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'School Construction Strategies for Universal Primary Education in Africa' examines the scope of the infrastructure challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa and the constraints to scaling up at an affordable cost.

A critical analysis of World Bank's agricultural assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa.This study assesses the development effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the period of fiscal 1991-2006.This region faces a variety of constraints that make its development a complex challenge.

The subject of food security and land issues in Africa has become one of increased importance and contention over recent years. In particular, the focus has shifted to the role new global South donors – especially India, China and Brazil – are playing in shaping African agriculture through their increased involvement and investment in the continent. Approaching the topic through the framework of South-South co-operation, this highly original volume presents a critical analysis of the ways in which Chinese, Indian and Brazilian engagements in African agriculture are structured and implemented. Do these investments have the potential to create new opportunities to improve local living standards, transfer new technology and knowhow to African producers, and reverse the persistent productivity decline in African agriculture? Or will they simply aggravate the problem of food insecurity by accelerating the process of land alienation and displacement of local people from their land? Topical and comprehensive, Agricultural Development and Food Security in Africa offers fresh insight into a set of relationships that will shape both Africa and the world over the coming decades.

Large-scale urban development projects are a significant format of urban expansion and renewal across the globe. As generators of governance innovation and indicators of the future city in each urban context, large-scale development projects have been interpreted within frameworks of ‘variegations’ of wider circulating processes, such as neoliberalisation or financialisation. However, such projects often entail significant state support and investment, are strongly linked to a wide variety of transnational investors and developers and are frequently highly contested in their local environments. Thus, each project comes to fruition in a distinctive regulatory context, often as an exception to the norm, and each emerges through complex interactions over a long period of time amongst an array of actors. We therefore seek to broaden the discussion from an analytical focus on variegated globalised processes to consider three large-scale urban development projects (in Shanghai, Johannesburg and London) as distinctive (transcalar) territorialisations. Using an innovative comparative approach, we outline the grounds for a systematic analytical conversation across mega-urban development projects in very different contexts. Initially, comparability rests on the shared features of large-scale developments — that they are multi-jurisdictional, involve long time scales and bring significant financing challenges. Comparing three development projects, we are able to interrogate, rather than take for granted, how a range of wider processes, circulating practices, transcalar actors and territorial regulatory formations composed specific urban outcomes in each case. Thinking across these diverse cases provides grounds for rebuilding understandings of urban development politics. 大型城市开发项目是全球城市扩张和更新的重要形式。作为在每一城市背景下治理创新的推动者和未来城市的指标，人们已经在更广泛的流通过程的 “多样化” 框架内（例如新自由主义化或金融化）对大型开发项目进行了解读。然而，此类项目通常需要大量的政府支持和投资，与各种各样的跨国投资者和开发商密切相关，并且通常在当地环境中被激烈争夺。因此，每个项目都是在独特的监管环境中实现的，通常是作为打破常规的例外情形，并且，每个项目都是通过一系列参与者在很长一段时间内的复杂互动而形成的。因此，我们寻求拓宽这一探讨，从多样化全球化进程的分析重点出发，考察三个大型城市发展项目（分别位于上海、约翰内斯堡和伦敦），将其作为独特的（跨标量）地域化案例。我们使用创新性比较方法，为在背景非常不同的超大城市开发项目之间进行系统性分析对话奠定了基础。最初，可比性取决于大型开发项目的共同特征：它们涉及多个辖区、时间跨度长、并且伴随着重大的融资挑战。通过比较这三个开发项目，我们得以审视（而不是想当然地推断）在每种情况下，一系列更广泛的过程、流通实践、跨标量参与者和区域监管结构如何导致了特定的城市结果。对这些多元化案例的思考为重建对城市开发政治的理解提供了基础。

Rural development is a political topic in which debate has been more focussed on externally identified needs than on demands or aspirations of the rural population and polarised between the attractions of urban income earning opportunities and the importance of rural farming communities for national food provision. The heterogeneity of local aspirations and their implications for development have barely been considered. We explore the aspirations of residents of three contrasting regions in Kenya that vary in their agricultural and off-farm potential. We argue that opportunities are a major framing influence on aspirations but there is important, and routinely overlooked, diversity within the communities which could inform future options for effective development. We outline how development initiatives could be redesigned to align more closely with aspirations. However, aspirations are a complex concept and, while our approach offered novel insights, these would be enriched when combined with household survey data.

The author reviews trends in rural electrification over the past 30 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it is shown that motivations for rural electrification programs have evolved significantly over the years, following changes in development paradigms. The author finds, however, that knowledge of the impact of this has only marginally improved: low connection rates and weak productive utilization identified in the 1980s remain true today, and impacts on such dimensions as health, education, or income, though often used to justify projects, are largely undocumented. Indeed impact evaluations are methodologically challenging in the field of infrastructures and have been limited thus far. Nevertheless examples of recent or ongoing impact evaluations of rural electrification programs offer promising avenues for identifying both the effect of electricity per se and the relative effectiveness of approaches to promoting it.

Megaprojects are returning to play a key role in the transformation of rural Africa, despite controversies over their outcome. While some view them as promising tools for a ‘big push’ of modernization, others criticize their multiple adverse effects and risk of failure. Against this backdrop, the paper revisits earlier concepts that have explained megaproject failures by referring to problems of managerial complexity and the logics of state-led development. Taking recent examples from Kenya, the paper argues for a more differentiated approach, considering the symbolic role infrastructure megaprojects play in future-oriented development politics as objects of imagination, vision, and hope. We propose to explain the outcomes of megaprojects by focusing on the ‘politics of aspiration’, which unfold at the intersection between different actors and scales. The paper gives an overview of large infrastructure projects in Kenya and places them in the context of the country´s national development agenda ‘Vision 2030′. It identifies the relevant actors and investigates how controversial aspirations, interests and foreign influences play out on the ground. The paper concludes by describing megaproject development as future making, driven by the mobilizing power of the ‘politics of aspiration’. The analysis of megaprojects should consider not only material outcomes but also their symbolic dimension for desirable futures.

The concept of climate compatible development (CCD) is increasingly employed by donors and policy makers seeking 'triple-wins' for development, adaptation and mitigation. While CCD rhetoric is becoming more widespread, analyses drawing on empirical cases that present triple-wins are sorely lacking. We address this knowledge gap. Drawing on examples in rural sub-Saharan Africa, we provide the first glimpse into how projects that demonstrate triple-win potential are framed and presented within the scientific literature. We identify that development projects are still commonly evaluated in terms of adaptation or mitigation benefits. Few are framed according to their benefits across all three dimensions. Consequently, where triple-wins are occurring, they are likely to be under-reported. This has important implications, which underestimates the co-benefits that projects can deliver. A more robust academic evidence base for the delivery of triple-wins is necessary to encourage continued donor investment in activities offering the potential to deliver CCD.

In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue “Rural aspirations—Livelihood decisions and rural development trajectories”, we outline current views on aspirations and their relevance for development research, projects and approaches. Using several examples from Africa, we outline how the combination of the different theoretical perspectives, case studies and regional backgrounds provides deeper insights about the role of aspirations in shaping rural areas. The distinct entry points of the ‘bottom up’ local aspirations for future lives, the ‘top down’ aspirations as visions for change, and the process of negotiating between these provide novel insights into directions for development action as well as for future research in the field of aspirations in the development arena.