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The rights-based approach is particularly associated with pro-poor development and the agency of the poor. At the centre of the approach is an understanding that successful development requires political analysis and action. Rather than development being reliant on charitable goodwill to meet the basic needs of very poor people, the rights-based approach emphasises that development should be based on a recognition of the equal rights of all citizens to the resources required for material well-being and social inclusion. Within such a conceptualisation of development, the contribution of the state is given prominence. Their role is that of provider, through equal access to essential services, and regulator, through a legal system that ensures equal rights for all. It is anticipated that under such conditions, the poor will experience a more supportive and less discriminatory context, and will be able to take advantage of new opportunities. Despite this emphasis, SDI, an international group of grassroots organisations and their support NGOs seeking pro-poor urban development (notably secure tenure, basic services and housing), have struggled to work within the rights-based approach. While these groups believe in redistribution, social justice and people's empowerment, they have been criticised by rights-based groups for being 'too close' to the state. The discussion below considers the reasons for this tension, and focuses particularly on two related themes. First, women, who make up the majority of members in the local organisations (savings schemes), do not believe that an openly aggressive and critical campaign against this state is likely to be a successful strategy, given the present imbalance in power. While on occasion, savings schemes may be openly critical of the state, in general they seek to negotiate with local and national government around shelter, service and livelihood issues. Second, the women believe that there is no simple answer to their needs for tenure, basic services and housing that the ...

In 1987, World Development published a supplement entitled "Development Alternatives: the Challenge of NGOs". Although this challenge now seems far more complicated, this paper suggests one way of giving meaning (and possibility) back to the juxtaposition of 'development alternative' and NGOs. Where NGOs have pursued radical rather than merely reformist alternatives, this has usually been in conjunction with political programmes of social movements or developmentalist states. NGOs need to rethink the notion of development alternatives in terms of the politics and political economy of social change, a rethinking that will help define the contours for a theory of NGOs.

Across the Global South, the realities of urban informality are changing, with implications for how we understand this phenomenon across economic, spatial, and political domains. Recent accounts have attempted to recognise the diversity of informality across contexts and dimensions, as well as its everyday lived realities. Reviewing key debates in the sector, and drawing upon the new empirical studies in the papers presented here, we argue for a shift away from seeing urban informality narrowly as a setting, sector, or outcome. We suggest that reconsidering informality as a site of critical analysis offers a new perspective that draws on and extends political economy approaches, and helps us to understand processes of stratification and disadvantage. We seek to highlight the significance of the informal-formal continuum at the same time as challenging this dichotomy, and to explore emerging theoretical and empirical developments, including changing attitudes to informality; the increasing salience of agency; and informality as strategy both for elite and subaltern groups.

This book was published by the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) at Loughborough University: http://wedc.lboro.ac.uk/ ; This book presents findings from project R7786 Partnerships to improve access and quality of urban public transport for the urban poor carried out by the authors as part of the Knowledge and Research (KaR) programme of the Infrastructure and Urban Development Department, Department for International Development (DFID) of the British Government. The purpose of the project was to identify, explore, and document critical issues in the provision of transport services for and in low-income settlements in developing countries. The identified issues can be used at policy and operational levels to provide better transport services to low-income communities in urban areas. In the research methodology, a sustainable livelihoods framework was used to set the research framework. The print publication comes with a CD containing pdf files of all publications in this series including case studies from Faisalabad, Pakistan; Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

This book was published by the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) at Loughborough University. ; For centuries, Small Water Enterprises (SWEs) have supplied a large share of the water market in the urban centres of most low-income countries. Such SWEs have proved themselves economically viable, and often operate in competitive conditions. They extend water services to informal settlements that have little prospect of being supplied with piped water from the local utility. Unfortunately, they attract comparatively little investment, and even less support from governments. The incremental but critically important improvements they can provide tend to be overlooked by governments and international agencies. In international statistics any household that gets its water from vendors is defined as lacking access to improved water supplies. This book is one of the outputs from a project designed to identify and test out ways of improving the water services delivered to the urban poor through SWEs. As such, it will prove an invaluable resource for water utility managers and policymakers. The book includes accounts of fieldwork undertaken in a number of African cities: Dar es Salaam (Tanzania); Nairobi (Kenya); Khartoum (Sudan) and Accra (Ghana). Even in these cities, where dependence on SWEs is high, the services provided by these SWEs have been poorly documented until now.