This article outlines issues affecting the functionality of Ugandan water user committees responsible for managing communal water and sanitation (WASH) services. Research undertaken demonstrated that their effectiveness is compromised by poor understanding of their rights and responsibilities by stakeholders within and outside the committees. Following the research, a handbook was produced that explained the rights and responsibilities in a form that is accessible to all community members. Preliminary feedback from committees that have used the handbook suggests that it has the potential to improve the functionality of the water user committees, thereby helping to improve the local management of WASH services in Uganda.

This article argues that people involuntarily displaced by development projects face the risk of adverse incorporation into local processes of development, and that resettlement programmes should aim at mitigating this risk. The article also contends that investigating the risk of adverse incorporation enables the identification of context-specific factors and processes that are likely to affect the outcomes of resettlement. The argument is applied to the case of the Polavaram dam in Andhra Pradesh, India, which will displace 200,000 people. It demonstrates that the affected people face the risk of being exposed to landlessness, fragmentation of landholdings, and casualisation of labour as a result of resettlement.

This practical note outlines Concern's approach to pro-poor budget analysis using the case of the Kenya Free Primary Education (FPE) policy. Analysis conducted on the outcomes of the FPE policy for Nairobi's urban slum-based poor suggests that the policy is not being implemented evenly within the city. The reasons stem from poor allocation and planning approaches, to political interference and unwillingness of teachers to work in slum-based schools. These have the unintended effect of increasing inequities for the urban poor, the reverse of the policy intention. The note outlines the pitfalls and practicalities of conducting this type of analysis.

India is an ethnographic museum, well-known for its national motto of “unity in diversity”. It is a country of diverse hierarchies where the social reality is intersected by the varied grades of caste and class, among others. Against this backdrop, this article conceptualises the intersections of primordial identities. The concept of intersection underscores how diverse social positions interact in a Tamil village in India. As intersectionality is “the mutually constitutive relations among social identities” (Shields 2008), the interactions of caste, class, and gender in education are conceptualised to understand the formation of capabilities.

This article explores a praxis-based moral approach to the study of development and women. Drawing upon an illustrative case-study of Ankur Kala – a non-governmental organisation devoted to the development of destitute women in Kolkata, India – the article shows how studying actual development practices on the ground generates valuable insights without which our ethical understanding of women's development globally would be incomplete.

The development of roads is a major focus of development projects in the Mekong Sub-Region. This empirical study was conducted in Savannakhet, Lao PDR, to examine the benefits of road development, its impact on livelihoods, and the link between livelihoods and mobility through the concept of sense of place. The results showed that road development affected people's livelihoods, which, in turn, affected their sense of place and mobility. Analysing sense of place allows us to understand how road development can change gender norms and why more women migrate than men.

There is a concept that development practitioners have either not heard of or not read, or have chosen to ignore – ruralisation. Unlike urbanisation in urban studies, ruralisation is rarely used as a concept in rural research. It remains a poorly explored concept. By challenging existing notions about the use of the concept, this article attempts to (re)introduce ruralisation as a fundamental concept in rural studies. What is ruralisation? Why do we need it? How can we use it for rural transformations? The article addresses these critical questions. It defines ruralisation and presents its conceptual framework for rural transformation.

Lack of sanitation facilities is a major challenge in slum areas, and this has implications on the health and well-being of residents. Sanitation in slums is complex due to slum living conditions, and a detailed understanding of dynamics in slums and how they impact sanitation is required. This study sought to understand the relationship between socio-economic dynamics, and sanitation provision and management in the slums of Kisumu, Kenya. The results indicate a mix of social, cultural, economic, tenancy, and relationship dynamics, all of which influence sanitation provision and management. The article calls for collaboration among various stakeholders and the use of local knowledge dissemination approaches.

Accountability advocacy is an increasingly common approach to working with displaced communities. This article explores a resettlement scheme for an Asian Development Bank project in Cambodia in which advocacy interventions resulted in significant improvements in resettlement sites over the eight years of the project. Resettlement standards improved in some of the sites so much that they might now be called “islands of governance”, tightly ring-fenced from the otherwise limited support provided ordinarily to displaced or landless Cambodians. Given these extremes, the article considers whether “good” resettlement policy is implementable. It also argues that best practice resettlement principles, such as the requirement to minimise displacement – no matter how sensible or well-intended when designed at an international level – have the potential for negative unintended consequences in implementation. These impacts cannot necessarily be mitigated through formal monitoring, oversight, and technical assistance. Building on the knowledge already available, it identifies five considerations relevant to resettlement programmes as they continue to evolve.

“Voluntary” land transfer agreements, negotiated directly between “willing buyers and willing sellers”, present a seemingly empowering alternative to the use of legal instruments for land acquisition or transfer which entail forced displacement. Yet asymmetrical bargaining power between the negotiating parties can undermine the fairness of negotiated outcomes and the right of the sellers to a “no-displacement” option. Viewed against a complex background of bourgeoning land transfers in multiple sites, this article examines rights-based and risks-based approaches to negotiated settlements, concluding that measures to address asymmetries in bargaining power must look beyond enhanced negotiation procedures to address underlying social and political dimensions.