This background paper focuses on the potential role that international science and technology ‘foresight-type’ activities might play in informing decision-making processes about innovation, ...

Where do you shit? In developing countries, the answer may determine whether you live or die. Around 2.6 billion people defecate in the open. The consequences are dire: shit carries disease and is a ...

Despite ambitious policies and well-intended programmes, food security and nutrition challenges persist around the world and ...

Resilience has, in the past four decades, been a term increasingly employed throughout a number of sciences: psychology and ecology, most prominently. Increasingly one finds it in political science, ...

This policy brief summarises what we know about simplified taxes in Africa, who pays them, and why they matter, while highlighting gaps in existing knowledge.

Our research has shown how land reform has driven the growth in small towns, creating new economic linkages in a reconfigured economic geography of the country. No longer are the metropolitan centres ...

Workforce 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 ...

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of development and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa.

Many students come to IDS with aspirations of a career in the UN system. A recent event at IDS gave both students and alumni ...