Here’s what I’m looking forward to reading soon! These papers are all freely available online, and feature research on the global South by Southern researchers. (And as a special feature, don’t miss Federico Ardila-Mantilla’s excellent article on inclusive pedagogy in higher education, where he notes: “Everyone can have joyful, meaningful, and empowering academic experiences; but no single academic experience is joyful, meaningful, and empowering to everyone. How do we build academic spaces where every participant can thrive?”)
Katja Bender, Barbara Rohregger, Bethuel Kinuthia, Grace Ikua, Esther Schüring, Clement Adamba, Kennedy A. Alatinga, and Nicky Pouw. 2021. “Different pathways of social protection reforms: An analysis of long-term institutional change in Kenya.” World Development.
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 decisionmaking. 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.
Esther Wangui Kimani, Sammy Gakero Gachigua, and George Mbugua Kariuki. 2021. “Restructured Citizen–Government Relationship in Kenya’s 2010 Constitution and the Right of Hawkers to the City in Nairobi.” Africa Development.
This article interrogates how various actors in the Nairobi Central Business District (CBD) space have made sense of the 2010 Constitution’s expansive provisions on socio-political and economic rights to advance hawkers’ claims to the right to the city. Using Lefebvre’s and human rights notions of the ‘right to the city’, the study finds that the Constitution has immense potential to secure the hawkers’ right to the city. However, various challenges impede efforts towards its realisation. Firstly, the 2007 no-hawking-in-the-CBD bylaw exerts inordinate influence, in practice suppressing the Constitution’s aspirations. Secondly, the City authorities’ efforts to facilitate the hawkers’ right to the city remain ambivalent or dependent on the whims of the serving governor. Thirdly, initiatives by other actors remain elitist, topdown and opaque with only the superficial involvement of hawkers. On their part, hawkers’ initiatives to claim their right to the city have suffered from fragmented leadership and individualistic self-help micro-strategies. Furthermore, hawkers have underutilised judicial activism as an avenue for challenging the constitutionality of the city bylaws banning hawking in the CBD. This strategy would potentially have provided a discursive platform to make their claim to the city the moral-legal claim envisaged by the Constitution.
Priya Manwaring and Shahrukh Wani. 2021. “Informal transport reform in Kampala: Learning from cross-country experience.” International Growth Centre.
Public transport services in Kampala city are largely made up of minibus and motorbike taxis. While the current transport sector provides a critical means of livelihood to many individuals in the city, the jobs offered are relatively low-paid and the job market is increasingly saturated. Given the limited potential for the current transportation industry to provide sustainable livelihoods for those in the sector, and the challenges presented by the sector on productivity and liveability of the city, there is a clear need for policy to better regulate transport operations. Several cities have attempted to target the informal and semi-formal transport sector to improve city-wide connectivity, ranging from outright bans to upgrading of the informal system. This brief compares four broad policy directions cities have adopted when interacting with informal transport providers and highlights key lessons to inform informal transport reform in Kampala.
Jacob Moscona and Awa Ambra Seck. 2021. “Social Structure and Redistribution: Evidence from Age vs Kin Based Organizations.” Working paper.
We document that ethnic groups’ social structure shapes patterns of economic interaction and hence the impact of public policy. Our analysis focuses on age set societies, ethnic groups comprising over 130 million people in sub-Saharan Africa in which individuals are organized into social groups based on age, known as “age sets,” that take priority over kin. Ethnographic accounts suggest that in age set societies, within-cohort economic ties are strong while inter-generational family ties are comparatively weak. First, we analyze a randomized unconditional cash transfer program in Northern Kenya and document that in age set societies, but not in kin-based societies, there are large consumption spillovers within the age cohort. Moreover, focusing on an arm of the experiment that simulates a pension program, we find that randomly increasing the income of older people improves child health and increases household education spending in kin based societies, but has no such impact in age set societies. Next, exploiting the staggered roll-out of Uganda’s social pension program, we document a similar pattern at a national scale: household exposure to the pension program has a large, positive effect on child health in kin-based societies, but no impact in age set societies. These findings highlight how local variation in social structure can lead to markedly different, yet predictable, patterns of redistribution, thereby shaping the consequences of national policies.
Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai. 2021. “Political settlement dynamics and the emergence and decline of bureaucratic pockets of effectiveness in Ghana.” Effective States in International Development working paper 173.
This paper explores the factors that shape the performance trajectories of three relatively effective public organisations in Ghana, namely, the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Ghana and the Ghana Revenue Authority. Drawing on an original investigation of organisational performance under the various political settlements that Ghana has experienced in the past few decades, it argues that although ‘pockets of effectiveness’ can emerge under different political settlement types and dynamics, such agencies are more likely to endure in concentrated political settlements than in contexts characterised by dispersed configurations of power. The main mechanism that links Ghana’s shifting political settlement and organisational performance is the quality of organisational leadership and its relationship to the political leadership of the day. Much depends on whether organisational leaders are (a) sufficiently politically loyal to be awarded the protection required to deliver on their mandate and (b) possess the political management skills required to navigate difficult political conditions. High levels of support (both technical and financial) from international development organisations and their privileged status as key nodes of economic governance have undoubtedly helped these organisations attain high levels of performance vis-à-vis the wider public bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the fact that the performance of these agencies has waxed and waned over time, despite international support and mandates being largely constant, suggests that the key to understanding their performance lies with political economy factors, with their effectiveness regularly undermined by the increasingly dispersed nature of power within Ghana’s political settlement and the resultant vulnerability of ruling elites.
Verónica Amarante, Ronelle Burger, Grieve Chelwa, John Cockburn, Ana Kassouf, Andrew McKay, and Julieta Zurbrigg. 2021. “Underrepresentation of developing country researchers in development research.” Applied Economics Letters.
We present evidence of how researchers from developing countries are represented in three areas of research: conference presentations, articles in journals, and citations. We find that the bulk of research on development and development policies in the South is conducted by researchers from the North. Southern universities represents 9% of conference presenters, while 57% of conference presenters are from Northern universities. There has been no evidence of improvements over time. Fewer than one in six of the articles published in top 20 development journals from 1990 to 2019 were by Southern researchers, while close to three-quarters were by Northern researchers. The remaining 11% were collaborations by Southern and Northern researchers. Additionally, there are also fewer citations per article for Southern-authored articles than for Northern-authored articles.