Palestinian youth face developmental, cultural, and political barriers that impede them from fully engaging in civic life. Non-traditional, youth-centred pedagogies of engagement, like community-based service-learning, have shown their potential to motivate marginalised populations and provide space and roles for them to form individual identities while developing civic skills. Using data collected through focus-group interviews, this article considers the impact on West Bank youth who participated in an NGO's community-based service-learning leadership programme. Six themed findings are discussed, and the author suggests that non-school-based service-learning may have a central role to play in the civic-identity development of Palestine's most populous group of citizens.

This article presents a case study of Manyakabi Area Cooperative Enterprise in south-western Uganda, which shows that benefits from agricultural cooperatives can extend beyond monetary tangibles. We discuss several social factors that women members claimed have improved since they became members of the cooperative, including their confidence, their negotiating skills, the ability to be of service to their communities through transferring skills to non-members, and the ability to take control of certain household decisions when dealing with men. We conclude that these social benefits could be enhanced if they were fully acknowledged as important by agents of change.

From a food-supply standpoint, the 30 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the world's rich club – can reasonably claim to be self-sufficient. Issues of food access are met through publicly funded social safety nets, and, for those who fall through the cracks, the emergency food-aid system, increasingly institutionalised as charitable food banks. Despite its best intentions, charitable food banking is very much a part of the problem of hunger in rich societies. While it makes a contribution to short-term relief, it is no guarantee of meeting demand, nor of ensuring nutritious or culturally appropriate foods. Its institutionalisation and corporatisation allow the public and politicians to believe that hunger is being solved. It reinforces the notion of hunger as a matter for charity, not politics. If there is to be a strong public commitment to eliminating hunger and reducing poverty in the wealthy states, there is an urgent need for governments to think and act outside this charitable food box. The human right to adequate food offers an alternative approach.

This article considers the challenges of promoting children's participation in development programming. It argues against the tendency to see the main obstacle to achieving this aim as technical. Instead it explores the institutional dimensions of change that may be required. The experience of a four-year process of training and organisational review within Save the Children Denmark provides the substance for reflection about the kinds of cultural and structural change that are implicated in enabling a development organisation to become capable of engaging young people as stakeholders in a meaningful and sustainable manner.

Young sportspersons now serve abroad within the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP) movement. Drawing on interviews with former interns from Commonwealth Games Canada's Canadian Sports Leadership Corps programme, this study explored what interns brought to, and learnt from, international SDP service. Interns confronted notions of expertise and privilege and, in some cases, considered the limits of Northern development stewardship. Interns also experienced a sense of ‘First World guilt’ that secured their sense of self at the expense of deeper engagements with inequality and struggles for development justice. Based on these findings, recommendations for supporting future volunteers are considered.

Youth and youth organisations are becoming valuable development partners, but little knowledge about their characteristics as learning organisations exists. This article presents perceptions of youth workers on this topic. These were gathered via an online survey and through research done by a youth network. Knowledge, skills and attitudes for active citizenship are facilitated by youth organisations as emergent learning spaces where peer-to-peer learning and experiential methods are central. Youth organisations adapt existing toolboxes and develop their own tools and knowledge that are more relevant to their needs. Support for youth organisations should take into account these special ways of learning.

Participatory research is increasingly being used with poor and marginalised populations in developing countries. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to ethical considerations in participatory research. We argue that there is a need for additional strategies to promote ethically sound participatory research, especially when working with marginalised groups. We present our experiences from a participatory research initiative with an indigenous population in rural India, in which we developed and implemented a Code of Research Ethics and sought community consent as well as individual consent. The challenges that we faced and how we attempted to overcome them are also discussed.

A surge of media reports and rhetorical claims depicted genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to the ‘global food crisis’ manifested in the sudden spike in world food prices during 2007–08. Broad claims were made about the potential of GM technologies to tackle the crisis, even though the useful crops and traits typically invoked had yet to be developed, and despite the fact that real progress had in fact been made by using conventional breeding. The case vividly illustrates the instrumental use of food-crisis rhetoric to promote GM crops.

The past 30 years have seen a proliferation in the use of the phrase ‘civil society' linked to international aid, resulting in the creation of official donor ‘civil society departments’. At the same time there has been growing understanding that international development has become commercialised into the ‘aid industry'. The result is an explosion of ‘aided', globalised and tamed civil society at the expense of the naturally occurring, local, less predictable and more politicised‘unaided' variety.