The Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) is the UK Government’s strategic plan to address instability and conflict overseas by building strong and legitimate institutions needed to help manage tensions peacefully in societies. It seeks to address the lessons learned from the Arab Spring and marks the first time that the UK Government has put in place an integrated ...» more
Library
This e-library contains more than 4500 external publications on governance, social development, conflict and humanitarian issues. It includes academic and grey literature selected for its basis in good quality research and coverage of a range of perspectives. Policy-oriented summaries of each document are provided, plus links to the full text.
Social Protection and Climate Resilience
This report presents the discussions and recommendations emerging from an international workshop on “Making Social Protection Work for Pro-poor Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation”, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on March 14–17, 2011 and organised by the World Bank, in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the UK Department for ...» more
Rethinking Support for Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change – The role of development interventions.
This paper is based on an analysis of three country studies conducted by national research teams in eight research sites in Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique for the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA). It describes the Local Adaptive Capacity (LAC) framework developed for this project, its application during the research and the evidence found about the impact of ...» more
Under what conditions are value chains effective tools for pro-poor development?
Designing trading relationships that reach and benefit small-scale producers in a sustainable way can be a challenge for practitioners who engage directly with women in agriculture. Understanding the benefits, costs and risks when connecting small-scale producers to formal markets is critical to informing companies, farmers, NGOs and donors in their decision to invest in supply ...» more
Gender and agricultural value chains – a review of current knowledge and practice and their policy implications.
This paper introduces value chain analysis and development as tools for addressing gender inequities in markets. It describes how factors such as access to assets, gendered education differentials and the nature and value of economic activities affect the way in which men and women participate and gain in value chains, distinguishing among household, institutional and chain ...» more
The Challenges of Political Programming: International Assistance to Parties and Parliaments
This paper examines the ways in which different donor agencies and implementing organisations are addressing the challenges of political programming. It uses the term ‘political programming’ to describe the recent attempts by donor agencies to apply more political forms of analysis (such as ‘drivers of change’) in the design, delivery and implementation of projects to achieve ...» more
Aid in Support of Women’s Economic Empowerment
Economic empowerment aims to raise the capacity of women and men to participate in, contribute to and benefit from growth processes in ways which recognise the value of their contributions, respect their dignity and make it possible to negotiate a fairer distribution of the benefits of growth.The economic empowerment of women increases their access to economic resources and ...» more
Determinants of international emergency aid – Humanitarian need only?
Although humanitarian need appears to be a major determinant of emergency relief payments, the results of this study suggest that political and strategic factors play a crucial role in emergency aid allocation as well. It finds that on average, donor governments favour smaller, geographically closer and oil exporting countries, and display significant biases in favour of ...» more
Gender Dimensions of Community-Driven Development Operations: A Toolkit for Practitioners
The objective of this toolkit is to provide practical guidance to CDD practitioners in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) on how to measure the gendered impact of CDD operations. CDD program reviews have found that gender indicators are not widely used. Second, several governments in the EAP Region have identified gender as an important pillar in poverty alleviation strategies, in ...» more
Transforming Livelihoods for Resilient Futures: How to Facilitate Graduation in Social Protection
It is frequently claimed that the most innovative feature of social protection, in contrast to safety nets, is that it has the potential to reduce the vulnerability of poor people to the extent that they can manage moderate risk without external support. This has led to an expansion of large-scale ‘productive safety net’ programmes. The potential to reduce vulnerability so that ...» more
Reaching the Poorest: Lessons from the Graduation Model
Microfinance is about extending financial access to poor and excluded people. However, apart from a few notable exceptions, microfinance has not typically reached extremely poor people--those at the lowest level of the economic ladder. The majority of the world's estimated 150 million microcredit clients are thought to live just below and, more often, just above the poverty ...» more
New Pathways for the Poorest: The graduation model from BRAC
The poorest, chronically food insecure households, with irregular incomes and little or no assets are often excluded from development interventions including microcredit. When they do receive assistance they are rarely able to improve their conditions enough to maintain long-term sustainable livelihoods. They are often chronically food insecure and more vulnerable to health ...» more
Victims of discourse: mobilizing narratives of fear and insecurity in post conflict South Sudan – the case of Jonglei State
The sign along the border to South Sudan that reads—“Our peace, our land, our oil, our liberty”—is a testament to the struggles recently fought by the South's Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the northern Khartoum Government. Such a seemingly apolitical expression of southern solidarity however obscures the often hostile relationships among the more than sixty ...» more
South Sudan: Waiting for Peace to Come: Study from Bor, Twic, East and Duk Counties in Jonglei
This study has sought to bring clarity to the increasingly popular concept of “Protection”, by studying it from the bottom upwards. The idea of agencies preventing suffering and engaging with the political factors that cause it rather than always picking up the pieces is an attractive one, but in interviews conducted for this study, local people felt aid agencies were failing ...» more
Review of Climate Change Adaptation Practices in South Asia
Climate change is predicted to have severe consequences for South Asia, particularly in agriculture, which employs more than 60 per cent of the region’s labour force.Some of the predicted impacts of climate change include: increased variability in both monsoon and winter rainfall patterns; increases in average temperatures, with warmer winters; increased salinity in coastal ...» more
To stay and deliver: Good practice for humanitarians in complex security environments
In response to growing concerns regarding the insecurity of aid operations and the resulting decline in humanitarian access, the present study, commissioned by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), set out to identify and document those strategies and practices that have enabled humanitarian organisations to maintain effective operations in contexts ...» more
Whores, Men, and Other Misfits: Undoing ‘feminization’ in the Armed Forces in the DRC
The global attention focused on sexual violence in the DRC has not only contributed to an image of the Congolese army as a vestige of pre-modern barbarism, populated by rapists, and bearing no resemblance to the world of modern armies; it has also shaped gender and defence reform initiatives. These initiatives have become synonymous with combating sexual violence, reflecting an ...» more
The Rule of Law and Economic Growth: Where are We?
It is widely assumed that the rule of law is essential for economic growth. However, the rule of law is clearly a multidimensional concept, encompassing a variety of discrete components from security of person and property rights, to checks on government and control of corruption. This article reviews the theory underlying these different causal mechanisms linking the rule of ...» more
Understanding Obstacles to Peace: Actors, Interests, and Strategies in Africa’s Great Lakes Region
This book reviews obstacles to peace in Northern Uganda, Burundi, Eastern DRC, Zanzibar, Sudan and Northern Kenya, arguing that the central Africa Great Lakes region presents an opportunity for finding a durable solution for challenges relating to peace and security, particularly in DRC. The mechanisms put in place to forestall any future conflicts in the region need to be ...» more
UN integration and humanitarian space
This independent study was commissioned by the UN Integration Steering Group (ISG) to explore the impact of UN integration arrangements on humanitarian space. The study focused on three case studies of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, complemented by a desk review of the Central African Republic, Darfur (Sudan) and Liberia. The research for this study ...» more
