The complexity of the development process calls for an adaptive approach for assistance programmes which rely on strategic planning, responsiveness and experimentation and decision-making processes that join learning with action

International assistance programmes for developing countries are in urgent need of revision. Continuous testing and verification is required if development activity is to cope effectively with the uncertainty and complexity of the development process. This examines the alternatives and offers an approach which focuses on strategic planning, administrative procedures that facilitate innovation, responsiveness and experimentation, and on decision-making processes that join learning with action. A useful text for academics and practitioners in development studies, geography and sociology.

Studies key design features of policy pilots influencing their scaling-up and mainstreaming into formal policies.

This book provides researchers, students, and practitioners with a methodology to evaluate the impacts of a wide diversity of development projects and policies on local economies. Projects and policies often create spillovers within project areas. LEWIE uses simulation methods to quantify these spillovers. It has become a complement to randomized control trials (RCTs), as governments and donors become interested in documenting impacts beyond the treated, comparing the likely impacts of alternative interventions, and designing complementary interventions to influence program and policy impacts. It is also a tool for impact evaluation where RCTs are not feasible. Chapters 1-4 motivate and present the basics of impact simulation, including how to design a LEWIE model, how to estimate the model, and how to obtain the necessary data. The remaining chapters provide a diversity of interesting real-world applications and extensions of the basic models. The applications include evaluations of the impacts of cash transfers for the poor, ecotourism, global food-price shocks, irrigation projects, migration, and corruption. Each chapter provide readers with the tools they need to conduct their own local economy-wide impact evaluations. All models and data used in this book are available on-line.

This Research Topic is a part of the Delft 2021: 1st Sociohydrology Conference series. To view the other sessions please follow the links below: Innovating a New Knowledge Base for Water Justice Studies: Hydrosocial, Sociohydrology, and Beyond Scale Issues in Human-Water Systems Water Resources and Human Behavior: Analysis and Modeling of Coupled Water-Human Systems Feedbacks and Coevolution Innovative Sensing, Observing, Measuring and Analysing Human-Water Data “Pluralistic water research” integrates the hydrological and the social to provide sustainable solutions to water crises. While relying upon robust quantitative modelling, sociohydrology captures crises across many waters (surface, ground and interstitial) along quantity and quality dimensions, hydrosocial unfurls power hierarchies in access to safe and required quota of water, be it for drinking or irrigation purposes. The success of engineering solutions laying out “hard” interventions such as solar powered irrigation, dams, high yielding crop varieties, water treatment plants and water distributions and purifications depend on “soft” socio-political, cultural and psychological variables like the political landscape, community behaviours and governance arrangements. How these soft parameters limit or advance the effect of hard interventions await more enhanced modelling and place-based qualitative analyses to disentangle various cause-effect pathways. While historical and process-based sociohydrology accommodates detailed temporal datasets and causal relationships across human-water systems, the hydrosocial paradigm reconciles “non-modern”, anti-hegemonic, water techniques and knowledge systems, animating local agencies within specific hydroscapes. This issue is dedicated to capture real time innovations through which water challenges have been confronted. It intends to unravel “storylines” along actionable water projects, reflecting on mediations across multiple actors and networks in specific spatio-temporal and cultural contexts, finally drawing our attention to the correlation between projected promises and actual realities. Situated at the crossroads of “boundary work”, we invite articles that will deploy a range of interdisciplinary frameworks like RANAS (Risk, Attitude, Norms, Ability, and Self-regulation), APIE (Awareness, Participation, Involvement and Engagement), HUPE (Historical Urban Political Ecology), etc. to demonstrate coupled sociohydrological and hydrosocial realties and in turn getting informed by empirical insights emanating from these actual water interventions. The final aim of the special issue is not to showcase water just actual interventions but to elicit a rigorous mapping of sustainable processes facilitating collective co-production of resilient water trajectories.

Policy formulation relies upon the interplay of knowledge-based analysis of issues with power-based considerations, such as the political assessment of the costs and benefits of proposed actions, and its effects on the partisan and electoral concerns of governments. Policy scholars have long been interested in how governments successfully create, deploy and utilise policy instruments, but the literature on policy formulation has, until now, remained fragmented. This comprehensive Handbook unites original scholarship on policy tools and design, with contributions examining policy actors and the roles they play in the formulation process.