This article aims to understand whether women’s empowerment increases access to healthcare among women facing domestic violence within the Indian context. It reports on a multi-centre cross-sectional study covering 18 states of India, with 14,405 women respondents through a systematic multi-stage sampling strategy. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Despite substantive possession of the existing attributes of empowerment, women fail to receive necessary healthcare services. This reflects a situation of biased policy processes and institutional frameworks, which are a manifestation of existing patriarchal norms and which result in the piecemeal processes of entitlements.

Programmes for environmental protection and land reclamation have been deeply embedded in local political and social contexts. This article focuses on the effectiveness of such measures to control ravine erosion in the lower Chambal Valley, one of the most degraded regions in India. The study used field observation to see whether the measures had any impact on further gully and ravine formation. The findings suggest that agricultural practices, including those often based on the short-term economic needs of households, lead to inefficient land-use practices, particularly in land-levelled and reclaimed areas.

This article explores the fertility differential of different religious groups across various socio-economic characteristics. The article is based on primary data collected from a field survey of 2,590 households in the Malda district of West Bengal in India. The mean number of children ever born (MCEB) is used to measure fertility. The analysis shows that there is a major variation in the impact of various socio-economic variables on the number of children ever born among different religious groups. The study findings will be helpful for policymakers regarding the planning for management of different demographic processes.

Household surveys are an important tool for assessing the status or trends of rural households, farms, and communities, and for conducting research. Conducting surveys in rural communities in developing countries is expensive and logistically challenging. We investigated whether primary school children could efficiently collect household or farm data as part of their homework. We hypothesised that primary school students can collect accurate data and therefore it should not be different from the data collected by trained interviewers. The results indicate that primary schools may be an excellent resource for efficiently collecting information about rural households and farm families in developing countries.

The EU has introduced a differentiated approach to development cooperation by reducing financial support for countries graduating to middle-income status from development cooperation. Differentiation will likely be applied in additional countries in the next budget cycle; as such, the way the EU organises differentiation makes for an important pilot case. This article reviews the factors that led to the graduation of certain countries and how this matches with the EU’s aspirations to policy coherence for development. The analysis concludes that ambiguous differentiation policy horizontally led to vertical incoherencies in the ways policy objectives are conveyed to financial instruments, and how they subsequently facilitate programming.

Urbanisation in the Global South presents numerous challenges for international development institutions. Building from interviews at nine different international development institutions working in Jakarta, Indonesia, this article examines how such institutions approach urban poverty, governance, and collaboration. The case study of Jakarta indicates that urban governance is often fragmented and difficult for such institutions to navigate, making partnership with other, often local, actors and institutions with urban and on-the-ground expertise vital. International development institutions struggle to both address the unique characteristics of distinct urban areas and to develop widely replicable practices, strategies, and platforms for effective partnership and development intervention.

This article develops a new pragmatic approach in delineating inclusive growth, covering two issues. First, it records the chronological evolution of inclusive growth; second, it details the distinction between broad-based growth and pro-poor growth, and inclusive growth. The article aims to highlight the objectivity of inclusiveness, which is distinctly different than broad-based growth and pro-poor growth. The research concentrates on salient issues like growth, poverty, and inequality, identifies a distinct variation between broad-based growth/pro-poor growth and inclusive growth, and establishes the exclusivity of inclusive growth.

The issue of sustainability is becoming more important for civil society, as non-profits, NGOs, and other civil society organisations (CSOs) face a range of political, regulatory, organisational, and financial challenges. This article focuses on the crucial dimension of financial sustainability and the growing awareness of the importance of accessing alternative sources of funds and developing new funding models. These include accessing social investment, using subsidiary businesses to fund programme work, or developing new social enterprises. The article draws on analysis of the funding environment and specific examples to explore the different dimensions of sustainability, and assess why many CSOs are looking to new funding models and alternative routes to sustainability.

The Western origin of human rights raises the question of how the human rights-based approach to development (HRBA) is understood in non-Western countries. This article explores individual practitioners’ perceptions of the HRBA in an NGO working in Bangladesh, drawing on interviews with its workers. The data suggest that participants accept the universal values of human rights and make sense of the HRBA influenced by their organisational and national contexts. Conceptualising this process as “internalisation”, this article argues that the organisational support and workers’ field experience are critical for incorporating contextual consideration into their interpretation and practice of the HRBA.