development Archives

Pastoral Prosperities

Pastoral Prosperities brings together contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives to explore the future of mobile pastoralism in Africa’s drylands. Offering new empirical material from across the continent, it builds on pioneering works that have challenged fundamental assumptions about development, questioning approaches that overlook well-being, purpose, quality of life and environmental health as central bearings of human flourishing. The book asks how the future is imagined and fought for in the drylands, and how understandings of this might broaden analytical frames that otherwise privilege narrow economic indicators.

Taking stock of the enduring power of negative narratives about pastoralism, the volume considers counter-narratives from multiple corners, tracing their alternative visions of both the past and the future. It explores everyday aspirations and practices to make sense of sweeping socio-economic, political and environmental change. In doing so, Pastoral Prosperities gestures towards new cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral conversations that might inform more grounded approaches to investment, governance and support in the years ahead.

Urban Informality and the Built Environment

Urban Informality and the Built Environment demonstrates the value of greater and more diverse forms of engagement of built environment disciplines in what constitutes urban informality and its politics. It brings a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of informality and the built environment in diverse contexts, drawing on recent research by architects, planners, political scientists, geographers and urban theorists.

The book presents different case studies from multiple geographies, drawing attention to the need for studying urban informality in the Global North and Global South. The cases promote a cross-fertilization between disciplines, lenses, geographies and methodologies. They range from the creative place-making of street artists in Accra, to the morphological evolution of urban Tirana, urban agriculture in la Habana and social reproduction in Greece. Additional contributions highlight the cross-cutting themes of infrastructure, exchange and image.

Urban Informality and the Built Environment introduces built environment disciplines to its constitutive roles in producing urban informality. It also tests a range of new methodologies to the study of urban informality, demonstrating the possibilities for new insights when building on the relational understanding of urban informality.

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century sets out a new vision for prosperity in the twenty-first century and how it can be achieved for all.
The volume challenges orthodox understandings of economic models, but goes beyond contemporary debates to show how social innovation drives economic value. Drawing on substantive research in the UK, Lebanon and Kenya, it develops new concepts, frameworks, models and metrics for prosperity across a wide range of contexts, emphasising commonalities and differences. Its distinctive approach goes beyond defining and measuring prosperity – addressing the debate about the failures of GDP – to formulating and describing what is needed to make prosperity a realisable proposition for specific people living in specific locales.

Departing from general propositions about post-growth to delineate pathways to prosperity, the volume emphasises that visions of the good life are diverse and require empirical work co-designed with local communities and stakeholders to drive change. It is essential reading for policymakers who are stuck, local government officers who need new tools, activists who wonder what is next, academics in need of refreshment, and students and people of all ages who want a way forward.

Humanitarianism from Below?

Since the late twentieth century, wealthy nations and international organisations have claimed a monopoly on humanitarianism. Even critical views of this regime of global aid and assistance have reinforced the image of a phenomenon shaped by secularised Christian ethics and Euro-American politics of life. At the same time, around the world various humanitarian institutions and practices have flourished that remain outside this realm.

Mostly invisible to Western publics, these forms of humanitarianism have reshaped global landscapes of aid in tangible ways; from protecting Indigenous communities in Canada to African diasporic initiatives in response to the Ebola pandemic; from Islamic economies of giving and Buddhist concepts of the human to crowdfunding aid in Ukraine. Written by leading scholars in the field, Humanitarianism from Below? forcefully illustrates that these humanitarian actors do not merely represent grassroots initiatives but have altered humanitarianism at large, involving alternative economies and politics. Drawing on original ethnographic and historical research, Humanitarianism from Below? addresses a wide audience of scholars and students in humanitarian and development studies, anthropology and political science. This volume considers humanitarianism’s multiple histories and relations of power and offers a profound reassessment of humanitarian pluralism today.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 have influenced the actions of international and intergovernmental organisations and governments around the world, and have dictated priorities for international aid spending. Culture, including heritage, is often presented as fundamental to addressing the SDGs: since 2010, the United Nations has adopted no fewer than five major policy recommendations that assert its importance as a driver and enabler of development. Yet, heritage is marginalized from the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development constitutes a substantial and original assessment of whether and how heritage has contributed to three key dimensions of sustainable development (namely poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalisation from the Sustainable Development Goals and from previous international development agendas.
Sophia Labadi adopts a novel, inclusive, large-scale and systematic approach, providing the first comprehensive history of the international approaches on culture (including heritage) for development, from 1970 to the present day. This book is also the first to assess the negative and positive impacts of all the international projects implemented in sub-Saharan Africa by a consortium of UN organisations that aimed to provide evidence for the contribution of heritage for development in time for the negotiation of the SDGs. The book’s conclusions provide recommendations for rethinking heritage for development, while reflecting on the major shortcomings of the selected projects.

Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique

Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique is a practitioners’ handbook that builds upon the experience of a pilot project that was awarded the United Nations ‘Lighthouse Activity’ Award.

Building upon a long scholarly tradition of participatory planning, this dual-language (English/Portuguese) book addresses crucial questions about the relevance of citizen participation in planning for climate compatible development and argues that citizens have knowledge and access to resources that enable them to develop a sustainable vision for their community. In order to do so, the author proposes a Participatory Action Planning methodology to organise communities, and also advances mechanisms for institutional development through partnerships.

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery introduces the system for planning and consenting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England (which has also applied for some schemes in Wales). These are the major projects involving power stations and large renewable energy schemes, motorways, railways and a range of other high profile, high impact and sometimes controversial development schemes, including some closely linked to the UK’s transition to net zero.

The book explains where this separate system for governing major infrastructure came from and how it operates in practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between planning, consent and delivery of these infrastructure projects. Detailed case studies of the A14 highway, Thames Tideway super sewer, Galloper offshore windfarm and Progress Power station, drawing on research by the authors, illustrate issues of the often overlooked continuing role of local government, the engagement of local communities and stakeholders, and the modification of schemes between consent and construction.

At a time of ongoing government planning reform, increased concern about climate change, and still unresolved consequences of Brexit, as well as timeless debates such as over national need versus local impact, this timely book offers rich detail on the particular approach to major infrastructure planning in England, but also speaks to wider issues around the governance of development and implementation of government policy under late capitalism.

Lahore in Motion

Lahore in Motion provides a portrait of the Pakistani metropolis by tracing the path of the city’s first metro rail corridor. Construction for this major piece of public infrastructure began in 2015 and, over subsequent years, the nascent ‘Orange Line’ rapidly reconfigured Lahore’s urban landscape – displacing residents and slicing through existing structures along its route, all while offering Lahoris the promise of ‘world-class’ public transportation. The volume collects stories from a series of walks along the metro’s 27-kilometre path, bringing together a wide variety of authors – including academics and activists, architects and artists – to reflect on the relationship between urban change and belonging in a historic city.

Each chapter is organised around a particular station on the metro, but the volume moves far beyond the neighbourhoods shadowed by the train’s elevated track. Contributors navigate the friction generated by the Orange Line’s construction and reflect on how this project of connection both responds to and produces fragmentation in the urban environment. The book brings together critical insights on the politics of infrastructure in South Asia and the desires and dispossessions fuelling projects of development in the Global South, assessing how they unevenly inflect the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most populous cities.

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection of 18 chapters brings into dialogue authors from a range of geographical contexts, social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. The wide variety of subjects include refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence and childcare and education.

Chapter authors focus on local contexts as well as their global interconnections, and draw on diverse theoretical traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, postcolonialism, political economy, and the ethics of care. Together the contributions offer new ways to conceptualise relations between women and children, and to address injustices faced by both groups.