			Home About us Contact

Development Context (development + context)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	50%

Selected Abstracts

The Experience of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 5 2006
Sudhanshu Handa
This article discusses the experience of six conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America, a model of social safety-nets which has grown to dominate the social protection sector in the region during the past decade. While they have been generally successful in terms of achieving their core objective, it is still not clear whether these programmes constitute the most cost-efficient or sustainable solution to the development bottleneck they seek to address. Furthermore, the almost exclusive focus on the human capital accumulation of children leads to missed opportunties in terms of impact on household welfare and the broader rural development context. [source]

Translating women's human rights in a globalizing world: the spiral process in reducing gender injustice in Baroda, India

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2009
N. RAJARAM
Abstract In this article we analyse the translation of global women's rights ideas in a local context, based on an ethnographic study of three women's organizations from Baroda, Gujarat state, India. On a macro-level, the local social and cultural norms, the development context, and the nature and role of the state strongly shaped the translation process. Micro processes of translation depend on the organization's core activity, the actors who direct the translation and where they are culturally anchored. Translation involves meaning-making, which consists of several simultaneous processes, including recuperation, hybridization, simplification and compartmentalization. The direction of the translation process is not linear, but resembles a spiral with ideas moving from global to local to global. Lastly, there are different types of translators, including converters, generators, conveyers, adaptors and transformers. [source]

The Principal Components of Growth in the Less Developed Countries

KYKLOS INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, Issue 4 2008
Derek Headey
SUMMMARY This paper re-examines the international evidence on the sources of growth in less developed countries (LDCs) using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Although EFA was first used in the development context by Adelman and Morris (1967) it has rarely been used since, despite being ideally suited to a context in which a large number of latent factors have been hypothesized to determine growth, and in which an even greater number of imperfectly measured and multicollinear proxies have been used to measure these latent factors. This paper uses EFA to minimize these problems of omitted variables biases, multicollinearity and measurement error, by reducing a large array of hypothesized growth determinants into a parsimonious and non-collinear set of composite indices. The paper then provides theoretical interpretations of the derived indices, tests their statistical significance and quantitative importance in otherwise conventional growth regressions, and uses these results to reappraise the usefulness of cross-country empirics in deriving robust, policy-relevant knowledge of the principal components of growth in LDCs, including the so called ,economic miracles'. [source]

Managing complex development projects: arenas, knowledge processes and time

R & D MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2002
Jonas Söderlund
The literature on project management has been dominated by techniques and methods for separating activities and making thought out plans. Closely related to this research stream is the research on product development, which seems to advocate somewhat of a different strategy where managing projects is a matter of enabling the crossing of functions and knowledge bases. This paper attempts to integrate these two lines of research. The paper is based on two in,depth case studies of project management in product development contexts. The projects under study were highly complex and consisted of multiple interrelated parts, which called for ,tightly coupled' organizational solutions. From our point of view, much effort by the project management teams was put into establishing a project that was responsive and where participating local units were oriented toward various ,global' measures. In our conception, the overall deadline seemed to have played an important role for promoting communal and interactive problem solving. Furthermore, the deadline emphasized the need for global arenas where the interactive problem solving could take place. It is argued that time,based controls set a global time for the project. The paper also demonstrates the importance of various global arenas, such as testing activities and project management forums, in order to keep track of time limits and to trigger global knowledge processes. Furthermore, based on the notion of ,separation' and ,coupling' of sub,systems and project phases, the paper suggests a model identifying four types of project organizations. The paper contributes to the knowledge on project management in complex product development. [source]