authors examine how these disputes impact the present and future interstate relations of this key region.

Throughout the global community, the challenges of finite resources, budget deficits, and growing interdependence and complexity have forced governments and the private sector to do more with less. In the foreign assistance realm, this has translated into a donor mandate to promote self-sustaining development in the Third World, a key component of which is the institutional framework that conceives, plans, funds, implements, and manages activities. This book, based on the results of a multi-year applied research project, focuses on institutional sustainability and its role in agriculture and rural development. It concentrates on collaboration between international donor organizations and developing countries to design and implement projects aimed at introducing performance and capacity improvements.

The collection of fifteen essays is divided into three subject areas. Part one examines the sustainability dimensions of agriculture and rural development, with chapters that focus on the range of meanings of sustainability and the relationship between it and continued benefit flows; a conceptual model that draws on systems theory, organizational contingency theory, and political economy; and the action-research methodology for applying the model in the field. Part two is made up of nine chapters, each of which uses the model to analyze a particular case where an international donor-funded intervention sought to develop a sustainable institution. The cases range geographically across the world. Finally, part three draws on the case experiences to highlight strategies for promoting institutional sustainability. Lessons are derived from a comparative analysis of several of the cases, and a chapter incorporating the points made in all of the cases is also provided. With its comparative framework and conclusion that institutional sustainability is a feasible objective for development agencies, this volume will be an important work for development practitioners and students of development administration, as well as a significant addition to public and academic library collections.

Combining studies of demography, climate change, technology and innovation, political development, new actors in international development, and global governance frameworks, this book highlights the major underlying determinants of change in the African context and key uncertainties about the continent's future development prospects.

Looking beyond the materialistic boundary of the conventional development paradigm, this book identifies our spiritual underdevelopment which is being reflected as self-centeredness and greed, as the root cause of conventional development's failure to alleviate poverty and inequality, achieve sustainability and deliver happiness to humanity.

This book contains the full research papers presented at the 20th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, held in 2017 at Wageningen University & Research in Wageningen, the Netherlands. The selected contributions show trends in the domain of geographic information science directed to spatio-temporal perception and spatio-temporal analysis. For that reason the book is also of interest to professionals and researchers in fields outside geographic information science, in which the application of geoinformation could be instrumental in sparking societal innovation.

This book is a collection of working papers, policy briefs and training modules, published by the International Poverty Centre in Brazil, which provides a comprehensives set of recommendations for alternative economic policies that can generate growth, employment and poverty reduction in developing countries.

Sustainability of rural communities is threatened by a plethora of factors including climate change and disasters which interact in an intricate manner in making rural people vulnerable and poor. This book is the output of empirical research on communities and livelihood strategies in developing countries. It reveals how rural communities are functioning and earning their livelihoods by making the best use of the resources, local/internal or external/new and the combination of the two to counteract the various challenges they face, with the ultimate goal of becoming resilient to local or global shocks and sustaining that resilience. Local governance is identified as crucial in ensuring sustainable livelihoods as it ensures healthy collaboration between communities, on the one hand and civil society and those communities, on the other hand, in promoting self-sustaining development trajectories. Similarly, the role of social capital is not ignored as it brings in community drive and a sense of purpose, direction and solidarity among community members which facilitates problem solving in periods of crises and disasters.

This book uses primary evidence to assess the value of agro-input and service delivery business models in terms of their inclusiveness, effectiveness and impact from a small farmer perspective, in the form of case studies in three Indian states: Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The services discussed include custom rental of farm machinery and equipment, franchising for backward and forward linkage for farmers and the supermarkets for delivery of farm inputs, and extension services. The book examines agro-input and service delivery business models as institutional innovations for inclusive and effective delivery of such services in the small farmer context, based on primary data from the agencies designing and implementing such models and the farmers who make use of these inputs and services. Further, it identifies major issues and challenges in the delivery of farm inputs and services across regions and types of farmers and examines possible policy and enabling provisions to promote cost-effective and high-quality agro-input delivery channels.

Cash Transfers and Basic Social Protection offers a ground-breaking analysis of the discourses that facilitated the rise of cash transfers as instruments of development policy since the 1990s. The author gives a detailed overview of the history of social protection and identifies the factors that made cash transfers legitimate policy.

There has been a growth in the use, acceptance, and popularity of indigenous knowledge. High rates of poverty and a widening economic divide is threatening the accessibility to western scientific knowledge in the developing world where many indigenous people live. Consequently, indigenous knowledge has become a potential source for sustainable development in the developing world. The Handbook of Research on Theoretical Perspectives on Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Developing Countries presents interdisciplinary research on knowledge management, sharing, and transfer among indigenous communities. Providing a unique perspective on alternative knowledge systems, this publication is a critical resource for sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, and graduate-level students in a variety of fields.

The growing scale of international migration has reshaped the debate on the social rights and social protection available to people outside their countries of origin. This book uses conceptual frameworks, policy analysis and empirical studies of migrants to explore international migrants' needs for and access to social protection across the world.

The adoption of technology has provided opportunities for increased participation in global affairs both at an individual and organizational level. As a discipline, e-adoption focuses on the requirements, policies, and implications of widespread technology use in developed and developing countries. E-Adoption and Technologies for Empowering Developing Countries: Global Advances reviews the impact technology has had on individuals and organizations whose access to media and resources is otherwise limited. With overviews of topics including electronic voting, electronic delivery systems, social Web applications, and online educational environments, this reference work provides a foundation for understanding the interplay between technology and societal growth and development.

This collection highlights the work of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Urgent Anthropology Fellowships fund, which supports research into communities whose culture and social life are under immediate threat. Created by George Appell in response to the distress he experienced working with a traumatized community of swidden cultivators in Borneo, who were struggling to survive after relocation in what Appell describes as a ‘cultural concentration camp’, the fund was established to identify ways of supporting and strengthening such communities through ethnographic work. Since 1995, Urgent Anthropology Fellows have worked with many displaced communities, whether found in refugee camps, resettled in kindred communities across national borders or in environments hostile to their traditional way of life; or whether suffering from the aftermath of civil war or the intrusion of foreigners in search of minerals. Despite the diversity of circumstances in these case studies, this book shows some of the common strategies that emerge in helping displaced communities regain some control over their own destinies. These include membership of social networks, access to natural resources, land ownership and self sufficiency, autonomy in local judicial procedures and economic activities as well as the celebration of traditional rituals, all of which lessen the potential powerlessness of displaced communities. Any anthropologist or NGO worker, and indeed anyone who works with, or cares about, vulnerable communities and the rights of indigenous peoples, will gain much from the accumulation of experience and insights offered herein.

This study examines and clarifies the relationship between Islam and modernization in the Muslim world. Through a comparative analysis of Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey, the author analyzes the ideas and conceptions which are inculcated and propagated in Islamic countries as Islamic religious thought, practice, orientation, tradition, and ways-of-life. Saeed explains that the chaotic conditions existing in the Muslim world are largely a result of a crisis of thought, that the grossly distorted and misunderstood Islam, as presently practiced, is a major obstacle to the development of Muslim countries--but that Muslim countries can develop and progress only through Islam.

Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds' examines a defining aspect of South Africa's recent past: the history of apartheid-era relocation. While scholars and activists have long recognised the suffering caused by apartheid removals to the so-called 'homelands', the experiences of those who lived through this process have been more often obscured. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, this book examines the makings and the multiple meanings of relocation into two of the most notorious apartheid 'dumping grounds' established in the Ciskei bantustan during the mid-1960s: Sada and Ilinge. Evans examines the local and global dynamics of the project of bantustan relocation and develops a multi-layered analysis of the complex histories - and ramifications- of displacement and resettlement in the Ciskei.

As the nations in Southeastern Europe confront the changes that are sweeping across the continent, there is much talk of a new beginning for the countries. But just as surely as they face the enormous task of restructuring, their future development will certainly be influenced to a large extent by their particular experiences in the past. This collection of essays considers the problems and prospects of development from a historical perspective by examining the major Balkan states: Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria. These strategic countries are an excellent example of societies with the potential for significant economic growth, but which have developed unevenly because of external and domestic factors. This work provides an integrated overview, geographically and temporally, of each nation's development, reaching back to its emergence. In his introduction, editor Gerasimos Augustinos characterizes development as the process by which economic and technological change leads to the transformation of the institutions and values of a society. Each contributor then examines each country and its specific historical determinants, identifying the developmental strategies that have been attempted in each state and allowing for the comparison of variations. Essay one focuses on Bulgarian modernization, discussing the possibilities and limits of political and economic development through secularization. The problems of differentiated modernization form the basis of the second essay, which compares the seemingly dissimilar states of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the first half of the twentieth century. Essay three addresses the socialist self-management strategy that Yugoslavia adopted in anattempt to promote progress and regime legitimacy. The development of Greece through the market and entrepreneurship is the subject of the fourth essay, while Romania's rapid shift from agriculture to industrialization serves as the focus of the final essay. This comparative study will be an important reference work for courses in contemporary political systems, economic development, and European history, as well as a significant addition to public, college, and university libraries.

China's commitments in Central Asia illustrate how regional foreign policy works and how long-standing principles of Chinese foreign policy might be revised in the near future. China's rise has 'moved' Asia, which is why it seems that what we have traditionally regarded as the geographic and political scope of Asia might actually considerably change in the near future. Nadine Godehardt gives crucial insights into the Chinese expert discourse on Central Asia - analyzing how Chinese experts define Central Asia when they talk and write about policy issues related to China's immediate Western neighbourhood. In this context, she gives an inside perspective on Chinese voices whose meanings are rarely examined in Chinese International Relations studies.

This book is a collection of essays covering a range of issues related to socioeconomic inequalities and diversities. The authors, leading social scientists of diverse nationalities, represent varied perspectives. The book has essays on multiculturalism, social inclusion and exclusion of minorities and other marginalized groups such as low castes, linguistic minorities, Adivasis (tribals), persons with disability and unemployed youth. The book focuses on some innovative concepts considered necessary to understand the very process and evolution of aspects of social development such as pro-sociality, authentic responsible self and leadership ideology. The book deals with the challenges for achieving social development and societal harmony. The book will be a very useful resource for social science scholars and particularly for social and cultural psychologists, development professionals and administrators interested in the issues related to social development, social diversity and inter-group relations. The book will also be useful for policy formulation and action.

Do participatory processes open a political space to marginalized groups & individuals? Or do they co-opt & coerce groups to reinforce existing inequitable relations? In an innovative comparative study which breaks with tradition this book explores these questions by looking at Malawi & Ireland.

This volume examines the impact of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on Africa's development post-2015. It assesses the current state of the MDGs in Africa by outlining the successes, gaps and failures of the state goals, including lessons learned. A unique feature of the book is the exposition on post-MDG's agenda for Africa's development. Chapters on poverty, south-south partnership, aid, gender, empowerment, health as well as governance and development explore what feasible alternative lie ahead for Africa beyond the expiry date of the MDGs.

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa's former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.