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The Political Economy of Energy Transition
No full textMENA remains a global outlier in energy trends. Energy intensity in the region has increased by 30% since 1990, in contrast to a global decline of 35%. This is driven by the dominance of fossil fuel subsidies, inefficient public sector structures, and underdeveloped renewable energy infrastructure.Without urgent action, the region risks falling behind in the global energy transition, with significant economic and political consequences. But such actions must be pursued in ways that align with political incentives as energy transition can have distributional consequences in society. MENA countries should prioritize a phased approach to fossil fuel subsidy reform.Gradual reductions, coupled with public awareness campaigns and targeted social welfare programs, can mitigate political backlash and build support for clean energy initiatives. Redirecting subsidy savings toward renewable energy projects and introducing carbon taxes to fund these efforts could create a self-sustaining cycle of investment in clean energy.Arabic version available.</p
WFP’s Support to Strengthening the National Social Protection System in Haiti
No full textThis case study reviews the role of the World Food Programme (WFP) in supporting social protection in Haiti over the last decade. It assesses how WFP has supported the building blocks of Haiti’s national social protection system, focusing on the development of a national social protection policy, the expansion of the social registry, the implementation of a safety net, the institutionalisation process for social protection and linking shock-responsive social protection to anticipatory action. The case study is a light-touch exercise, undertaken through a rapid literature review and interviews with WFP staff and other key stakeholders.</p
Building Trust and Engagement: Vital to Health Emergency Preparedness and Response
No full textCommunity engagement is a crucial part of preparedness and response to health emergencies. It can enable more effective and equitable approaches by listening and responding to people’s needs, aspirations and priorities as much as communicating information to people and seeking to guide their behaviour.Learning from experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic can help to improve understanding of the concerns of diverse communities and needs to guide more appropriate, effective and equitable pandemic preparedness and response strategies for the future.This brief summarises key findings and recommendations from a British Academy-funded project that investigated approaches and experiences of community engagement for pandemic preparedness and response in three superdiverse urban areas: Cleveland, Ohio, US; Marseille, France; and the London Borough of Ealing, UK.</p
Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary February 2025
No full textMonthly Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summaries aim to signpost FCDO and others to the latest relevant evidence and discourse on humanitarian action. It is structured around FCDO humanitarian framework themes:• Protect: Protect civilians, IDPs, refugees, marginalised groups including women and girls, and humanitarian access.• Prioritise: Prioritise effective humanitarian assistance to people in greatest need.• Prevent: Prevent and anticipate future shocks and rebuild resilience in protracted and recurring crises.Further detail on methodology and scope at the end. Click on the hyperlinks to bring you to the relevant literature. We hope this is a useful resource and you can read all the articles produced by brilliant authors and organisations(!), but each month we also invite a guest to identify their five 'star reads' from the wider list. This does not represent an organisational position or assessment of rigour, but rather a personal choice of published evidence, guidance or discourse that are of special interest or impact. This month, Nancy Bailey, from the Centre for Humanitarian Change, highlights her five 'star reads', chosen either because of their particular interest, quality, or relevance to this week’s cuts in American aid.</p
Zakat Payments in Pakistan Exceed State Social Protection
No full textEvery year, hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world pay a proportion of their wealth as zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam mandating an annual payment of a proportion of an individual’s productive wealth, broadly representing 2.5 per cent. Consequently, zakat represents a significant part of how redistribution and social protection works in practice. And yet there have been almost no empirically robust estimates of its quantum and effect. Since 2021, a partnership between the ICTD and the Lahore University of Management Sciences has enabled more systematic accounts of how zakat is paid in practice, including through a new nationally representative survey of 7,500 Sunni Pakistanis conducted via computer-assisted telephone interviews in 2024. Using this novel data, this factsheet explains how much zakat we can estimate is being paid in Pakistan every year – and where the money is going.</p
A Tax by Any Other Name? Conceptions of Taxation and Implications for Research
No full textAs taxation has become a prominent issue in international development policy, much research has focused on taxpayers’ perceptions and experiences of taxation using cross-country comparative survey data. However, insufficient attention has been paid to issues related to content validity and the cross-context comparability of tax-related concepts key to analyses of many topics, including relationships between willingness to pay taxes and perceptions of corruption, state legitimacy and public service provision. While serious questions have been raised about the data quality in some quantitative work in African studies, little attention has been given to the specific problems of using cross-country survey data.We encourage critical reflection concerning the use of tax-related data across diverse contexts. We show that a tax by any other name does not retain the same meaning across contexts. We argue that taxation studies, particularly survey-based research, should be informed by a deeper understanding of the contextual meanings ascribed to taxation. Greater prioritisation of conceptual analysis, mixed methods approaches and local language research will strengthen the measurement and interpretive validity of taxpayer perception data, and enhance understanding of taxpayers’ experience and interactions with tax systems.Summary of article written by Ane Karoline Bak and Vanessa van den Boogaard and published in the Journal of Modern African Studies.</p
Environmental Change, Development Challenges [Editorial]
No full textThe late 1980s saw a phenomenal growth of international concern over the global environment. It has begun to influence politics both in industrially advanced countries and in the newly democratising countries of Eastern Europe. Recognising that the roots of this concern are not new, this IDS Bulletin addresses its twin aspects in the context of developing countries and at different scale levels. On the one hand, environmental change poses significant challenges for development policy and practice. On the other, the development process itself presents challenges for sound environmental management.</p
Rethinking ‘Farmer–herder’ Conflicts in the Ivorian Internal Frontier
No full textThere is a heightened concern among the media, United Nations (UN) agencies, and security experts about the rising number of localized conflicts in West Africa. While many of these conflicts are labelled as farmer–herder conflicts, they are, in fact, more complex and multidimensional. This article demonstrates as much for the Ivorian case by building on the concept of the internal frontier in West African rural institutions. Population mobility has been central to state policies and practices towards the internal frontier in order to optimize conditions for economic growth and capital accumulation. Drawing on the case of Bouna, Côte d’Ivoire in 2016, this article argues that the conflict is driven by a reconfiguration of local social orders, whereby the state’s internal frontier logic faces a crisis due to the ideological contradictions between capital accumulation and autochthony.</p
Health Equity Fact Sheet
No full textThis K4DD Fact Sheet explains what health equity is, why it is important, how we can achieve health equity, and a list of helpful questions to consider when developing new policies and programmes.</p
Violent Conflict, Discrimination at School and the Well-Being of Students in Tanganyika and Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo
No full textThis working paper is one of two working papers that present the results of the research component of the REALISE project, implemented by Save the Children and funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the DRC. The research component of the project was led by the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, in partnership with Marakuja Kivu Research. The working paper focuses on violence within the school environment and its effect on children’s well-being.</p