Suchergebnisse

Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme has been widely characterised as 'home grown'. This article challenges such accounts of the LEAP by showing how donors used their financial muscle to shape the LEAP both at the level of programme adoption and implementation. However, the extent to which donor interests and ideas influenced the programme's design and implementation depended on the degree to which such interests were aligned with those of domestic political elites. While it was donors who first pushed cash transfers on the agenda of the Ghanaian government, electoral calculus took centre stage in driving the programme's subsequent expansion and institutionalisation. The article suggests the need to move beyond the donor-driven versus state-led type of arguments to explore the complex ways in which transnational factors and the formal and informal aspects of domestic politics interact to produce different levels and types of commitment to social protection in Africa.

Exploring and updating the controversial debates about the relationship between democracy and development, this Research Handbook provides clarification on the complex and nuanced interlinkages between political regime type and socio-economic development. Distinguished scholars examine a broad range of issues from multidisciplinary perspectives across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Analysing the relationship between political regime types, including varieties of democracies and autocracies, and broader development indicators, chapters cover economic growth, poverty and human development, inequality, corruption, conflict, human rights, and environmental sustainability. The Research Handbook examines longstanding and unresolved debates in the field over the past 60 years, as well as investigating contemporary issues of rising global inequalities, the resurgence of authoritarian populism, and the crisis of liberal democracy.