Introduction to the Special Issue: Policies for Inclusive Development in Africa

While there is increasing academic analysis and policy concern regarding growing inequality and the need for more inclusive development trajectories, it is equally important to advance our understanding of the pathways to attain more inclusive development in practice. This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue examining the empirical outcomes and processes of inclusive development policies in selected countries in Africa. The paper presents a policy implementation and assessment framework as a lens that connects the different case studies. The framework links general inclusive development strategies in employment, social protection and governance, to the participation and representation of the various stakeholders as well as the monetary and non-monetary transaction costs in accessing and/or implementing these programmes on the ground in different national and sub-national contexts. Based on the findings of the 9 case studies, the paper also advances policy directions and operational frameworks to attain more inclusive development in practice

An economics of wellbeing: what would economics look like if it were focussed on human wellbeing?

This paper makes a number of fundamental proposals to reconsider economics by putting human wellbeing at the centre. It emerges from a pluralist perspective in economics and the ontological, conceptual, axiomatic and methodological propositions that are made lead to the construction of what we call an inclusive economy matrix (IEM).In particular, the paper draws on heterodox economics to redefine the scope of economics, economic agency, rational behaviour and put emphasis on wellbeing rather than welfare. Furthermore, from the acknowledgement of human wellbeing as a three-dimensional concept, the economic aggregation problem is reconsidered and the methodological implications discussed.The IEM is proposed as a comprehensive and robust analytical framework that gives space to bring social equity and sustainable development considerations forward as a priori concerns for economic development. As such, the IEM can serve as a point of departure for formulating new research questions, exploring new relationships between human wellbeing and economic development, and building economic models that bring us closer to people’s realities on the ground

Inclusive development in search of political will

Inclusive development builds upon the three pillars of increased human wellbeing for all, social and environmental sustainability, and empowerment. Political will at multiple levels of governance needs to be mobilized to curb the global inequality trend

From correlation to causation: the cruciality of a collectivity in the context of collective action

This paper discusses a longitudinal field study on collective action which aims to move beyond student samples and enhance mundane realism. First we provide a historical overview of the literature on the what (i.e., antecedents of collective action) and the how (i.e., the methods employed) of the social psychology of protest. This historical overview is substantiated with meta-analytical evidence on how these antecedents and methods changed over time. After the historical overview, we provide an empirical illustration of a longitudinal field study in a natural setting―a newly-built Dutch neighbourhood. We assessed changes in informal embeddedness, efficacy, identification, emotions, and grievances over time. Between t0 and t1 the residents protested against the plan to allow a mosque to carrying out their services in a community building in the neighbourhood. We examined the antecedents of protest before [t0] and after [t1] the protests, and whether residents participated or not. We show how a larger social network functions as a catalyst in steering protest participation. Our longitudinal field study replicates basic findings from experimental and survey research. However, it also shows that one antecedent in particular, which is hard to manipulate in the lab (i.e., the size of someone’s social network), proved to be of great importance. We suggest that in overcoming our most pertinent challenge―causality―we should not only remain in our laboratories but also go out and examine real-life situations with people situated in real-life social networks

Energy flows in gesture-speech physics: The respiratory-vocal system and its coupling with hand gestures

Expressive moments in communicative hand gestures often align with emphatic stress in speech. It has recently been found that acoustic markers of emphatic stress arise naturally during steady-state phonation when upper-limb movements impart physical impulses on the body, most likely affecting acoustics via respiratory activity. In this confirmatory study, participants (N = 29) repeatedly uttered consonant-vowel (/pa/) mono-syllables while moving in particular phase relations with speech, or not moving the upper limbs. This study shows that respiration-related activity is affected by (especially high-impulse) gesturing when vocalizations occur near peaks in physical impulse. This study further shows that gesture-induced moments of bodily impulses increase the amplitude envelope of speech, while not similarly affecting the Fundamental Frequency (F0). Finally, tight relations between respiration-related activity and vocalization were observed, even in the absence of movement, but even more so when upper-limb movement is present. The current findings expand a developing line of research showing that speech is modulated by functional biomechanical linkages between hand gestures and the respiratory system. This identification of gesture-speech biomechanics promises to provide an alternative phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and mechanistic explanatory route of why communicative upper limb movements co-occur with speech in humans. ACKNOWLEDGMENT