Wellbeing Ranking

John Rowley

Wealth-ranking is a participatory tool enabling people to group their fellows into wealth bands, and thus identify the very poor. Now the method has been developed to include the broader aspects of wellbeing, such as social standing and health, that people value as much as material wealth. Wellbeing...

Still Standing?

Theo Schilderman, Eleanor Parker

Huge levels of aid are spent on reconstructing housing after disasters. Have these houses withstood the test of time and hazard? Just as important from the point of view of their owners, has the reconstruction process played a part in restoring their livelihoods and social networks? Unfortunately, a...

Wellbeing and Quality of Life Assessment

Sarah C White, Asha Abeyasekera

Human development may encompass social, cultural and spiritual facets as well as economic improvement, and development organizations are beginning to recognize this fact. But building into programming a wider understanding of development throws up a number of questions: how do our organizations defi...

Brazil Inside Out

Jan Rocha, Francis McDonagh

Seen as a successful ‘emerging economy’, Brazil walks tall on the world stage and its voice is growing louder. Its success, celebrated in the 2014 Football World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, is attracting millions of foreign tourists. Yet Brazil also faces huge challenges: to combine economi...

Perspectives énergétiques des populations pauvres 2014

La pauvreté énergétique est un élément accablant du piège de la pauvreté qui condamne les personnes qui en sont victimes à vivre une vie de corvées et d'activités de subsistance. Au cours des dernières années, nous avons pu constater l'émergence de préoccupations en matière de pauvreté énergétique s...

Poor People's Energy Outlook 2014

Energy poverty is a crippling component of the poverty trap that consigns victims to lives of drudgery and subsistence. Accordingly, we have recently seen the rise of concern for energy access on the international stage. However, at the national level the gravity of this issue has yet to be fully ap...

Into the Unknown

Robert Chambers

Development is about change, and lives immersed in researching international development should be prepared for exploration, for discovering the unexpected, and for questioning the direction that ‘development’ is taking. Robert Chambers reflects on experiences, which led him to examine personal bias...

Training for Transformation in Practice

Anne Hope, Sally Timmel

Training for Transformation is an approach to community organization encompassed in three books which enables people to ‘read their reality and write their own history’ using a combination of group processes, socio-economic analysis and organizational development processes. Since its inception 40...

Community Well-being in Biocultural Landscapes

Bas Verschuuren, Suneetha M. Subramanian, Wim Hiemstra

There is a growing recognition that living well must go beyond economic and material plenty to encompass social and spiritual well-being. But what do we understand by these wider aspects of well-being? Community Well-being in Biocultural Landscapes provides an introduction to the concept of human w...

Scaling Up Multiple Use Water Services

Barbara van Koppen, Stef Smits, Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, John Thomas

Poor people in developing countries need water for many purposes: for drinking, bathing, irrigating vegetable gardens, and watering livestock. However, responsibility for water services is divided between different government agencies, the WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and irrigation sub-sect...