Multi-donor trust funds and fragile states: assessing the aid effectiveness of the Zimbabwe multi-donor trust fund

It is widely acknowledged that multi-donor trust funds (MDTFs) contribute to aid effectiveness. This paper challenges this assertion through assessing the aid effectiveness of the Zimbabwe Multi-Donor Trust Fund. The paper makes four key arguments. First, political relations between recipient and donor countries are vital in the functioning of MDTFs. Second, the design of MDTFs affects the delivery and functioning of the trust fund. Third, whilst the legitimacy of national governments in fragile states is often contested, targeting legitimate and credible institutions can offer tangible and life changing results. Fourth, MDTFs focusing on the recovery of key sectors such as water, sanitation and energy have direct impacts to economic recovery and people’s lives

What determines women's participation in collective action? Evidence from a western Ugandan coffee cooperative

Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collective action has been promoted to remedy those disadvantages. Using survey data of 421 women members and 210 nonmembers of a coffee producer cooperative in Western Uganda, this study investigates the determinants of women's participation in cooperatives and women's intensity of participation. The results highlight the importance of access to and control over land for women to join the cooperative in the first place. Participation intensity is measured through women's participation in collective coffee marketing and share capital contributions. It is found that duration of membership, access to extension services, more equal intrahousehold power relations, and joint land ownership positively influence women's ability to commit to collective action. These findings demonstrate the embeddedness of collective action in gender relations and the positive value of women's active participation for agricultural-marketing cooperatives

Taxation and Development: a Review of Donor Support to Strengthen Tax Systems in Developing Countries

Recent years have seen a growing interest among donors on taxation in developing countries. This reflects a concern for domestic revenue mobilization to finance public goods and services, as well as recognition of the centrality of taxation for growth and redistribution. The global financial crisis has also led many donor countries to pay more attention to the extent and effectiveness of the aid they provide, and to ensuring that they support rather than discourage the developing countries’ own revenue-raising efforts. This paper reviews the state of knowledge on aid and tax reform in developing countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Four main issues are addressed: (1) impacts of donor assistance to strengthen tax systems, including what has worked, or not, and why; (2) challenges in ‘scaling up’ donor efforts; (3) how to best provide assistance to reform tax systems; and (4) knowledge gaps to be filled in order to design better donor interventions. The paper argues that donors should complement the traditional ‘technical’ approach to tax reform with measures that encourage constructive engagement between governments and citizens over tax issues.Department for International DevelopmentBill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

African Dreams: Locating Urban Infrastructure in the 2030 Sustainable Developmental Agenda

This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multi-nodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what an African metropolis might aspire to by 2030. The sustainable development vision provides a useful stimulus for Africa’s urban poly-crisis, demanding fresh interdisciplinary and normatively explicit thinking, grounded in a practical and realistic understanding of Africa’s infrastructure and governance challenges

Gender Mainstreaming Critiques: Signposts or Dead Ends?

An enduring legacy of the Beijing conference, gender mainstreaming has been widely implemented and widely critiqued since the 1990s. But the basis of these critiques has changed over time: this article charts a typology of critique approaches. It shows how the central problem is diagnosed variously as the loss of the political dimensions of gender in the course of mainstreaming; or technical shortcomings; or the gendered nature of organisations as the causes of technical failure. For others, the problem has been the failure to scrutinise the connection between gender mainstreaming and changes in gender relations in women's real lives. More recently, another group asserts that the trajectory of gender mainstreaming is simply part of the much broader logic of neoliberal governance. Understanding the technologies of power that shape a feminist practice suitable for the governance institutions into which it is inserted can help guide future feminist engagement

Towards an understanding of the political economy of the PPCR

While an analysis of the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) is inseparable from wider discussion on adaptation finance, this article primarily focuses on the drivers and ideologies that shaped the PPCR governance and delivery structures. The core narrative of mainstreaming adaptation into development through a process of government-centred policy reform challenges many principles of the UNFCCC process. Utilising the structures of international financing institutions as implementing agencies, heightens this tension. The central idea of mainstreaming adaptation through climate-proofing existing development initiatives utilises the standard economic growth narrative. This climate ‘add-on’ approach to development allows the World Bank Group and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) to claim a space in managing future climate finance flows. This drive by the Bank plays out in the exclusivity of the design process for the PPCR and through the implementation modalities, which severely curtail opportunities for multi-stakeholder dialogue and thus the potential for development of broad country ownership of programmes

Rural connectivity in Africa: motorcycle track construction

Motorcycle transportation has burgeoned in war-affected West Africa over the past decade. The penetration ofmotorcycle taxis deep into isolated rural communities has spread spontaneously and created direct and indirectemployment opportunities for low-skilled youth, a category most susceptible to militia recruitment. Equallyimportant, it has significantly contributed to lifting smallholder farmers out of poverty by reducing the costs ofmoving produce to markets, with motorcycles able to visit villages connected to feeder roads solely by footpaths.Nevertheless, state actors and international donors remain reluctant to allocate funds to rural track building/upgrading, preferring to stick to more conventional, but expensive, construction/rehabilitation of rural roadsaccessible to four-wheeled vehicles. Through a case study of Liberia – still recovering from two civil wars and an Ebolahealth crisis – this paper argues that the impact of bringing community access through track construction/footpathupgrading is significant, particularly because track construction lends itself par excellence to the involvement of therural communities themselves

Shifting the Narrative: Child-led Responses to Climate Change and Disasters in El Salvador and the Philippines

Children and young people are commonly treated in the climate change and disasters literature as victims of natural events requiring protection by adults. This article critiques that narrative, drawing on examples from the Philippines and El Salvador that explore how children’s groups have responded to such issues through child‐centred initiatives. This highlights the importance of understanding children’s perception and communication of risks facing their lives and livelihoods, their potential as agents of change in preventing disasters and adapting to climate change, and the implications for the theory and practice of child participation, particularly in developing countries

Towards a New Political Economy of Climate Change and Development

In this article, the authors propose a new political economy of climate change and development in which explicit attention is given to the way that ideas, power and resources are conceptualised, negotiated and implemented by different groups at different scales. The climate change and development interface warrants such attention because of its importance to achieving sustainable poverty reduction outcomes, cross‐sectoral nature, urgency and rapid emergence of international resource transfers, initiatives and governance architectures, and the frequent assumption of linear policymaking and apolitical, techno‐managerial solutions to the climate change challenge