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Non-contributory pensions have become extremely popular in the last decade, with 78 developing countries currently distributing money in this way, and their acclaimed impacts are increasingly celebrated. Studies have found them to contribute not only to 'obvious' needs such as increased consumption and income security but also to investments in productivity, social relationships, health, increased access to credit and savings, while it has become common to claim that they contribute to intangible goals such as dignity and citizenship. The danger of some of these claims is that they assume that wellbeing is heavily responsive to monetary wealth, rather than other areas. To study this, an ethnographic methodology, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, was employed in two rural communities located in the La Paz department in the highland Altiplano region of Bolivia close to Lake Titicaca. Our analysis shows that while the Renta Dignidad increases older persons' livelihood security, its contributions to other areas where non-contributory pensions are claimed to have major impacts, such as productive investment, health care and relational wellbeing, are actually relatively limited. The policy implication of this is that a more integral approach needs to be adopted to older persons' wellbeing, going beyond cash transfers to greater efforts to bring health-care services to older people in remote rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the largest labour guarantee scheme in the world, offering 100 days of paid labour to every rural household. This article reviews the growing evidence base, assessing the extent to which the scheme can be said to contribute to resilience to climate change, based on its effectiveness as a safety net and driver of household accumulation, its ability to create assets which build collective resilience, and its support for transformations of exploitative social relations. The article concludes that the MGNREGA has already made a major contribution to resilience, but requires improvements in governance and state capacity to maximize its contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorists have critiqued the individualism at the heart of Sen’s capabilities approach, and have advocated the concept of “collective capabilities” to better understand the role of social institutions in influencing human flourishing and freedom. However, the extent to which collective capabilities are complementary to, or in tension with individual ones has been under-researched. This paper explores the relationship between collective and individual capabilities by analysing the social institutions of indigenous peasants living in the Bolivian Altiplano, a relatively collectivist society, considering the roles of three key social institutions: village-level political organizations, social activities, and Evangelical churches. It argues that the strength of institutions to contribute to both individual and collective well-being often depends on their ability to use coercive instruments to override individual freedoms. Therefore, while the data support the claim that individualist approaches to well-being and freedom are inadequate, it also calls for more dynamic understandings of the ways in which social institutions enable and constrain people’s capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines some of the limitations of existing institutions and their inadequacy in bringing about 'green transformations' to address climate change in order to explain the need for alternative approaches to institutions. It outlines the 'entrepreneurial state' approach, as outlined by Mariana Mazzucato as a promising conceptual approach with potentially transformative policy implications to address the issues of innovation. It identifies some of the political challenges to achieving entrepreneurial state-type institutions in contexts where configurations of power and existing actor networks are unfavourable. It argues that although entrepreneurial state-type institutions are often framed as operating by harnessing high degrees of cooperation between different actors according to commonly-held long-term objectives, achieving the right types of institutions is likely to require a high degree of contestation in order to overcome existing vested interests. Moreover, it discusses the relationship between green transformations and democratic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research has established the centrality of markets to Andean rural livelihoods, but understandings of fairness and different market actors' power relations in these markets are less clear. Using ten months of ethnographic research in Bolivia's Altiplano, this case study reveals strategies and moral narratives of peasant producers and market traders in an emerging pea market. While traders attempt to deceive producers, the latter have their own means of exploiting competition between traders and advancing their own moral narratives about how the market should operate. Thus, the market is an economic field and a moral one, and traders can be punished for excessively prioritizing profit maximization. The moral nature of the pea trade should be viewed not as a quirk of Andean culture but as an illustration of the embeddedness of all markets and the need for critical examination of the moral economies of market interactions across the capitalist world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of the growing discussion around transformation and adaptation for development policy and practice. While there is increasing agreement that incremental approaches are insufficient to tackle climate change, and that deeper transformative change is also necessary, the ways in which transformation is understood vary significantly, and hence how it is to be operationalised remains unclear. Tracing the emergence of transformation in adaptation debates, and linking them to the intellectual roots of the idea of transformation, we interrogate different approaches that exist towards transformation in terms of moving beyond dominant neoliberal development trajectories. The article discusses some of the conceptual and practical challenges in bringing about transformational change in international development, concluding with some suggestions for the way forward in operationalising transformation for development in line with long-term climate change adaptation goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]