The many ideas and opportunities include: narrowing the gaps between words and actions; reducing demands on administrative capacity; using minimum rules, non-negotiables and downward accountability to transform power relations; finding new potentials for participation; improving scaling up; critical reflection and experiential learning; complementing rights-based with obligations-based approaches; pro-poor realism; and responsible well-being."

Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider. Yet all is not lost. Robert Chambers, one of the ?glass is half full? optimists of international development, suggests that the problems can be solved and everyone has the power at a personal level to take action, develop solutions and remake our world as it can and should be. Chambers peels apart and analyses aspects of development that have been neglected or misunderstood. In each chapter, he presents an earlier writing which he then reviews and reflects upon in a contemporary light before harvesting a wealth of powerful conclusions and practical implications for the future. The book draws on experiences from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, covering topics and concepts as wide and varied as irreversibility, continuity and commitment; administrative capacity as a scarce resource; procedures and principles; participation in the past, present and future; scaling up; behaviour and attitudes; responsible wellbeing; and concepts for development in the 21st century.

This book is a collection of different studies in the history and development of powerful philosophical ideas, though it is not confined to a particular stage in this history. It highlights to the reader that looking at the history of insightful connections and theories increases the awareness of the importance of providing a historical context that develops a conversation: ideas require minds concerned with them, which renders ideas almost living things. The book studies and relates the ideas of philosophers including Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Hegel, Royce, Kierkegaard, Peirce, and James, among others. If this conversation is an intelligent process, since it requires serious and continuous thought, then these ideas progress along with the minds that conceptualise them.

Heralded as a success that mobilized support for development, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ushered in an era of setting development agendas by setting global goals. This book critically evaluates the MDG experience from the capabilities and human rights perspectives, and questions the use of quantitative targets as an instrument of global governance. It provides an account of their origins, trajectory and influence in shaping the policy agenda, and ideas about international development during the first 15 years of the 21st century. The chapters explore: • whether the goals are adequate as benchmarks for the transformative vision of the Millennium Declaration; • how the goals came to be formulated the way they were, drawing on interviews with key actors who were involved in the process; • how the goals exercised influence through framing to shape policy agendas on the part of both developing countries and the international community; • the political economy that drove the formulation of the goals and their consequences on the agendas of the South and the North; • the effects of quantification and indicators on ideas and action; and • the lessons to be drawn for using numeric goals to promote global priorities. Representing a significant body of work on the MDGs in its multiple dimensions, compiled here for the first time as a single collection that tells the whole definitive story, this book provides a comprehensive resource. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and policymakers in the fields of development, human rights, international political economy, and governance by numeric indicators.

A collection of international case studies that demonstrate the importance of ideas to urban political development Ideas, interests, and institutions are the "holy trinity" of the study of politics. Of the three, ideas are arguably the hardest with which to grapple and, despite a generally broad agreement concerning their fundamental importance, the most often neglected. Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of urban politics and urban political development. The essays in How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development argue that ideas have been the real drivers behind urban political development and offer as evidence national and international examples—some unique to specific cities, regions, and countries, and some of global impact. Within the United States, contributors examine the idea of "blight" and how it became a powerful metaphor in city planning; the identification of racially-defined spaces, especially black cities and city neighborhoods, as specific targets of neoliberal disciplinary practices; the paradox of members of Congress who were active supporters of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s but enjoyed the support of big-city political machines that were hardly liberal when it came to questions of race in their home districts; and the intersection of national education policy, local school politics, and the politics of immigration. Essays compare the ways in which national urban policies have taken different shapes in countries similar to the United States, namely, Canada and the United Kingdom. The volume also presents case studies of city-based political development in Chile, China, India, and Africa—areas of the world that have experienced a more recent form of urbanization that feature deep and intimate ties and similarities to urban political development in the Global North, but which have occurred on a broader scale. Contributors: Daniel Béland, Debjani Bhattacharyya, Robert Henry Cox, Richardson Dilworth, Jason Hackworth, Marcus Anthony Hunter, William Hurst, Sally Ford Lawton, Thomas Ogorzalek, Eleonora Pasotti, Joel Rast, Douglas S. Reed, Mara Sidney, Lester K. Spence, Vanessa Watson, Timothy P. R. Weaver, Amy Widestrom.

In this book Ian Goldin shows how the understanding of how nations escape poverty and achieve economic and social progress has changed as the pendulum has swung from arguments for state-led development to a preoccupation with market forces.

…Formally speaking, the New Economy Policy had been replaced by the New Economic Order, which had been promulgated in the name of liberalism. Thus it may seem that the issues and concerns addressed by the book had been rendered irrelevant by the shift in policy. Against such proposition, I must say that my book addresses itself to the question of ideas, principles and weltanschaaung beyond mere policies and formality. It is therefore too early in the day to conclude that the new liberalism has definitively replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) as an era and ethos, throwing into question the relevance of this book. It may well turn out to be that the issues and concerns of the book transcend superficial policy changes in a more fundamental way. -Shaharuddin Maaruf University of Malaya 15 April 2014 The sweep through the history of Malay political ideas which is to be encountered in Malay Ideas on Development from Feudal Lord to Capitalist – a sweep achieved with analytic skill and clarity – will stimulate new readers to seek more detailed examination of one targeted writer or another. Creating such desire is an indication of the book’s effectiveness. Juxtaposing one thinker with another, setting modern debate in the context of traditional political thought, proposing categories or streams of political thinking – ‘capitalistic nationalism’, ‘traditionalistic nationalism’ and so forth – is the best possible way of promoting a greater interest in the history of Malay political thinking, and not just as an academic enterprise. Shaharuddin Maaruf is one of a small handful of scholarly pioneers whose work has the capacity to enrich the quality of political debate in Malaysia. -Anthony Milner Basham Professor for Asian History, Australian National University

An engaging history of how the idea of development has shaped Africa's past and present encounters with the West.

This second volume from the United Nations Intellectual History Project surveys the history of the UN's regional commissions and the ideas they have developed over the last 40 years. Each essay is devoted to one of the five regional commissions -- Europe, Asia and the Far East, Latin America, Africa, and Western Asia -- and how it has approached its mission of assessing the condition of regional economies and making prognoses about future conditions. The essays describe how each commission has added local perspectives to global debates over economic development and brought an authentic regional voice to the UN. Contributors are Adebayo Adedeji, Yves Berthelot, Leelananda de Silva, Blandine Destremau, Paul Rayment, and Gert Rosenthal.

A central premise is that an objective and universally‐accepted measure of “success” in development and paths to it does not exist.