From United Nations emergency responses involving tent camps, to the reconstruction approach of FUNDASAL in El Salvador and the post-disaster provision of housing by Caritas in Asia, it is clear that a giant step has been taken in thinking about emergency shelter, as well as about how prevention and reconstruction are managed. This article evaluates some current good practices in Asia and Latin America in post-disaster emergency shelter that use local skills, materials, and tools, and participatory processes.

The need for eco-regional or landscape-scale conservation and development has been widely recognised in Madagascar, yet implementation remains problematic. The approach was initially driven by biodiversity-conservation concerns, without enough emphasis on sustainable development, especially agriculture. Current challenges include consensus building for eco-regional visions, strengthening partnerships with government institutions, and negotiating land-use trade-offs within focal landscapes. Increased attention to revenue generation from agriculture and forest products, as well as enhanced communication and widespread participation by all stakeholders, should augment the success of broad-scale conservation and development programmes.

‘The myth of community’ permeates both the understanding and the practice of participatory development. Yet the idea that communities exist as coherent units of people who inhabit bounded geographic spaces and are ready to be mobilised for development restricts the very agency that participation promises. This article offers an alternative model of community: one that is more compatible with the ideal of people-centred, participatory development. Using Etienne Wenger's concept of ‘communities of practice’, and drawing on narrative theory and cognitive approaches to policy analysis, the article argues that community should be created and sustained around shared meanings.

The literature on self-help groups (SHGs) shows a mixed record on empowering women both economically and socially, while the literature on Women with Disabilities (WWDs) highlights the problems of isolation that exacerbate their disadvantages. This article, asking whether SHGs can empower WWDs, is based on a study conducted in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. It concludes that being an SHG member is useful for gaining employment that leads to better recognition in the family and society. However, employment opportunities and organisational experiences mean that the benefits are not equally shared among all members.

In rural Sri Lanka, remittances from housemaids working in the Middle East figure prominently in household livelihood strategies. This article examines the impact of housemaid remittances on living standards and suggests measures to maximise the benefits of remittances for recipient households while minimising the personal and financial costs of migration. The effectiveness of migration as a household strategy depends on a decent overseas job with a reliable income, a reduction in the costs of migrating and remitting, and the responsible management of household welfare and finances by recipients, including the maintenance of local income sources while the migrant is away.

This article examines the experiences and outcomes from collaboration between a group of researchers and a Northern NGO to improve recovery work in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. A Real-Time Research methodology was established to follow and intervene in the recovery practices as they took place on the ground. What was learned and achieved through this collaboration is assessed, with particular reference to the relationships between various stakeholders in the collaboration.

This article presents evidence from Uganda's National Agricultural Advisory Service to argue that the concept of ‘the learning organisation’ is a valuable complement to participatory development which may facilitate a shift towards more democratic development institutions in which target beneficiaries have a stronger voice in planning and managing development. The concept of ‘the learning organisation’ as developed within the literature of management studies cannot, however, be readily translated into anything as specific as a clear set of practical guidelines. Rather it acts as a seed that grows to take on characteristics specific to the rural development context.

This Viewpoint argues that international development aid agencies have failed adequately to address the rights and needs of genocide survivors in Rwanda. It illustrates that genocide survivors remain impoverished and marginalised, and that development aid agencies only tangentially, if at all, acknowledge their vulnerability and take steps to empower them to realise their rights. It provides examples of aid programmes that are reaching genocide survivors and urges development aid agencies in Rwanda to design and implement programmes explicitly for genocide survivors.

Taking as its point of departure the failure of the ‘policy science’ project, the article discusses the declining authority of ‘one size fits all’ policy advice. It relates this to the absence of a robust empirical basis for such positions, as shown by the cross-country regressions literature, and relates it also to changes in a range of disciplines, including natural sciences and mathematics. It discusses the rising tolerance for inconsistency between implementation logics and argues that these issues, while of general importance, are most obvious in the context of development, where ‘one size fits all’ policy logics have been heavily contested.