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This article describes an unconventional participatory development approach carried out in an informal e‐waste hub in South‐West Hebron, an area that has collected and processed the bulk of Israeli e‐waste for over a decade. Our approach contributes to the critique and recovery of community representation in participatory development and the search for ways to facilitate representative community engagement. Specifically, we describe our use of a novel Delphi‐like method that allowed us to facilitate a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community. We show how the results yielded by this approach diverged from those that were likely to emerge from more facile forms of participation in ways that are important for other similar e‐waste hubs internationally, which face a destructive status quo on the one hand, or the economically ruinous international policies that ban e‐waste trade from "developed" to "developing" countries on the other. Despite real tensions and cleavages within the affected communities, the process described facilitated a shift from deadlocked environmental versus livelihood positions towards building capacity and regulating existing informal e‐waste trades to preserve livelihoods dependent on these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the sake of less developed countries, it is time to adjust the discussion of international development assistance on poverty reduction. This article attempts to do so by reviewing new and old literature explaining why some countries are rich and others are poor. History has repeatedly shown that building up capabilities in manufacturing and improving the productivity of agriculture are the keys to wealth creation and long-term sustained poverty reduction. Furthermore, industrialisation and increased agricultural productivity are interdependent processes. Discussion about ending world poverty needs to be shifted back to consideration of economic transformation and the role foreign aid can reasonably play in achieving these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accountability movement in public policy hails a new programme for US foreign assistance - the Millennium Challenge Account established in 2004 with the aim of 'picking winners' for grants among developing countries based on their demonstrated quality of governance. This article uses the MCA's own rating system to dispute its claim to know in advance which countries are best positioned to meet major development goals. High governance scores alone bear little or no relationship to growth in national income or decline in poverty. Attempting to measure public-policy performance limits the range of choice available to policy-makers, and may inadvertently limit true performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]