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• Provides a comparative overview of three approaches to resilience measurement and the complementary insights they offer. • Living in the flood plain and gender of the household head shift resilience when measured as shock persistence. • Using a moments-based approach, household food insecurity is path-dependent and lower when living in the flood-plain. • Algorithms can identify the best predictors of food insecurity as a proxy for resilience, such as distance to drinking water. • Outlines a methodological approach for collecting monthly 'high-frequency' household data centered on resilience. Resilience as a metric is of growing interest to development researchers and practitioners, particularly for those whose work concerns the effects of climate change, conflict and epidemics. The growing need for resilience measurements motivates this research, measurements that reflect the complex, dynamic features of welfare among populations living in shock-prone contexts. It presents insights from three measurement approaches to explore the dynamic, intra-annual effects of shocks on household well-being, mediated by household characteristics; one based on shock persistence, one based on the stochastic distribution of well-being, and one driven by machine learning algorithms and based on predictive power. The insights gained from the comparison of measurement approaches offer a fuller understanding of the factors driving resilience than any single approach on its own. The paper harnesses a novel data-set from the 'Measuring Indicators for Resilience Analysis' project, which, each month, tracks shocks and food security indicators for one year in a highly food insecure population in Malawi. Across approaches, our study consistently finds that shocks and food insecurity are very persistent, and that households living in the flood plains are more resilient. When focusing on specific shocks such as illness, the gender of the household head matters as-well. A broader search for predictors of food insecurity using LASSO and Random Forest algorithms uncovers other characteristics that affect resilience, such as the distance to drinking-water. The paper demonstrates how multiple complementary approaches can identify different but overlapping factors related to resilience, painting a fuller, richer picture. It also demonstrates the empirical benefits derived from using high-frequency data sets in the study of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A standard model of electricity sector reform has been prescribed in Africa. • Timing of reform is due to country need for external financing to improve efficiency. • Pace of reform is due to country autonomy from donors, particularly the World Bank. • Extent of reforms implemented is due to internal autonomy from domestic pressures. • African countries exercise agency, autonomy, and resistance to mediate global norms. Electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest amongst all regions of the world. In response, since the 1990s, the World Bank and other donors have pushed African countries to reform their electricity sectors. While a "standard model" of liberalization reforms has been endorsed, the timing, pace and extent of reform adoption and implementation undertaken by countries varies significantly. This paper asks: why do some countries adopt electricity sector reforms more quickly and more fully than others? The paper uses a comparative historical analysis of Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda to answer this question. Each country's experience with reform varies. Our study finds that the timing of reform was largely contingent on economic factors, primarily the need for financing to improve sector efficiency. The pace of reform was shaped largely by international political considerations, namely differences in the countries' reliance on aid from key donors, especially the World Bank. And the extent of reform was determined primarily by internal national political factors. Specifically, where elite decision-makers faced a historically-grounded national ideology that created citizen expectations that the state provide electricity, a competitive democratic regime, and stronger civil society, electricity sector reforms were less extensive. The paper makes an important contribution to understanding the politics of institutional change. We show how African governments exercise autonomy and resistance, both internationally with donors, and domestically, in the rewriting of institutional rules; that reforms are contingent on political calculations by national political elites about domestic conditions and needs; and that global norms are not sufficient to cause policy change. Overcoming energy poverty in Africa is expected to remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. As new development partners replace or complement the World Bank's role in African energy sectors, attention to how domestic institutions and politics engage with global norms is critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Introduces new data on rebel group formation in African states (1997–2015). • Indicates that most rebel groups formed in rural areas and did not emerge from local protests. • Demonstrates the need for more theory on the pathways to internal armed conflict. • Demonstrates the need for – and challenges of collecting – systematic evidence on armed group formation. Theories of internal armed conflict onset often conceptualize an eruption emerging from pre-existing, non-violent opposition movements or organizations. This paper argues that this is not the most common pathway to armed conflict in Africa. It introduces new data on rebel group formation in 47 African states (1997–2015) that offers a more complete picture than existing conflict datasets; about two-thirds of the groups in the new dataset are not named in standard conflict datasets. The strong majority of these rebel groups formed in rural areas; did not emerge from nearby protest movements or civil society organizations; and initially did not benefit from substantial material resources nor commit large-scale violence. Analyses suggest that rebel groups forming in rural parts of African states draw less often on pre-war, public, non-violent contestation than those of urban areas. The paper highlights the need for more theory on the varied pathways to internal armed conflict, and the importance of – and challenges of collecting – systematic evidence on armed group formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the rules that are often chosen to frame decentralization in Ghana. It perceives the challenges of multi-level governance in postcolonial sub-Saharan African countries, such as weak local government capacity for urban planning, as effects of ill-conceived constitutional rules. The paper draws ideas from constitutional political economy (CPE) to problematize the constitutional rules underlying Ghana’s current state of decentralization. I argue that these constitutional rules, embodied in Ghana’s 1992 Constitution and Local Government Act (462), evince both continued dominance of state control over local governance and a systemic transfer of the logics and instruments of the authoritarian Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) military regime to the choice of constitutional rules for Ghana’s decentralization. In other words, Ghana’s decentralization patterns and processes must be examined in the context of the constitutional regime from which they were born. One such pattern is the creation of new local governments (a gerrymandering strategy) by successive governments without commensurate improvement in local democratic and pro-poor developmental outcomes. The paper’s discussions, largely conceptual but interlaced with empirical moments, serve to stimulate debate about the relationships between the constitutional rules for decentralization and their socioeconomic and political effects. I conclude by reflecting on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using CPE to analyze constitutional rules for decentralization and offer ideas to address these challenges in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City governments in sub-Saharan Africa have historically been beholden to national governments. Lack of national urban policies and tensions between national and city governments are common. Yet, for decades, research has identified small-scale innovations at the urban scale. Rarely, however, are policy innovations in African cities so influential as to lead national governments to scale up city based actions. This is particularly true in sectors that have been the dominant purview of central governments. This paper examines how citizens, civil society organizations, city governments and national bureaucrats in two cities of East Africa – Kampala and Nairobi – have interacted to produce policy innovation in agriculture. Agriculture has always been a sector of high national importance in Africa, but increasingly cities are becoming focal points for agricultural policy change. The two cities compared in the paper are unusual in having a collection of interests who have been advocating for improved support and recognition of urban food production. Indeed, these cities are rare for having continually promoted the formalization of urban agriculture in local and national policy. While advocacy for urban agriculture is common globally, what is not clear is under what conditions local advocacy produces policy uptake and change. What are the conditions when city-based advocacy deepens the institutionalization of policy support locally and nationally? Drawing from theory and research on policy change and African urban politics and governance, and qualitative data collection in each country, this paper argues that while external, international assistance has helped initiate policy dialogue, domestic civil society organizations and their engagement with local and national bureaucrats are key to policy support at the local and national scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Over the period 1990–2009, Africa has experienced a distinct and favorable reversal in its growth fortunes in stark contrast to its performance in the preceding decades, leading to a variety of hypotheses seeking to explain the phenomenon. This paper presents both cross-country and panel-data evidence on the causal factors driving the recent turnaround in Africa’s growth and takes the unique approach of disaggregating the separate growth impacts of Africa’s bilateral trade with: China, Europe, and America. The empirical analysis presented in this paper suggests that the primary and most robust causal factors driving Africa’s recent growth turnaround are private sector and foreign direct investment. Although empirical evidence of the role of bilateral trade openness in Africa’s recent growth emerges within a fixed effect estimation setting, these results are not as robust when endogeneity and other issues are fully accounted for. Among the three major bilateral partners, Africa’s bilateral trade with China has been a relatively important factor spurring growth on the continent and especially so in resource-rich, oil-producing, and non-landlocked countries. The econometric results are not as supportive of growth-inducing effects of foreign aid. These findings emerge after applying a variety of panel data specifications to the data, including the recent fixed effects filtered (FEF) estimator introduced by Pesaran and Zhou (2014) and the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, which allows for endogeneity between trade and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the driving factors of manufacturing development in Africa. Using the system-GMM technique with four-year average panel data over the period 1995–2014, including 53 African countries, the paper finds four main results. (1) There is a U-shaped relationship between the manufacturing share of GDP and per capita GDP. (2) Exchange rate depreciation stimulates Africa’s manufacturing sector. (3) Good governance, especially a low level of corruption and better government effectiveness contribute to Africa’s manufacturing development. (4) The size of domestic market positively affects the manufacturing share of GDP. On the other hand, the paper finds no significant effects of FDI and urbanization on manufacturing development. The implication of these findings is that improving the level of competitiveness, expanding the size of domestic market, combating corruption as well as improving government effectiveness are key for Africa’s manufacturing sector development. Moreover, the U-shaped relationship between the manufacturing share of GDP and per capita GDP, implies that African countries should not expect industrialization to automatically happen with income increase, but rather, they should proactively tackle key obstacles to the development of the manufacturing sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Can the political science literature on sons-of-the-soil (SoS) conflict and civil war explain patterns of ethnic conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa? Sons-of-the-soil terminology, developed with reference to conflicts in South Asia, has been used to describe some of Africa’s most violent or enduring conflicts, including those in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, the Casamance Region of Senegal, and southwestern Côte d'Ivoire. Is Africa becoming more like South Asia, where land scarcity has often fueled conflicts between indigenous land owners and in-migrants? This paper argues that political science theories that focus on rural migration and land scarcity alone to explain outbreaks of SoS conflict in Asia fall short in Africa because they are underdetermining. The paper proposes a model of structure and variation in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and argues that these factors are critical in explaining the presence of absence of SoS conflict over land. This conceptualization of the problem highlights the strong role of the state in structuring relations of land use and access, and suggests that the character of local state-backed land institutions goes far in accounting for the presence or absence, scale, location, and triggering of large-scale SoS land conflict in zones of smallholder agriculture. A meta-study of 24 subnational cases of land conflict (1990–2014), drawn from secondary and primary sources and field observations, generates case-based support for the argument. The study suggests that omission of land-tenure institution variables enfeebles earlier political science theory, and may inadvertently lead policy makers and practitioners to the erroneous conclusion that in rural Africa, primordial groups compete for land in an anarchic state of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The take-up of the social pension in Kenya has varied across diverse sub-national contexts. • This paper finds that the registration of remote and marginalized populations in Marsabit County was negatively impacted by two factors. • Weak state infrastructural power and the political timing of the social pension registration limited the program's reach. • The quasi-universal social pension has increased coverage and reduced the burdens of targeting. • However, complementary investments in state capacity are required to ensure social assistance access for marginalized populations. In 2017 the government of Kenya transformed its poverty-targeted older persons cash transfer into a '70-plus' social pension. While the literature suggests that a switch from targeted to universal programs would simplify registration and reduce inclusion and exclusion errors, there were significant variations in take-up of the social pension across diverse counties in Kenya, with lower take-up in counties with higher rates of poverty. Drawing on qualitative data collected across six months in 2018, including interviews and focus group discussions with government officials, community leaders, politicians and ordinary citizens, this paper examines why take-up of the social pension has been lower in Marsabit County, an area of the country with high levels of poverty. We find that government officials struggled to register eligible beneficiaries in remote and marginalized communities within the mass registration exercise's tight timelines. As a result, they often relied on local actors to relay information between the state and local communities, which resulted in uneven registration and the exclusion of some marginalized populations, particularly in remote and conflicted affected areas. We argue that pressure from the national government to register potential beneficiaries in the month prior to the highly contested 2017 national election exacerbated the challenges posed by low state infrastructural power, including limited resources, low state oversight and a lack of embeddedness within local communities. The visible expansion of the social pension prior to the election was prioritized over achieving universal registration. This paper contributes to the literature on universal versus targeted approaches to social assistance and furthers our knowledge of the challenges of reaching the poorest of the poor even through nominally 'universal' programs. While universal approaches expand access to social assistance, this paper highlights the importance of ongoing registration and investments in state infrastructural power to ensure that remote and marginalized populations can access social assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper examines the role that multinational enterprises (MNEs) and foreign direct investments (FDI) can have in enhancing the access to electricity for local communities in developing countries based on the quality of home and host institutions. Access to electricity is a marker for development but it is far from being universal in developing countries. The shortage of electricity is mainly the consequence of inability of governments in planning, financing, and developing necessary electricity infrastructure. In this context, investments from other actors can be essential. Particularly, we focus on the role of FDI and MNEs. We claim that when MNEs invest in developing countries, they are incentivized to solve the lack of electricity infrastructure mainly for two reasons: to guarantee their business activities and to gain legitimacy with their local stakeholders. In addition, we argue that MNEs and FDI from institutionally underdeveloped countries will be more prone to develop infrastructure for the provision of electricity to local population, as generally they suffer from a negative stereotype. For this study, we rely on 1,547 observations composed of pairs of 83 home countries and 15 host countries in sub-Saharan Africa, observed from 2005 to 2011. Due to the nature of the database, we adopt panel data techniques, i.e., system-GMM and corrected Least Square Dummy Variable estimators. We find that FDI promotes access to electricity in developing countries with weak institutions and this is more likely true when FDI come from institutionally underdeveloped countries. These results are far from obvious, as they controvert common idea among institutional scholars that a regulatory authority is essential in the provision of infrastructure. In conclusion, with this paper we partially rehabilitate the image of MNEs investing in developing countries, by demonstrating that—under certain conditions—they could contribute to energy poverty alleviation of local population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding bureaucratic corruption in access to public services and exit mechanisms particularly for the poor remains a core question in the economics of corruption literature. This paper examines the role of social networks in easing bureaucratic corruption in the demand for public services, using a bivariate ordered probit model and the sixth wave of the Afrobarometer survey from 36 African countries between 2014–2015. The main results suggest that not all citizens are victims of corrupt public officials, as social networks serve as substitutes or potential exit options out of corruption. However, individuals who face multiple deprivations lack access to public services as they are not able to use their social networks to ease access. Individuals who do not face difficulties in accessing public services employ social networks as complements to their corrupt acts to "get ahead". We discuss these findings in line with poverty eradication strategies and anti-corruption policies in Africa. • Corruption hinders public service access in Africa but not all citizens are victims. • Officials are likely to be more corrupt than citizens in demanding public services. • Corruption eases the poor's access to public services in Africa • Civic networks serve as an exit option from corruption, and a way to "get ahead". • Poverty eradication and anti-corruption are key for service access for the deprived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In the post-financial crisis era, fiscal challenges have led countries adopt a more market-based means of development finance. • The state is not a sheer subsidizer distorting market in favor of policy objectives, but a risk-sharing, profit-seeking equity investor. • China's investment fund offers not only equity shares but also state-related resources to assist private firms' business expansion in Africa. • Stateness has prevented the investment fund from choosing the most financially promising projects or withdrawing from the failing ones. The post-2008 financial crisis era has witnessed a significant change in the global development landscape. Fiscal challenges have led countries that historically provided state-led, gift-like development assistance to adopt a more market-based means of development finance driven by self-interest. This allows us to reconsider the roles of the state and the market in development by focusing on the China-Africa Development Fund (CADFund), China's first official development-oriented investment fund and a subsidiary of the China Development Bank, the world's largest national development bank. This paper draws from interviews and participant observations involving CADFund, its partners, and project companies in Africa to examine how China's official finance mobilizes private investment to facilitate global development. The findings indicate that the state-led equity fund has catalyzed the start-up and expansion of Chinese overseas private enterprises by providing otherwise inaccessible equity support and channeling additional state-related resources to empower long-term business development. Meanwhile, stateness has created an adverse selection problem, preventing CADFund from choosing the most financially promising projects or withdrawing from the failing ones. The paper sheds light on the potential challenges facing development finance institutions in employing equity investment as a tool for reconciling long-term development objectives and short-term commercial objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The discovery of natural resources across the African continent brings hope for millions of poor people, but there are long-standing fears that the resources will be a curse rather than a blessing. One of the most frequently claimed effects is that gender inequality in economic opportunities may increase with mining. This paper is the first multi-country quantitative analysis of the local employment impacts for men and women of large-scale mining in the African continent. Using exact mine locations, we merge survey data for 800,000 individuals with data on all mine openings and closings across the continent, which enables a highly localized analysis of spillover effects. We employ a geographic difference-in-difference estimation exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in mining. We show that industrial mine opening is a mixed blessing for women. It triggers a local structural shift, whereby women shift from agricultural self-employment (25% decrease) to the service sector (50% increase), and are 16% more likely to earn cash. However, overall female employment decreases by 8% as agriculture is a larger sector than services. Male partners shift to skilled manual labor, and some find jobs in the mining sector. The effects of mine openings diminish with distance and are close to zero at 50 km from a mine. Mine closure causes the service and skilled sectors to contract. The results are robust to a wide battery of robustness checks, such as using different measures of distance and excluding migrants from the sample. This paper shows that large-scale mining can stimulate nonagricultural sectors in Africa, although it creates local boom-bust economies with transient and gender-specific employment effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centre (ATDC) has been considered as an alternative model to pursue sustainability of Chinese foreign aid to African countries in the new era. This paper attempts to examine the ATDC scheme, particularly focus on the knowledge construction at macro level of design and the knowledge encounter at micro level of daily operation based on the case studies in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Our study finds multiple facets of the ATDC, i.e., the cleavage between the macro-level of policy design and micro level of implementation realities; the interplay between knowledge and politics, and appearance of possible alternative development pathways stimulated by ATDCs in African countries. The paper argues that even though the ATDC is a technology-centered scheme, it is inevitably a social and political process in implementation, resulting in the discontinuity of the policy results. With a whole set of ideas and imaginaries being delivered, frustrated, and negotiated, the ATDC creates a very different vision to the established CG system, or the western bilateral aid programs. As an embodiment of a “traveling technocratic rationality”, the ATDCs are important sites for negotiations over knowledge and politics, and the meanings of aid, investment, and development, as part of the wider playing out of China’s engagement in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The growing involvement of the Chinese state and business in Africa has generated significant debate about China’s Africa strategy and the benefits for Africa’s development. What is the nature of Chinese state capitalism in Africa? This study examines Chinese state–business relations and argues that China’s involvement in Africa is more complex than often portrayed. It aims to build a closer understanding of the diverse factors that influence the Chinese state–business relations as it is implemented in Africa. This paper focuses on how state–business interactions influence agricultural development outcomes, using six case-studies from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It explores the question of how far the state can control business and direct development by identifying the key relationships that influence the decision-making processes of state and business actors within China and its African engagement. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom of homogenized, unitary relations. It argues that these relations are, in practice, heterogeneous, as a result of the state being disaggregated into a multiplicity of provincial relations and central state agencies, and tensions arising between commercial market and political interests. The active role of African governments in agricultural schemes is also affecting outcomes. China’s engagement is multivariate, involving a multiplicity of agencies, operating at different levels, structures, and processes with sometimes contrary interests and goals. The findings of an analysis of six state–business projects in the agricultural sectors of Zimbabwe and Mozambique suggest that where agriculture is concerned, a wide range of Chinese agencies are involved, with businesses being driven by either market forces or national state interests, which together make outcomes less open to generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper introduces a Special Section on Chinese and Brazilian engagements in African agriculture. The paper asks if a new paradigm for development cooperation is emerging, and argues that we must move beyond the simplistic narratives of either “South–South” collaboration or “neo-imperial” expansion of “rising powers” to look at the dynamic and contested politics of engagement, as new forms of capital and technology enter African contexts. Historical experiences in Brazil and China, as well as domestic political and economic debates, affect how interventions are framed, and by whom, and so influence what technologies are chosen, which investments are funded, and who gets trained. There are both political and economic drivers at the heart of these choices, but these are not uniform or uncontested, either in Brazil and China or in Africa. The Special Section argues for a focus on the encounters on the ground, moving beyond the broader rhetoric and generic policy statements. A key feature of Brazilian and Chinese engagements in African agriculture is the role of state–business relations in shaping and steering development, suggesting new forms of developmentalism. The paper concludes that there is a growing opportunity for learning from the Brazilian and Chinese experience, as this will be a long-run feature of African agricultural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper analyzes the adoption and welfare impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern Zambia using data obtained from a sample of over 800 farm households. Using both propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression models, the paper shows that adoption of improved maize leads to significant gains in crop incomes, consumption expenditure, and food security. Results further show that improved maize varieties have significant poverty-reducing impacts in eastern Zambia. The paper concludes with implications for policies to promote adoption and impacts of modern varieties in Zambia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper studies the impact of gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International (IPUMS-I) database. Using an estimation method analogous to difference-in-differences, the paper finds that gender-based differences in literacy, primary school completion, and secondary school completion are larger for minority ethnic groups compared to others, or ethnicity-based differences are larger for women compared to men. The findings suggest that the intersection of gender and ethnicity confers cumulative disadvantage for minority groups, especially in Latin American countries, with implications on the design of development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• REDD+ projects are associated with an increase in forest carbon. • Forests recovered due to improved governance, community engagement, land use planning and capacity building. • REDD+ projects neither improved nor harmed livelihoods. • When designed appropriately, REDD+ has the potential to simultaneously improve welfare and reduce carbon emissions. This paper investigates the impacts of REDD+ in two pilot sites in the districts of Kilosa and Kondoa in Tanzania. We pose two questions: First: What are the impacts of REDD+ on social welfare? and second: What are the impacts of REDD+ on forest carbon storage? The study employs the Before-After/Control-Intervention research design and a mixed method approach to draw conclusions on REDD+ impacts. A theory-based evaluation is then used to understand the underlying causal mechanisms driving the observed changes. In estimating REDD+ impacts on income, we account for potential selection bias by matching pilot and control villages on factors likely to influence selection and outcomes and by using fixed effects panel data modelling. REDD+ impacts on forest carbon are measured using satellite imagery and ground truthing, combining data on the amount of forestland converted to other land uses, with information on how much carbon remains trapped in the forests after the land use changes. Results suggest that in terms of total income, REDD+ neither improves nor harms livelihoods in the two pilot areas. REDD+ however, increased forest income in the Kilosa pilot. REDD+ is also associated with increased forest carbon in both Kilosa and Kondoa. We discuss what could explain these seemingly contradictory developments. Three policy implications arise from the results 1) the need for REDD+ projects to involve NGOs/implementing partners that have a good understanding of local conditions, as local contexts play a central role in determining welfare and forest carbon outcomes 2) the importance of strengthening forest governance and management for facilitating a balance in livelihoods and forest cover improvements and 3) the significance of considering economic risk, safety nets and insurance against risk in the design of REDD+ projects, as a failure to do so, will lead to overexploitation of forests during periods of economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We developed a comprehensive and spatially disaggregated typology to identify and locate major food security bottlenecks. • The typology is conceptually sound, operationally flexible, and less data intensive. • Intervention types and levels of production, access, and utilization efficiency were identified for rural areas in the DRC. • The efficiency profile of nine high-priority territories was discussed in more detail using secondary data. • The proposed approach can be adjusted to fit the conditions of most developing countries. In this paper we develop a typology to help design and improve spatial targeting of food and nutrition security (FNS) interventions. Using a comprehensive framework, the proposed approach allows for the broad identification and location of major food security bottlenecks. The resulting typology is based on an amendable demarcation of areas in a four-indicator diagram representing the four core dimensions of FNS. The proposed typology is applied to the rural territories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Despite a continuum of heterogenous development challenges across the country, the typology helps identify clusters of territories that suffer from production, access, and utilization constraints. For the nine territories (out of 145) with the highest child stunting levels, we identify four broad intervention zones and analyze their efficiency profile in more detail. Despite its reductionist nature, our typology is conceptually sound, operationally flexible, and less data intensive, important features to promote evidence-based policymaking in contexts characterized by imperfect and scarce data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Mental health data, particular nationally representative panel data, is extremely rare in low-income countries, including South Africa. • We provide the first nationally representative estimates of intergenerational transmission of mental health in Sub-Saharan Africa. • We find high rates of mental illness among adolescents, and high rates of intergenerational transmission from parent to child. • Using nationally representative panel data, we find parental mental illness is the largest determinant of adolescent mental illness. • Using exogenous variation, we find a large negative effect of cash transfers on intergenerational transmission, a previously unstudied phenomenon. Abstract Mental illness and substance abuse makes up the leading cause of disability among adolescents globally, and yet adolescent mental health is an understudied area in developing countries. Using data from South Africa, this paper provides the first nationally representative estimates of the inter-generational transmission of depressive symptoms in Sub-Saharan Africa, using data from 2012. Using a longitudinal household survey, we find that one-third of South African adolescents will suffer from depressive symptoms if either parent does so - and that parental mental health is the single largest determinant of child mental health. We exploit the exogenous variation in the roll-out pattern of an unconditional cash transfer in South Africa, and find that the South African child support grant is associated with a reduction in the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptomatology to adolescent children by more than forty percent. This potentially mitigating effect is larger for female adolescents, who are more likely to be affected negatively by parental mental illness than male adolescents. This is not to deny the importance of the shared household environment on the mental health of both adolescents and parents, but in the absence of sufficient treatment for mental illness among South African youth, the child support grant appears to play a crucial role in supporting mental health outcomes amongst low-income adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We find that solar PV adoption rates are persistently lower for credit constrained households in Uganda. • For a large number of the poor, credit constraints serve as a permanent barrier. • Presence of well-functioning second-hand markets for solar PVs enhance consumption and welfare. • Polices that relax access to credit and facilitate second-hand markets are needed to promote solar PV adoption. Abstract Access to electricity in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, where livelihoods are predominantly based on small scale farming, is significantly low. Extending centralised national electricity grids to these rural areas faces significant technical and financial constraints. As a result, many see household-financed decentralised technologies such as small standalone solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as being important for achieving greater electricity access. However, rural farm households typically face a range of market imperfections including lack of access to credit, investment irreversibility (or absence of second-hand markets) and farm production/income risk which act as barriers to their ability and/or willingness to invest. This paper examines how these market imperfections impact on the adoption of standalone solar PV systems for small scale farm households in Uganda. We consider how temporary or permanent these barriers to adoption are when farm production/income is uncertain. We do so by using a dynamic programming model which captures household investment in small scale solar PV systems where significant positive benefits arise through assumed improved farm productivity or income effects, while allowing for credit constraints, investment irreversibility and income risk. Although strong positive incentives exist in the model to adopt a solar PV system, the results show that adoption rates are substantially lower for credit constrained households, with only 40% of these households adopting immediately, compared with over 70% of credit unconstrained households. While these adoption rates do increase over time, only 60% of credit constrained households have adopted within 5 years compared with nearly all credit unconstrained households adopting within the same time period. In the longer term for almost 30% of households the credit constraints act as a permanent barrier to adoption. The presence of a well-functioning second-hand market does increase household consumption and welfare but the impacts on overall adoption rates are rather small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We argue that national networks facilitated cooperation between actors in colonial empires, especially governments and mission societies. • Unlike their non-British counterparts, British mission societies expanded education more in British colonies than elsewhere. • Findings are supported by novel primary data that captures educational activities of mission societies in interwar Africa. • National networks should receive more attention in studies on the history and legacy of colonialism. Colonial Africa was shaped by a variety of European actors. Of foremost importance in the educational sector were both colonial governments and Christian mission societies. While their activities and long-term implications are often analyzed in isolation, few systematic studies investigate relationships between them. However, it is well-known that underfunded colonial governments supported mission societies, who used schools to attract new converts, as low-cost educational providers. In this paper, we argue that mission societies that shared national ties with colonial governments benefitted from increased support and engaged in more extensive educational activities. Using new historical data on Protestant mission societies from the interwar period in Africa, we demonstrate that national alignment between mission societies and colonizer's identity in British Africa was associated with more primary schools and higher enrolment. We discuss and explore potential channels underlying this dynamic, including financial support for missionary activities as well as the granting of access to more favourable locations. Our findings show that national networks are an important but understudied aspect of colonial empires. Furthermore, analyzing the early expansion of education provides insights on the causal links often assumed by studies focused exclusively on long-term effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Examined women's involvement in prioritizing public goods investments to support climate adaptation at community level. • Findings reveal variations in women's participation ranging from nominal to active and substantial participation. • Conditions motivating active participation were social networks, and recognition of women's role in income generation. • Differential participation occurred across intersecting identities, and was influenced by intrahousehold power dynamics. • Future CBA initiatives should engage with and build capacity for women to ensure their voices and needs are being heard. Efforts to promote inclusive participation in community-based adaptation projects highlight the importance of giving those most vulnerable to climate change a voice. This paper explores the involvement and inclusion of women in participatory spaces in the Decentralized Climate Funds pilot project in Senegal to evaluate whether only the voices and demands of the powerful and vocal few were raised and heard. Using semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, the paper explores and analyzes the factors motivating and constraining women's active and empowered meaningful participation. The findings reveal that women in the Kaffrine region of Senegal experienced different levels of participation in community decision-making, ranging from nominal and passive participation to active and substantive participation. Results highlight that women's social capital and networks, community-level recognition of women's role in income generation, and favorable intrahousehold power dynamics were instrumental in encouraging active and empowered participation. The paper finds that the community-based adaptation approach of devolving decision-making to the community level is by itself not sufficient to ensure that women can meaningfully access the participatory process. Future community-based adaptation initiatives can improve their approach and ensure that women are able to voice their needs by understanding the local gender dynamics and designing projects to acknowledge and work within those dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing recognition of the significance of farmer-led irrigation, externally engineered and induced schemes remain a popular model for irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa. These have had a mixed record, and many have been widely critiqued. Nonetheless, schemes that were initiated under colonialism have been rehabilitated and new schemes are still being developed. This paper interrogates the continuing attraction of this model for irrigation, asking how and why it persists. Is the fact that engineering is so central to irrigation schemes another example of ‘high modernism’, as Scott might argue? Analysis of the history and current policy-making context of a new irrigation scheme in Malawi suggests a picture that is more complex, in which practical engineering considerations combine with narratives of modernisation and political imperatives to create momentum and lock-in. Understanding this, and why lessons from the past inadequately shape future-directed planning requires interrogation of the positionality of those involved, including state, donors and private sector actors and the political, economic and discursive fields in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causal relationship between land tenure security and agricultural investment plays a crucial role in the process of rural development. Land property rights are key determinants for reducing poverty through agricultural productivity, natural resource management, and socio-economic inequalities. Growing competition for land access increases the sensitivity in land socio-economic stakes and related policies in developing countries. This paper analyzes the impacts of land rights on land-related investment in rural Burkina Faso. We use rural representative panel data and appropriate methods. The Two-Stage Conditional Maximum Likelihood approach is used for dealing with endogeneity, while the Generalized Structural Equation Model allows us to control for random effects. We show that stronger land rights increase land-attached investment, and land investment has positive and negative effect on stronger and weaker land rights, respectively, in rural Burkina Faso. Our study also finds that women and immigrants have less land rights than men and natives, respectively. Our contribution to related literature includes the use of rigorous process of hierarchy in land rights. The close link of the results with land right strength is of great interest for cautious practitioners in land tenure and investment. Moreover, our results imply that a gain of efficiency can be achieved from combining practices in land tenure and investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health insurance can improve health-seeking behaviors and protect consumption from health shocks but may also crowd out informal insurance. This paper therefore examines whether impacts of health insurance depend on households’ access to informal insurance, as proxied for by mobile money usage. Based on high-frequency financial diaries data collected in rural Kenya, we find that households with weaker access to informal insurance cope with uninsured health shocks by lowering subsequent non-health expenditures by approximately 25 percent. These same households are able to smooth consumption when health shocks are insured, due to lower out-of-pocket health expenditures. In contrast, households with access to informal insurance are able to smooth consumption even in the absence of formal health insurance. For this latter group, health insurance increases healthcare utilization at formal clinics and does not crowd out gifts and remittances during weeks with health shocks. These findings provide guidance for insurance schemes aiming to target the most vulnerable populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa face several choices to increase levels of access to electricity under severe budget constraints. First, they need to prioritise technologies that can supply electricity at a low cost. Second, they need to design and implement appropriate policies to attract private investment. On the first choice, renewable energy is becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. Moreover, it contributes to energy security and environmental sustainability, while providing access to new sources of (sustainable) finance. On the second choice, developing countries typically face a multitude of constraints to attract investment to their energy sector. It can be daunting and expensive to address them all at once. This paper presents a new methodology to support policymakers to better target policies for the promotion of commercial-scale renewable energy investment. The methodology, which we call “Green Investment Diagnostics” draws upon the Growth Diagnostics framework, extensively used in the field of Development Economics to identify the binding constraints to economic growth. It is operationalised with a decision tree analysis that builds cumulative evidence to prioritise some constraints over others, through the review of indicators and validation through expert interviews. We apply this approach to Kenya and Ghana, finding that Ghana’s key constraints to investment in renewable energy are an unreliable off-taker, macroeconomic imbalances, regulatory uncertainty, pressures to keep prices low, as well as insufficient and costly domestic finance. Kenya instead offers generous returns to investment in renewables but faces a low demand, a lack of networking infrastructure and problems of governance and social acceptance, exacerbated by uncertain land property rights and rent-seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese firms operating in Africa are often accused of violating international labour standards and not adhering with national labour laws. Considering China’s tendency to maintain control over development projects throughout the entire implementation phase, using Chinese contractors for work performed in the recipient countries, the present paper investigates whether China impacts African labour practices in their capacity as a donor. Specifically, we use a new data material allowing for systematic quantitative analysis of Chinese development finance to investigate whether Chinese development projects affect trade union involvement. Matching geo-referenced data on the subnational allocation of Chinese development projects to Africa over the 2000–2012 period with 41,902 survey respondents across 18 African countries, our estimation strategy relies on comparing the trade union involvement of individuals who live near a site where a Chinese project is being implemented at the time of the interview to those of individuals living near a site where a Chinese project will appear in the future, but where implementation had yet to be initiated at the time of the survey. The results consistently indicate that Chinese development projects – unlike the projects of other major donors – discourage trade union involvement in the local area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative investigation of trends before and after the establishment of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to determine which trajectories changed where, and to what scale of human consequence. We perform three empirical assessments: a count of countries that accelerated their rate of progress post-2000; statistical t -tests for differences in mean country rates of progress; and a determination of the incremental lives saved or improved (or not) due to accelerated progress above pre-MDG trends. We find that low-income countries and sub-Saharan African countries had positive acceleration on a majority of indicators and accounted for much of the world’s post-2000 accelerations. Middle-income countries typically registered larger cumulative gains but less acceleration over the period. The greatest advances were in matters of life and death. At least 20.9 million and as many as 30.3 million additional lives were saved due to accelerated rates of progress, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for approximately two-thirds of the total. Primary school completion also showed considerable overall acceleration, leading to at least 74 million more children having finished primary school. Other measures of basic needs – including undernourishment, access to water and access to sanitation – showed mixed patterns of acceleration. Headcount rates of extreme income poverty declined at an accelerated rate in most regions. Environmental indicators showed no systematic evidence of faster progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the emerging entrepreneurial practices on family farms in two agrarian reform cooperatives in Morocco. Their emergence can be explained by the constant negotiation of multiple and sometimes even antagonistic logics within these farms in a context of rapid agrarian change and the juxtaposition of capitalistic, entrepreneurial and peasant farms in the same area. Through their engagement as workers or sharecroppers in the different types of farms and as household members on the family farm, the young farmers from the dismantled agrarian cooperatives participate actively in the transformation of farming modes. The porosity of the peasant and entrepreneurial worlds is the main lesson we draw from our study. There is a subtle process of hybridization between the peasant and entrepreneurial modes of farming, resulting in a wide range of profiles. If we only focus on the political discourse, the trend towards capitalistic and entrepreneurial modes of farming seems inescapable. Nevertheless, our study stresses the resistance of peasant modes of farming that can blend with a ‘modern’ perception of agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper examines the existence of social learning in agriculture in Ethiopia. To be specific, we use a “random matching within sample” technique to collect data on social networks and to elicit details of the relationships and information exchange between network members. We find that shared kinship or membership in certain groups, informal forms of mutual insurance, and having frequent meetings with network members are all associated with a higher probability of forming an information link with a network member. Furthermore, we find evidence for a statistically significant and positive relationship between networks and the adoption of row-planting as well as yields for both male and female networks. However, the evidence for an inverse U-shaped relationship of social learning, that is, between the number of adopters in the network and the adoption of row-planting, is strongest for female networks. Our results, thus, suggest that extension services and other programs that promote agricultural innovations and seek yield improvement can benefit from social networks but that their success depends on identifying the “right” networks, such as those of female household members in the case of row-planting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of most kinds of project aid decline over distance, so in order for aid to help the poor it must be targeted to the places where the poor live. This paper examines if aid from the World Bank and African Development Bank flows to the relatively poor within African countries. The unit of analysis is an approximately 50 km × 50 km cell that is tiled across the continent to form a grid of roughly 10,500 cells. I aggregate geotagged aid from each donor into the grid cells in three ways: a binary measure marking if a cell received any aid, the count of aid projects per cell, and each cell’s dollar value of aid. I operationalize poverty at the grid cell level in five ways: light at night, mean travel time from the cell to a major city, distance from the centroid of the cell to the recipient’s capital city, and cell-level estimates of child malnutrition and infant mortality. I test for the influence of each poverty variable in models that control for the population within each cell and include recipient country fixed effects. Aid flows to richer rather than poorer cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary In this paper we argue that historically emerging frontiers of conservation pave the way for continuous top–down territorialization. Drawing on a concrete case in the Selous–Niassa Corridor in Southern Tanzania, we show how a frontier emerged in the form of community-based conservation. Decades of consecutive and continuous territorialization projects, based on mapping and boundary making, have ensured that conservation is beyond questioning, despite failures in the processes of demarcating, controlling, and managing this large-scale socio-spatial intervention. Although these failures produce territorial conflicts and confusions on the ground, we argue that in the context of a conservation frontier the gap between the envisioned ideal and the messy reality is used to legitimize continuous conservation interventions that rely on technical expertise rather than political dialog. While such top–down territorialization by community-based conservation inevitably remains partial and contingent, this is nonetheless a powerful and resilient project that gradually transforms communal landscapes into conservation territories with little room for public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper uses hedonic analysis to estimate the impact of an area-based anti-poverty project on land values in a developing country. Economic theory would suggest that benefits of area-based programs would be capitalized into land prices, as supply is relatively fixed compared to other factors of production. While revealed preference methods have been applied widely in the field of environmental economics, they have not yet been used to evaluate an international development project. We study the effects of The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in Sauri, Kenya. Using administrative data from the Kenyan government on prices for land bought and sold within the MVP (established in 2005) and for land bought and sold in the surrounding area during 1999–2013, we estimate the project’s effect on local land prices. We find no evidence that the MVP investments led to an increase in land prices within project areas. This research represents the first work to use hedonic analysis of land values to assess an international development project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The relationship between rural household productive assets and child labor in developing countries is complex. Some empirical evidence shows that child labor tends to increase as land holding increases, or there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between the probability of putting children to work and land holding. This paper shows that the relationship between use of children as laborers and land holding is nuanced. Child labor generally decreases as per capita land holding increases, but there can be an upward bump in the relationship between child labor and landholding near the middle of the range of land per capita. The bump can be explained theoretically by the relationship between the marginal productivity of a child worker on the farm and the marginal value placed on his/her education at different levels of wealth. This pattern is repeated in three surveys conducted in Zimbabwe, in 2001, 2007–8, and 2010–11. From the perspective of policy making, the policy maker should be alerted that the programs to promote school retention should not necessarily focus only on the poorest households in rural areas. There is a high probability that middle-wealth households put their children to work, and this probability may change by some other factors such as gender of child and agro-ecological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate the effects of refugees' camps on the occurrence of protests and conflicts in host localities employing a counterfactual approach were we compare geographical cells that host a camp (treated) with other cells that have a priori similar probability of hosting a camp and a similar socio-economic context. • We do not find that after the establishment of a camp the average occurrence of protests increases significantly. • Using a panel event study estimation, we find evidence of a significative increase in the number of protests in the 2-years after the establishment of the camp. • Over time the easing of tensions might be related to the increased socio-economic contacts as we find that the establishment of camps boosts the growth of host-localities. • The intensity and density of interactions are unlikely to generate strong social tensions as refugees contribute to the expansion of economic opportunities also in marginal and relatively underdeveloped contexts. In this paper we study the effects of the establishment of refugees' camps in Africa on the occurrence of protests and social conflicts by using geo-referenced panel data (2000–2014). We use 50x50 km cells as units of analysis and match data on the frequency of protests, armed conflicts and other organized violence events (based on GDELT and GED databases) with information on the location of camps contained in the UNHCR Camp Mapping Database. By using a counterfactual empirical strategy, we find that refugee camps significantly increase the occurrence of protests only in the initial period (2 years) while no statistically significant effect is detected in subsequent years. We interpret these findings as the asynchronous effect of two shocks associated with the presence of refugee camps: a sudden population shock which initially increases social tensions with the host-communities and a growth effect spurred by the increase in aggregate demand due to a public-spending shock and the progressive participation of refugees in the host socio-economic system. To support this hypothesis, we analyze the effect of hosting a camp on economic growth in the surrounding area (within 10 km from the camp). We find evidence that, on average, camps positively affect economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper evaluates labor allocation as a strategy to cope with unanticipated events during hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. • In this periodc are already stressed by hyperinflation and so further labor reallocations delineate the bounds of possible labor responses. • In this stressed environment, new shocks compound existing stresses. • We find that different types of shocks disparately affect labor allocation; perceptions about experienced shocks also shift labor behavior. • Perceived rainfall shocks affect the share of labor allocated to migration activities and to non-labor participation. This paper investigates labor allocation as a strategy for coping with unanticipated events. We evaluate household responses to unforeseen death and rainfall shocks in Zimbabwe, during a period in which many households were already stressed due to the country's long-term economic crisis. In this context, shocks compound existing stresses. Different types of shocks disparately affect household labor allocation. Household perceptions about the shocks experienced also shift labor use. Perceived rainfall shocks positively affect the share of labor allocated to migration-related activities and negatively affect the share of labor allocated to non-participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• China is increasingly involved in renewable energy deployment in sub-Saharan Africa. • Unique Chinese model of renewable energy infrastructure provision exists. • Only bounded local economic co-benefits can be identified in three detailed project-level case studies. • Policymakers should be cautions of overly optimistic expectations of co-benefits. • Implementation of carefully designed policies can potentially increase local economic co-benefits. Investments in renewable energy are increasing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. The overall purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent and under what conditions these investments are producing economic co-benefits in terms of spillovers and linkage development effects. One peculiarity of Africa's renewable-energy sector is the rapid increase and likely future growth of Chinese involvement in large-scale renewable-energy infrastructure projects. Insights from other infrastructure, utility and resource-extraction sectors in sub-Saharan Africa suggest that China is pursuing a specific Chinese model of investments characterised by enclave characteristics and including finance, turnkey project development and the importation of labour and equipment from China. Hence our focus in this paper is to determine to what extent economic co-benefits are created when renewable-energy projects are developed by Chinese investors. To do this, we undertake an in-depth analysis of three Chinese renewable-energy investment projects in hydro, wind and solar PV, based on primary data. Overall, we find evidence of 'bounded benefits'. On the one hand, we can identify some newly created jobs, linkages generated with actors in local systems of production and training activities involving local staff. On the other hand, the extent of these benefits is very limited. Overall, the results suggest that policymakers should be wary of overly optimistic expectations when it comes to assessing the co-benefits of renewable energy projects in the context of scarce pre-existing capabilities. However, the adoption of pro-active strategies and the implementation of carefully designed policies can increase the local economic co-benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The South African government has been praised for its decisive and science-based response to the Covid-19 pandemic. • The paper examines the government response and whether such claims hold up to scrutiny. • Two frameworks are used: pandemic response as an intertemporal optimisation problem and the notion of scientism. • The sub-optimal response unnecessarily harmed development outcomes but was obscured by the state's performance of scientism. • Illustrates the importance of policymaking processes that incorporate epistemic humility and avoid incredible certitude. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic South Africa was praised for decisive political leadership based on scientific advice and the strictness of the measures it imposed to limit domestic spread of the virus. This paper critically examines the South African response through two conceptual frameworks. The first frames an optimal policy response as a solution to an intertemporal welfare-optimisation problem. The need for governments to balance epidemiological considerations and public health measures with the negative consequences of non-pharmaceutical interventions to limit transmission is particularly acute in developing countries. The second considers the use of scientific evidence and expertise through the lens of scientism – undue deference to science. The South African government erred towards drastic action in the face of predictions by some scientific advisors of a catastrophe, but initially without a clear, public long-term plan. Its lockdown has caused serious economic and societal harm across a range of measures. But these costs have not been matched by proportional benefits in health system preparedness or, based on evidence three months into the epidemic, a definitive improvement in expected long-term epidemic outcomes. This failure, and the questionably confident basis for the original lockdown decision, has been obscured by the government's performative scientism – a public performance of deference to science – even in the absence of transparent decision-making. One consequence was a slower correction of strategy than merited by evidence of limited benefits and high costs of the lockdown. Another was an unwillingness to admit and explain errors after the fact. The latter, combined with the convincingness of the initial performance undermined the behavioural dimension of policy – leading to beliefs among citizens that confounded efforts by the state to adapt its policy stance through reopening schools, reducing the stringency of clinical guidelines and resuming various economic activities while nevertheless observing basic social distancing precautions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Theoretically, diversity in institutional change is explained by the interplay between preferences, institutions and uncertainty. • In Kenya, cash transfer reforms show a pattern of cumulative incremental change, change in social health protection is obstructed. • Contributing factors are stronger conflicting interests and institutional legacies within the area of social health insurance. • Private information and the presence of focal points facilitated decision-making on cash transfers and fee waivers. • Ambiguity and complexity sharpened the focus on cash transfers and exacerbated critical views on social health insurance. The potential of social protection to contribute to inclusive growth has been increasingly recognized throughout the last two decades. Social protection reforms involve comprehensive processes of long-term institutional change. Dynamics differ not only across but also within countries across social protection pillars reflecting multiple institutional trajectories and equilibria ranging from rapid and comprehensive shifts over processes of gradual change to situations of blocked reforms or reform reversals. This paper seeks to understand why reforms aiming at extending social protection coverage to the poor might differ across different pillars of social protection within the same country. Being embedded within comparative institutional analysis the paper aims at providing a systematic framework for defining and explaining variations in reform dynamics highlighting the role of uncertainty. The framework is applied to the Kenyan case. The empirical methodology employs a process tracing approach including primary and secondary data covering the time period between 2001 and 2017. The case of Kenya is one example for multiple institutional trajectories within a country: Whereas cash transfer reforms follow a pattern of cumulative incremental change, social health protection reforms reflect patterns of non-cumulative change including blocked reforms and reform reversals. The results suggest that those differences are partly explained by differences in preferences among agents or the institutional legacies within each domain. In addition, behavioral responses to uncertainty matter: Stronger information asymmetries within the cash transfer and fee waiver reform domains opened space for discretionary decision-making. Interpretations of the concept of social protection and complexity of 'insurance' facilitated processes related to cash transfers whereas providing impediments to social health insurance. Lastly, the international and socio-economic context provided focal points facilitating coordination on targeted or vertical interventions such as cash transfers or fee waivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary We ask whether there is empirical evidence that supports the existence of norm-based access rules that give poor households access to important production resources. A substantial literature has investigated informal insurance schemes, which trigger supporting exchanges after negative shocks have occurred. This paper is instead concerned with material exchanges that take place before shocks occur, which has received far less attention in the economic literature. We employ a dataset of 51 rural villages in The Gambia, and we focus on access to the most important production resource in our context—land. We find that poor households are more likely to receive seasonal land usage rights. We also show that these exchanges are more likely to occur in villages where land is abundant and where ethnic fractionalization is low. We argue that this is consistent with the existing qualitative evidence, which argues that informal exchange is thought to be disappearing due to population increases and ethnic fractionalization. Our findings highlight the importance of attention to the local (i.e., village-level) context for assessing welfare and conducting effective policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary To understand why soil erosion is persistent despite three decades of massive investments in soil conservation, this paper explores how drainage and soil conservation change a hill slope in the Choke Mountains. By paying close attention to the practices that reshape the hill, we account for the active roles of people and material flows in shaping their identities, forms, and power relations. Social relations can be read in the landscape as their material outcomes are literally scoured into the hill slope. Such a material reading of Ethiopia’s “developmental state” reveals three issues: First, drainage and soil conservation practices are configured by particular historical regimes of land distribution and rent appropriation. Second, the power of the Ethiopian government’s model of the developmental state derives from the exploitation of this configuration by a new coalition of landholders and government officials. Government officials mobilize landholders to construct terraces in exchange for government support in conflicts over land and input distribution. When the terraces create obstructions that can trigger flooding, landowners convert them into drains and divert drainage flows to plots sharecropped by landless families. Consequently, the yearly mobilization for terrace construction does not halt soil erosion but further aggravates it. This continues because the performance of this yearly ritual affirms the authority of landholders and government agents. Third, landless families which fail to live up to the model of the “farmer interested in soil conservation” have created a competing “trader model” with its own institutions. The denial of their non-farmer identities by landholders and officials fuels generational conflicts over drainage which deepen the fractures in the hill and pose a challenge to government authority. Land degradation thus embodies both the powers and the limits of the developmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper addresses the debate on establishing GIs in weak national institutional contexts. It builds on evidence provided by six case studies in a project implemented by the African Intellectual Property Organization (French acronym OAPI) in Western and Central Africa: Oku white honey, Penja pepper, Ziama-Macenta coffee, Dogon shallots, Galmi purple onions, and Korhogo cloth. Thanks to OAPI’s unique status and an appropriate methodology, three GIs have been registered. We notice a lack of sound and effective state involvement which can limit the successful development of GIs. We identify some decisive factors in successful collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Ethiopia has experienced an impressive growth acceleration over the past decade. This was achieved on the back of an economic strategy emphasizing public infrastructure investment supported by heterodox macro-financial policies. This paper identifies the drivers of Ethiopia’s recent growth episode and examines the extent to which they were typical or unique. It combines country-specific information with the results of a cross-country panel regression model. We find that Ethiopia’s growth is explained well by factors correlating with growth in a broad range of countries in recent decades, including public infrastructure investment, restrained government consumption, and a conducive external environment. On the other hand, we argue that the policy mix that supported very high levels of public investment in Ethiopia was, to some extent, unique. Interestingly, macroeconomic imbalances due to this heterodox policy mix only moderately held back growth which helps explain why Ethiopia was able to grow so fast in spite of their presence: their negative effects were quantitatively much less important than the positive growth drivers they helped to achieve. The results suggest that “getting infrastructure right” may outweigh moderate shortcoming in the macro framework at early stages of development. We further relate this country-specific finding to the recent growth literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the determinants of price discrimination in the rice market in one neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria. There has been little empirical study of how ethnicity and class shape economic outcomes in informal market interactions. We conduct an audit experiment—one of the first audit experiments in Africa—seeking to address this gap. We experimentally manipulate class, with confederates presenting as different classes; this may be the first audit study to take this approach. This is also one of the first in-person audits to have multiple transactions for each buyer and seller, thus allowing for the use of buyer and seller fixed effects. We find little evidence that, all else equal, sharing an ethnicity on its own inuences market treatment. Class, however, does have substantial effects, at least for non-coethnics. High-class non-coethnics receive higher prices per unit than low-class non-coethnics. Our findings suggest that the boundaries of group identity appear to be at least partially defined by class in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the impact of smallholder participation in a contract-farming scheme in the rice sector in Benin. We use data from a cross-sectional farm-household survey and different propensity score matching estimations to reveal how participation in a contract-farming scheme affects smallholder rice production. We find that contract-farming results in expansion of the rice area, intensification of rice production, increased commercialization of rice, and higher farm-gate prices, and ultimately contributes to rice output growth and increased income. Our findings imply that contract-farming can contribute to upgrading the rice supply chain and the development of the rice sector in Benin. Promoting and supporting the spread of contract-farming schemes in the sector might be an effective way to contribute to reaching the government goals of expanding rice production to become self-sufficient and improving rice quality to compete with imported rice. While there is a large empirical literature on contract-farming in high-value and commodity export sectors, studies on contract-farming in staple food sectors are very scarce. Our results document that contract-farming for staple food crops can be sustainable and benefit smallholder farmers; which is against theoretical expectations that contracting for staple food crops is not feasible because of contract-enforcement problems that stem from a low value of produce, low storage and transport costs, and a larger number of buyers in the chain. Our study contributes to understanding the role that contract-farming might play in the much needed upgrading of domestic and staple food crop sectors in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Over the past three decades, an increasing number of low- and middle-income countries have decentralized water provision to the local government level, and have sought to more thoroughly involve users in service delivery. Such reforms reflect the twin goals of encouraging greater responsiveness to local needs and promoting sustainability. This study illustrates how the aims of decentralization can be undermined in the absence of robust democratic competition, and how governments interpret “demand” by voters in such settings. Focusing on the Tanzanian water sector, the paper first traces the distribution of money for water from the central government to the district level. Next, I consider how district governments use these funds to distribute water infrastructure within their jurisdictions, using geo-referenced data on all 75,000 water points serving rural Tanzanians. I find that the central government’s allocation of money to districts is fairly unresponsive to local needs. However, the pattern of distribution cannot primarily be explained by politics, with the exception of consistent favoritism of the Minister for Water’s home district. Political favoritism is more pronounced at the local level. Within districts, the distribution of new water infrastructure is skewed to favor localities with higher demonstrated levels of support for the ruling party. In addition, wealthier and better-connected communities—those with the resources to more effectively express their demands—are significantly more likely to benefit from new construction. This suggests that “demand-responsive” approaches to water provision can entrench regressive patterns of distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary REDD+ is an ambition to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the Global South. This ambition has generated unprecedented commitment of political support and financial funds for the forest-development sector. Many academics and people-centered advocacy organizations have conceptualized REDD+ as an example of “green grabbing” and have voiced fears of a potential global rush for land and trees. In this paper we argue that, in practice and up until now, REDD+ resembles longstanding dynamics of the development and conservation industry, where the promise of change becomes a discursive commodity that is constantly reproduced and used to generate value and appropriate financial resources. We thus argue for a re-conceptualization of REDD+ as a conservation fad within the broader political economy of development and conservation. We derive this argument from a study that compares the emergence of REDD+ in Tanzania with that of a previous forest-policy model called Participatory Forest Management. Our study describes how the advent of REDD+ implies change at the discursive level, but also continuity and repetitiveness in terms of the initial promises and expectations leading to substantial donor financing, pilot project activities, and policy development and implementation processes. In both epochs, these have achieved little in terms of changing actual forest management and use on the ground outside selected pilot project sites, but have sustained the livelihoods of actors within the development and conservation industry, including academics. Given that there are still many who look to REDD+ in the hope of addressing global climate change, despite less than hoped for financial support at the global level, our study provides an important starting point for questioning the uses of the finances for REDD+ that are actually amassed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary To investigate whether Africa’s exports to China influence labor practices in Africa, we reconsider the debate over trade’s influence on regulatory standards in exporting countries. The first generation of trade–regulation scholars asked whether high levels of exports influenced regulatory standards of exporting countries, with inconclusive results. The second generation of scholarship focused not on how much a country exported but to whom it exported, identifying a “California Effect” by which firms and consumers in (mostly developed) importing countries projected their high regulatory standards on less developed export partners. Structural change—especially the rise of China as a major importer—poses a challenge to these optimistic findings. Drawing on insights from the analysis of compositional data, this paper introduces a third generation of trade–regulation research, which suggests examining not only with whom a country trades, but also how the composition of markets in a country’s export basket reshuffles over time. Specifically, we explore the possibility of a “Shanghai Effect” whereby African countries begin to reflect the lower labor standards of China, which has emerged as a major destination for their exports. We show that when a country increases exports to China, the net effect on domestic labor standards depends critically on the labor practices of other export destinations compositionally displaced by China exports. Our analysis of a panel of 49 African countries for the period 1985–2010 produces a small continent-wide estimate of China’s negative influence on African labor practices. In-sample simulation at the country level uncovers a moderate Shanghai Effect for a handful of countries only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]