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Introduced in Bolivia a little over a decade ago, social funds have become a key community-led poverty reduction tool. A departure from traditional government-sponsored approaches, social funds encourage communities and local institutions to take the lead in identifying and carrying out small-scale investments, generally in social infrastructure such as schools, health clinics, and small-scale water supply and sanitation. The social fund model has proved to be a dynamic, replicable approach, easily adapted and scaled up in diverse countries around the world. In Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia, social funds have now absorbed close to $10 billion in foreign and domestic financing. Despite their popularity, the effectiveness of social funds as a mechanism for improving welfare has remained largely unmeasured. This study is the first systematic cross-country impact evaluation of social funds using survey data and accepted evaluation methodologies. The research, carried out in Armenia, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Zambia, addresses four fundamental questions: Do social funds reach poor areas and poor households? Do social funds deliver high-quality, sustainable investments? Do social funds affect living standards? How cost-efficient are social funds and the investments they finance, compared with other delivery mechanisms?The result of important new World Bank research, this book will be of interest to social policy practitioners and analysts, to academics and students of development, and to anyone interested in current thinking on poverty reduction strategies.

In light of grand societal challenges, most recently the global Covid-19 pandemic, there is a call for research on responsible leadership. While significant advances have been made in recent years towards a better understanding of the concept, a gap exists in the understanding of responsible leadership in emerging countries, specifically how leaders resolve prevalent moral dilemmas. Following Werhane (1999), we use moral imagination as an analytical approach to analyze a dilemmatic stakeholder conflict (between indigenous communities in rural India and an emerging market multinational enterprise headquartered in the same country) through the lense of different responsible leadership mindsets and in light of different ethical principles and moral background theories. Based on this analysis, we arrive at a tentative moral judgement, concluding that the instrumental approach is morally inferior and recommending the integrative approach as the morally superior choice. In the subsequent discussion—focussed on what “could” (instead of “should”) be done, we apply the integrative script and use moral imagination as a pathway for generating morally justifiable solutions. Through this analysis, we provide novel insights on how to apply an integrative responsible leadership approach to a stakeholder conflict situation, using the single case study to expand the responsible leadership discussion to emerging markets.

Debates around infrastructure tend to focus on the global North, yet in the global South demand for infrastructure is huge and we see new and emergent actors engaged in finance and construction; China being pre-eminent among them. China’s interests in the global South have grown apace over the past decade, especially in terms of accessing resources and securing infrastructure deals. The role of Chinese banks and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in financing and building the projects reveals a blurring between geopolitical and commercial interests and processes. The article situates China’s entry into the global South as part of a geopolitics that is simultaneously geoeconomic and interrogates these issues through case studies of Chinese-backed projects in Ghana and Cambodia. These projects are spatially and politically complex, with China adopting a range of financing models – often including an element of resource swaps – in which bank finance is critical and marks the Chinese as different from Western financiers. These international deals are secured at the political elite level and so bypass established forms of national governance and accountability in the recipient countries, while the turnkey construction projects remain locally enclaved. The cases also show that wider developmental benefits are limited, with ‘ordinary’ citizens – especially those in the rural areas – gaining relatively little from these major energy projects and the benefits accruing to urban-based elites. 围绕基础设施的争论往往集中在全球北方，但在全球南方对基础设施的需求巨大，我们看到新的和新兴的参与者从事金融和建设；中国在其中占据突出地位。过去十年来，中国在全球南方的利益迅速增长，特别是在获取资源和取得基础设施交易方面。中国的银行和国有企业（SOE）在融资和建设项目中的作用揭示了地缘政治和商业利益与过程之间的模糊。本将中国进入全球南方作为地缘政治的一部分，同时具有地缘经济性，并通过中国支持的加纳和柬埔寨项目的案例研究来审问这些问题。这些项目在空间和政治上都很复杂，中国采用了一系列融资模式 - 通常包括资源互换的要素 - 其中银行融资至关重要，并标志着中国人与西方金融家不同。这些国际交易在政治精英层面取得，因此在受援国绕过了既定的国家治理和问责形式，而交钥匙建设项目仍然是当地的飞地。这些案例还表明，更广泛的发展利益是有限的，“普通”公民 - 特别是农村地区的公民 - 从这些重大能源项目和城市精英所取得的利益中获得的收益相对较少。

The papers in this volume discuss the strategies adopted by people to accumulate assets through migration, housing investments, natural resources management, and informal businesses and consider how an asset-based social policy could enable those strategies or help them overcome the constraints of an unfavorable institutional environment.

Since the 1960s the resource-poor countries have grown much faster than the resource-rich ones. This reflects basic differences in the speed of industrialization and the nature of the political state that are rooted in the natural resource endowment. Most resource-rich countries experienced a growth collapse in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows.

In recent decades, governments and NGOs--in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world--have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? Monitoring Democracy argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving interaction between domestic and international politics, Judith Kelley refutes prevailing arguments that international efforts cannot curb government behavior and that democratization is entirely a domestic process. Yet, she also shows that democracy promotion efforts are deficient and that outside actors often have no power and sometimes even do harm. Analyzing original data on over 600 monitoring missions and 1,300 elections, Kelley grounds her investigation in solid historical context as well as studies of long-term developments over several elections in fifteen countries. She pinpoints the weaknesses of international election monitoring and looks at how practitioners and policymakers might help to improve them.

Purpose: Universities can do more to deliver against the sustainable development goals (SDGs), working with faculty, staff and students, as well as their wider stakeholder community and alumni body. They play a critical role in helping shape new ways for the world, educating global citizens and delivering knowledge and innovation into society. Universities can be engines of societal transformation. Using a multiple case study approach, this study aims to explore different ways of strategizing sustainability toward delivering the SDGs are explored in a university setting with an example from the UK, Bulgaria (Europe) and USA. Design/methodology/approach: The first case is a public UK university that adopted enterprise and sustainability as its academic mission to secure differentiation in a disrupted and increasingly marketized global higher education sector; this became a source of inspiration for change in regional businesses and the local community. The second case is a business sector-led sustainability-driven transformation working with a private university in Bulgaria to catalyze economic regeneration and social innovation. Finally, a case from the office for sustainability in a major US research university is given to show how its engagement program connected faculty and students in sustainability projects within the institution and with external partners. Findings: Each case is in effect a \"living lab,\" positioning sustainability as an intentional and aspirational strategy with sustainable development and the SDG framework a means to that end. Leadership at all levels, and by students, was key to success in acting with a shared purpose. Partnerships within and with universities can help accelerate delivery of the SDGs, enabling higher education to make a fuller contribution to sustaining the economic, environmental, cultural and intellectual well-being of our global communities. Originality/value: The role of universities as the engine of transformational sustainability toward delivering the SDGs has been explored by way of three case studies that highlight different means toward that end. The collegiate nature of the higher education sector, with its shared governance models and different constituencies and performance drivers, means that sustainability at a strategic level must be led with leaders at all levels acting with purpose. The \"living lab\" model can become a part of transformative institutional change that draws on both top-down and bottom-up strategies in pursuit of sustainable development.

An innovation system can be defined as a network of organizations, enterprises, and individuals demanding and supplying knowledge and bringing it into a social and economic use. This book's primary aim is to focus on the largely unexplored operational aspects of the innvoation systems concept and to explore its potential for agriculture.

Counting the world's poor: problems and possible solutions; by Angus Deaton. Comments on \"counting the world's poor\"; by Martin Ravallion, and T. N. Srinivasan. Ecology, history, and development : a perspective from rural Southeast Asia; by Yujiro Hayami. Productivity growth and sustainability in post-green revolution agriculture: the case of the Indian and Pakistan Punjab; by Rinku Murgai, Mubarik Ali, and Derek Byerlee. The politics of Russian enterprise reform: insiders, local governments, and the obstacles to restructuring; by Raj M. Desai and Itzhak Goldberg.