Progress in Development Studies

This study examines local government officials’ perspectives on framing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Ghanaian context. The emerging themes suggest a dualistic framing of the SDGs by local actors, with the SDGs framed, on the one hand, as part of ongoing development programming and, on the other hand, as a framework that facilitates local development and provides a standard for local development. Framing the SDGs as ‘new wine’ in the ‘old wineskins’ of existing local development programming risks watering down the SDGs’ ambition through localization. However, framing the SDGs as local development facilitators enables innovations embedded in the SDGs’ ‘new wine’, to enhance the ‘old wineskins’ of existing development.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created new vulnerabilities and deepened existing ones. In Ghana, the overall headcount poverty decline has disguised a large group of vulnerable households now threatened with falling back into poverty given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article draws on new household panel data to analyse transient poverty, the drivers of vulnerability before and since the COVID-19 pandemic and provides implications for social protection. Using poverty transition matrices, we first measure poverty episodes which help to not only track the movements in and out of poverty but also to identify and categorize households into distinctive groups. We then apply logistic regression to examine the determinants of vulnerability to poverty before evaluating COVID-19 vulnerabilities in the context of social protection in Ghana. We find that a large group of struggling households exist between the poor and the stable middle classes that have been overlooked by cash transfer programmes. We characterize this group and show that current vulnerability measurements and social protection design need adjustments. We also find that poverty and vulnerability to it is no longer a rural phenomenon as the transient poor since the COVID-19 pandemic are mostly located in urban areas and largely not covered by current social protection systems. Both vertical and horizontal expansion of social policy is required to reach these new groups and new locations. For reducing poverty and limiting vulnerability in developing country contexts, our findings imply that (a) new measurements and targeting may be required, (b) vulnerable informal groups in urban areas need to be included, and (c) new types of social protection for struggling households are required to prevent their falling back into poverty in the event of aggregate shocks.

Development knowledge sharing (DKS) by Japan, South Korea and China has rapidly expanded over the last decade. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the nature and processes of their claimed-to-be ‘unique’ development knowledge production. To address this research gap, we explore their international development studies (IDS) as key sites where researchers and resources are ‘mobilized’ under high-level policy initiatives. We find that processes of DKS are principally dictated by the governmental agenda. We also find that, in contradiction to three countries’ claim of ‘unique knowledge’, their IDS share common traits with Western IDS offering knowledge that is decontextualized, depoliticized and which claims to be universally applicable knowledge.

An increasing body of literature suggests that agriculture is ‘feminizing’ in many low- and middle-income countries. Definitions of the feminization of agriculture vary, as do interpretations of what drives the expansion of women’s roles in agriculture over time. Understanding whether, how, and why the feminization of agriculture is occurring requires effective research methodologies capable of producing nuanced data. This article builds on six research projects that set out to deepen narratives of feminization of agriculture by empirically exploring the dynamics and impacts of diverse processes of feminization of agriculture. The researchers working on these projects reflect on how their methodological innovations enabled them to obtain new, or more nuanced, insights into the processes of feminization of agriculture. A first insight is that the way ‘feminization of agriculture’ is defined and operationalized plays a decisive role in the evidence we produce on the process. Second, bias in data on feminization can arise unless researchers examine well-recognized gender norms that mediate whether women are acknowledged by wider society as legitimate farmers. Third, the feminization of agriculture should be understood as a non-linear continuum. Research methodologies need to be capable of capturing dynamics, complexity, as well as multiple and diverse context- and time-specific drivers. Researchers need to exercise critical awareness of such biases when they are constructing data to measure or proxy aspects of feminization to avoid significantly underestimating women’s roles in agriculture.

Internet infrastructure, like other infrastructures, is gradually becoming an important force affecting economic and social development, laying the foundation for the development of the digital economy. Based on a quasi-natural experiment, combined with the data of 201 Chinese prefectures from 2010 to 2018, this study constructs a difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of internet infrastructure construction (IIC) on the urban–rural income gap. The main results show that IIC has a significant widening effect on the urban–rural income gap. Our study also finds that the effect has significant location and city attribute heterogeneity. Specifically, the IIC widens the urban–rural income gap more strongly in central-western, inland, provincial capital and small-scale cities. Furthermore, the promotion of IIC to the income of urban residents far exceeds that of rural residents, which is a typical manifestation of the third-level digital divide. However, increasing the education level of residents is beneficial to alleviating the widening effect of IIC on the urban–rural income gap. Overall, national policymakers should pay attention to the possible inequalities in promoting the development of national broadband internet. Policies for improving the digital application abilities of residents, especially vulnerable groups, are highly recommended to share the digital dividend.

Better, swifter and more responsive international coordination is needed within our global financial system for the containment of the pandemic and its effects. This requires better international tax coordination with a higher global minimum corporate tax, comprehensive coverage of sectors and firms, inclusion of all current tax havens and more generous redistribution of excess profits to developing nations based on user location. There also needs to be a more substantial and easier-to-access mechanism for debt relief and restructuring, one that generously suspends debt payments in periods of crises and provides financial support without strict and painful conditionalities.

The commentary addresses, with constructive suggestions, the tension between common beliefs that development knowledge is not predictive and the general requirement that it be used to support instrumental action (using devices such as the log frame or theories of change that embody ideas that X will lead to Y). I suggest that this tension is best resolved differently from much current practice, which tends to fudge the issue. I draw two central implications: first, that stakeholders to a possible development intervention decide formally, before proceeding, whether the context and knowledge of it suggest that it is wise to proceed instrumentally or not; second, that a positive aspect of the ‘fudge’ is that a significant share of development interventions, whilst organized according to instrumental principles (such as the log frame or theories of change), in fact lack suitable knowledge and so are, in reality, non-instrumental. In such contexts, development professionals, in fact, have well-developed but informal methods for acting ‘non-instrumentally’.

Cole, M. (ed.), Education, Equality and Human Rights: Issues of Gender, ‘Race’, Sexuality, Disability and Social Class (5th Edition) (London: Routledge, 2022), 350 pp. £28.99 (paperback), £120.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781032010991.

De, I., Chattopadhyay, S., Nathan, H. S. K. and Sarkar, K. (eds), COVID-19 Pandemic, Public Policy, and Institutions in India: Issues of Labour, Income, and Human Development (1st ed., Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 204 pp. Hardback £96.00 and eBook £29.59.

Mezzadri, A. (ed.), Marx in the Field (London: Anthem Press, 2021), 246 pp. £80, $125, ISBN 9781785274497.

Onuora-Oguno, A. C. Development and the Right to Education in Africa (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 239 pp., €23.36 (hardcover), €69.99 (softcover), €58.84 (eBook). ISBN: 978-3-319-90334-7 (hardcover), 978-3-030-07994-9 (softcover), 978-3-319-90335-4 (eBook).

Regilme Jr, S. S. F. Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 308 pp. £64.95, ISBN 9780472132782 (e-book).

Skair, L. (ed.), The Anthropocene in Global Media: Neutralizing the Risk (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 272 pp. £110, ISBN 9780367375973.

Táíwò, O.O. 2022: Reconsidering Reparations. New York: Oxford University Press. 280 pp. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0-197-50889-3 (hardback).

Traczykowski, L. 2021: Ethics, Law and Natural Hazards: The Moral Imperative for International Intervention Post-Disaster. London: Routledge. 140 pp. £120 hardcover, £33.29 paperback. ISBN: 9780367808600 (paperback), 9780367407049 (hardcover).

Vaughn, S. E. Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 256 pp. US $99.95 (cloth), US $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-1548-2 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-1810-0 (paper).