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Transformational Agroecology: The Making and Unmaking of Zero Budget Natural Farming in India
No full textAgroecology is increasingly seen to have the potential to transform agriculture towards sustainability and social justice. Recent studies have highlighted different characteristics and principles of such transformative agroecology. Scholars have also shown that agroecology practices can be scaled up to achieve broader transformation. However, the process of systematising approaches to transformative agroecology often creates a static vision of transformation, which could be achieved once and for all. The static view creates illusionary binaries of goods and bads of agroecology that separate the ideological scholarly view from everyday, contested and messy practices. In this article, we discuss the case of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) in India to argue that transformational agroecology is made and unmade repeatedly at different sites, networks and practices it gets entangled in. As a result, rather than thinking of transformative agroecology as a goal or target to be achieved, it is more useful to see it as an everyday struggle requiring unwavering scrutiny with a commitment to care for the marginal concerns.</p
Rapid Scoping Review 2025: Philippines
No full textFeminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and more (LGBT+) movements in the Philippines face mounting challenges that are deeply rooted in cultural, religious, and political dynamics. Machismo culture continues to reinforce strict gender roles and perpetuate male dominance, leaving little room for gender equality. Women’s rights groups and the Church have also dismissed efforts to recognise sex work as labour, arguing that it exploits women’s poverty. This environment has significantly shrunk the space for sex work activism. This brief explores the context of rollback, the landscape of anti-rollback actors, counter-rollback strategies, and gaps and areas for future research and work.</p
Powering Change: The Critical Role of Women and Youth in Sustainable Energy Transformation
No full textHow do we build economic systems that recognise and work within the biophysical limits of our finite planet while simultaneously reducing poverty and inequality? This has become a defining question of our time, and the global transition to clean energy is increasingly considered an important vehicle via which we might address this ‘trilemma.’ Concerns about environmental sustainability and fossil fuel insecurity have encouraged countries around the world to transition to low-carbon energy supplies derived from clean renewables such as solar, hydro, bioenergy, geothermal and wind. Since producing and distributing clean energy is more labour intensive than producing and distributing fossil fuels, this shift is creating new employment opportunities, as well as addressing energy poverty in remote or under-served communities everywhere in the world.Although there is tremendous potential to create employment and opportunities for entrepreneurship in clean energy almost everywhere in the world, there is a growing concern that women, who are already underrepresented in the energy sector, will become even more marginalised if gender equity policies and programmes are not proactively planned and implemented. Without appropriately targeted training, education, apprenticeships, employment placement, financial tools and supportive social policies, transitioning to clean energy may exacerbate existing gender inequities and hinder global poverty alleviation goals, including the SDGs. Empirical data on the participation of women and youth in the clean energy sector remains weak and scattered, and so do policy interventions designed to optimise their participation. This is precisely what Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is trying to accomplish via its Clean Energy for Development: A Call to Action (CEDCA) initiative, which supports 12 research projects that operate in 27 countries across three thematic bases: clean energy transition, micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), and women and youth.This research for policy and practice report showcases three of these research projects and draws out rigorous evidence to inform policymaking that advances the participation of women and youth in the clean energy sector.</p
Humanitarian Evidence and Discourse Summary March 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
Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands
No full textThis working paper examines how communities along the Somalia–Kenya border navigate a landscape of war. Over decades of conflict – including civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency – local people have relied on their own means of governance and mutual support to repair the damage and maintain life and livelihood. The study draws on people’s reflections on their ‘middle way’, a system rooted in tradition by which they both govern themselves and do their best to avoid the dangers of the war. The informal order blends customary institutions, negotiated agreements, and far-reaching social networks to provide basic public goods and maintain the common good.</p
Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, and Conflict in the Sahel
No full textThis rapid literature review explores the impact of climate change and environmental degradation on conflict in the Sahel, with focus on Mali and Niger. It goes beyond discussions looking at direct causes of conflict, to focus on the indirect impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on conflict and violence – e.g. how it can exacerbate the drivers of conflict, and the conditions that shape whether, when, where, and what form of conflict will break out.</p
Measuring the Business Case for Workforce Nutrition Programmes
No full textWorkforce Nutrition Programmes (WNPs) can improve the health of workers, but with mixed results for a business case—which is crucial to their sustainability. This paper thus explores impact pathways and metrics used to assess the business benefits of WNPs, as well as the factors that influence the business case, with the aim of informing future interventions and research. Business outcomes of WNPs include reduced sickness absence, reduced voluntary staff turnover, and reduced corporate health costs, which contribute to cost savings. Increased productivity and reduced presenteeism contribute to increased sales and revenues. Furthermore, improved employee job satisfaction can be considered as an intermediary business benefit, while WNPs also having the potential to increase company reputation. While most of the literature is based on high-income countries, to implement WNPs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), contextual and enabling factors need to be understood and reflected in strong programme design, which results in more beneficial business outcomes.</p
Livelihoods in Crisis: Challenges for Rural Development in Southern Africa [Introduction]
No full textLivelihoods in southern Africa are in crisis. One of the worst ever food crises has hit the region, with over 14 million reported to be at risk. Newspapers carry appeals from charities for support, and TV images of food queues and malnourished children are commonplace. Yet, southern Africa is the region where the development success story was supposed to unfold. This was the bread basket of the continent, where economic reforms were apparently generating growth and investment and where the great hopes of democratic transition were supposed to show quick dividends. According to the script, the crisis was not supposed to happen.The research on which this IDS Bulletin is based has attempted to examine how various rural development and governance initiatives, concerning wild resources, land and water, have played out in practice in a series of rural areas in three southern African countries: Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. By looking empirically and in detail at what has and has not happened on the ground, questions are raised about the nature of the current livelihoods crisis, its origins and potential solutions. What emerges, perhaps not surprisingly, is a complex story connecting livelihood change with the dynamics of politics and power, where easy technical or managerial solutions are not immediately evident.</p
Scenarios for Negotiating a UN Framework Convention on International Tax
No full textIn 2024, a debate on the objectives and design of a new UN Framework Convention on International Tax fully took off. By establishing a framework for intergovernmental cooperation, such a convention could provide for a more central role of the United Nations in the international tax regime complex, which has been dominated by the OECD and the G20. An analysis of discussions at the Ad Hoc Committee, which met in 2024 to elaborate terms of references for the negotiations of the coming years, stakeholders’ submissions, and the literature on the convention shows that the breadth of suggestions is sizeable, with only little convergence between proposals from the global South and the global North. This paper identifies the main points of contention in the current debate, analysing countries’ and other stakeholders’ positions on them. After the question of the sequencing of the negotiations was settled in the ToR, there are two principal remaining controversies: one is over rules and decision-making procedures, the other over substantive topics to be addressed. While the decision to designate substantive protocols to the convention as optional will allow for the creation of a framework without fully resolving these debates, proponents of the convention from the global South must make a strategic choice as to which of these areas to prioritise, because they form part of a trilemma. If they stick to a firm position on procedures – according to which the convention’s decisions have a binding character and can be taken by a majority vote – and on topics of discussion, much of the framework’s output will initially mainly be ‘by the global South for the global South’, with little participation from the global North. To keep a larger and more diverse group of states on board, the global South may need to compromise on the bindingness of the convention’s instruments, or on the issues that are in scope. Each decision would lead to a different role for the convention in the international tax regime complex. None of them would signify a radical change of the status quo, but each has the potential to incrementally improve the position of lower income countries and thereby lead to a more inclusive international tax regime complex.</p
االعتبارات الرئيسية: التخفيف من انعدام األمن الغذائي المزمن في جنوب السودان
No full textقم بالاستثمار في الزراعة، وخاصة في أنشطة الكفاف التي يعتمد عليها معظمالسودانيين الجنوبيين، وذلك للمساعدة في التخفيف من انعدام الأمن الغذائيالحاد على المدى المتوسط والطويل.</p