Numerous countries across the Arab region are linking national development visions and strategies to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This offers potential opportunities for civil society organisations to push their agendas and build their capacity. Building on a presentation given in Qatar in March 2018, this viewpoint identifies four ways that civil society in the Gulf and other Arab states can link their actions to the SDGs. Notwithstanding the major variations in the contexts for civil society across the region, this framework may help to strengthen the credibility of CSOs in the eyes of state authorities and local societies.

Research on international development volunteering has increased significantly in recent decades, but there is a need for greater depth of understanding in relation to host communities. This article examines the impact of younger volunteers from the perspectives of host community members, evaluating the positive and negative aspects in working with young people from the “UniVol” programme of Volunteer Service Abroad, New Zealand. It argues that further insights into host community experiences can play a key role in enhancing youth IDV volunteering, creating assignments that are more beneficial for hosts, and moving away from neo-liberal “volunteer-centric” youth volunteering.

KAP Score is an evaluation tool developed to enable aid and donor organisations to monitor and evaluate the outcome of interventions, particularly those where the link between programme activities and outcomes constitutes an “unknown”. This article articulates KAP Score and demonstrates how it has been applied to two separate interventions related to risk avoidance (human trafficking) and demand reduction (wildlife consumption) to generate quantitative evidence for assessing how they contributed to increasing compliance. The examples presented demonstrate how KAP Score attributed the effectiveness of these interventions to a proxy indicator that can measure incremental behavioural compliance.

The international development community is focusing on women’s empowerment as a key means of achieving high-level development goals. In this context, many development programmes, such as Feed the Future, take a market-based approach to empowerment focusing on access to and control over resources as the primary drivers of change. This kind of empowerment programming, however, often loses sight of power relations which structure access to resources and opportunities. This article, therefore, explores the limitations of economic-based approaches to empowerment that permeate the international development space, and provides strong evidence that a broader multi-dimensional approach is needed to support women’s empowerment.

This article explores dimensions of ethical research practice, decision making and the importance of taking a reflexive approach during development studies doctoral research. The researcher is a non-indigenous midwife, from a developed country, while the research was based in Papua New Guinea, a developing country in the Pacific region. The key point of inquiry is to better understand the nature and practice of reflexivity using the personal experiences of the author, who grappled with a variety of tensions. Reflexivity is argued to play a crucial role in the validation of qualitative research and is a vital component of practicing cultural safety.

This article investigates off-farm work decisions by smallholder farm households. Using data on 1,101 households from Burkina Faso, it demonstrates that in addition to the usual household socio-demographic characteristics, remittances, access to information and beneficiary of specific training affect off-farm work decisions, as well as rainfall factors and idiosyncratic health shocks. Community characteristics such as accessibility and number of inhabitants are also key factors. While suggesting that off-farm work is less likely to be undertaken for accumulation purposes, these results have important policy implications. In particular, policy measures should consider each segment as a separate entity.

Access to reproductive health services and products in remote and rural communities is a critical area of concern for developing countries. This article considers a pilot intervention in three districts of Pakistan where “Business-in-a-Box” as a model of place-based social innovation is used to improve the socio-economic conditions of women in remote rural settings through socially responsible micro-franchising. It finds that such programmes help build a sense of community, ownership and grassroots capabilities and skills. The article also discusses the impacts of such actions on the individual and community life, and the need to upscale and sustain these initiatives.

Recognising the limits of the conventional global framework for sustainable development policies, the UN has recently accorded “culture” a central status in its universal vison for transformative development. However, many experts have voiced concern that the use of culture as a development strategy has not generated adequate community-based indictors for meaningful sustainability. Furthermore, the promotion and incorporation of culture into sustainable development strategies has largely and ambiguously remained within the confines of neo-liberal globalisation discourse. This article aims to examine the limits of culture-based sustainable development in the GCC region, as expressed in UN-inspired national development visions.