Over six billion dollars in developmental assistance is funneled annually through non-governmental organizations (NGOs), yet little is understood about the nature of their relationship with communities and the real impact of their work. This book examines what role NGOs really play in fighting poverty in Latin America. Expert NGO professionals and scholars explore grass-roots relationships between international religious and secular NGOs and poor communities. They probe the power structures, cultural assumptions, dangers and possibilities that underlie NGOs' work. While fighting poverty is the mission of many NGOs, most are aware that they often fail to make things better, and, in fact, may make things worse. By providing a forum for Northern and Southern NGOs, donors, scholars, and poor people themselves, this book explores the causes and cures of poverty, and presses at the boundaries of our understanding of participatory development. It identifies both internal and external factors that influence the success of NGO projects, and moves beyond standard best-practice theory to probe more deeply the relationships that underlie poverty and how these relationships can be shifted to achieve solutions.

This edition marks the 50th anniversary of Indian independence and the 10th anniversary of the series. It provides analysis of and context for political, economic, social and cultural developments in India, and considers what past trends may indicate for the future.

The rise of populism across Europe and the US – first in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and then in the shape of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote in 2016 – are indicative of a seismic shift in the terrain of economic ideas in public discourse. Settled liberal norms concerning ever-increasing international market expansion, and the political integration required to sustain it, have been decisively upset by political forces that, whilst once on the fringes, now dominate economic debate. How might we make sense of this ideological breakdown and what might we hope for next? This book turns to the work of Karl Polanyi for answers, developing the expansive, historicised approach to political economy that Polanyi pioneered. Holmes provides a wide-ranging history of economic ideas read in terms of a series of hopeful theoretical visions of order, in which political, social and ecological contradictions could be transcended in one way or another. Through this, the book demonstrates that the failing utopian visions of pre-2008 economic orthodoxy, which have formed the backdrop to the rise of populism today, are only the latest in a series that stretches across economic thought in Western modernity as a whole. This book will interest students and scholars of IPE, political science, sociology, anthropology, law and history.

Accelerating climate change is widely predicted to have profound impacts on human mobility over the coming decades. Climate mobilities and immobilities invoke issues of justice and social inequality and pose numerous socio-cultural, health, economic, legal and political challenges. Current international legal frameworks and national governance mechanisms provide insufficient protection for people displaced by climate change who are often subjected to health risks, psychosocial trauma, human rights abuse, and even new climatic risks. At the same time, there is a need to better understand how climate change interacts with other mobility drivers and why many climate-affected people decide to stay put or remain trapped in at-risk locations. Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary traditions and featuring Indigenous voices and youth perspectives, this book introduces new conceptual frameworks and empirical studies to examine the unique challenges facing people on the move and those staying behind.

This edition of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity report brings sobering news. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its associated economic crisis, compounded by the effects of armed conflict and climate change, are reversing hard-won gains in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. The fight to end poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades after more than 20 years of progress. The goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, already at risk before the pandemic, is now beyond reach in the absence of swift, significant, and sustained action, and the objective of advancing shared prosperity—raising the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country—will be much more difficult. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and shared prosperity. Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and economic simulations, it shows that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already poor and vulnerable people hard, while also shifting the profile of global poverty to include millions of 'new poor.' Original analysis included in the report shows that the new poor are more urban, better educated, and less likely to work in agriculture than those living in extreme poverty before COVID-19. It also gives new estimates of the impact of conflict and climate change, and how they overlap. These results are important for targeting policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. It shows how some countries are acting to reverse the crisis, protect those most vulnerable, and promote a resilient recovery. These findings call for urgent action. If the global response fails the world's poorest and most vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date will be minimal compared with what lies ahead. Success over the long term will require much more than stopping COVID-19. As efforts to curb the disease and its economic fallout intensify, the interrupted development agenda in low- and middle-income countries must be put back on track. Recovering from today's reversals of fortune requires tackling the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 with a commitment proportional to the crisis itself. In doing so, countries can also plant the seeds for dealing with the long-term development challenges of promoting inclusive growth, capital accumulation, and risk prevention—particularly the risks of conflict and climate change.

The author examines the moral, methodological, and practical problems that arise from poverty measurement. He establishes a methodological framework for analyzing poverty conceptions and measures, and concludes with concrete recommendations regarding both the procedures for and substance of future global poverty measurement.

Sustainable development is capturing the attention of planners, politicians and business leaders. Within the academic sphere its study is increasingly breaching disciplinary boundaries to become a focus of attention for natural and social scientists alike. But in studying such a key concept, it is vital that there is a clear definition of what it means, how it is applied on the ground, and the influence it exerts upon people's perceptions of change in the physical environment, economic activity and society. Exploring Sustainable Development is a major new text which provides a multifaceted introduction to key areas of study in this field, examining sustainability at the full range of spatial scales from the local to the global. Building on existing theory it demonstrates the unique contributions that thinking geographically about space, place and human-environment relationships can bring to the analysis of sustainable development. This book explores different interpretations of sustainable development in both theory and practice, in developed and developing countries, and in rural and urban areas. It pays particular attention to the local, national and international politics of implementation, the future of climate and energy, the role of business, and different conceptions of agricultural sustainability. This wide-ranging text is ideal for undergraduates and postgraduates in geography, environmental science, development studies, and related social and political sciences.