The relationship between microcredit and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has been explored in numerous quantitative studies. These alternately claim that microcredit exacerbates, reduces or has no impact on IPV. These contrasting findings are problematic, however, particularly as hundreds of billions of dollars continue to be invested in microcredit and women’s economic empowerment programs. This article, by contrast, uses qualitative methods to examine the perceptions of both female microcredit users and their male partners in West Bengal, India, drawing on 34 focus group discussions and 29 one-to-one interviews. This study analyses women’s and men’s understanding of IPV and the impact they see that a microcredit program has had on violence. It reviews these perspectives and seeks to understand the contradictory studies on microcredit and IPV through drawing on feminist economic and sociological theories of violence. This paper illustrates the importance of male backlash models, especially at the beginning stages of a program, but indicates that after time, a household bargaining model also holds relevance. This highlights the significant temporal dimensions in the relationship between microcredit and IPV and demonstrates the importance of six key factors for a household bargaining model to hold.

Lines of accountability for the provision of health services in many federal systems are complex. Institutional structures and political strategies that blur lines of responsibility make it more difficult for voters to claim their rights, to assign responsibility and reward or sanction governments on the basis of their performance. Based on a survey of 1500 voters across five states in India, this paper examines how voters attribute credit and blame for health system performance. In India, central, state and local governments are involved in the delivery and financing of different elements of health care provision from running hospitals, providing health insurance to running vaccination programmes. Contrary to expectations, we find that most voters can broadly attribute responsibility to the relevant level of government for different health services and programmes, however a significant minority consistently misattribute responsibility by holding the local government responsible. We find that perceptions of health system performance matter more than partisanship in explaining when voters hold different levels of government responsible. Those who are less satisfied with the health system are more likely to blame the local government for poor performance, even where it is not constitutionally responsible. This suggests that state and national governments receive credit from voters who perceive services as functioning well but are not punished by those who are dissatisfied. In other words, political leaders are able to capture credit among voters who are more satisfied with health provision while deflecting blame from those who are less satisfied. These findings demonstrate important weaknesses in the chain of electoral accountability for health. The paper suggests possible parallels to authoritarian contexts such as China where recent research has shown that strong centralised political leadership claims credit for public goods provision while deflecting blame for corruption and inefficiency to lower levels of government.

Across sub-Saharan Africa powerful sites of illegal gold mining challenge and change the workings of a range of statutory and non-statutory institutions, providing rich contexts for investigating institutional complexity. In Ghana, illegal mining contributes an increasing share of gold produced, attracting a large and diverse body of scholarship. This article provides an original and critical analysis of the emerging institutional forms and processes of social accept around the illegal extraction. In so doing it contributes to scholarship on two fronts: By exploring the interconnectedness and changeability of institutions it contributes empirically to understandings and evidence of social processes around the illegal extraction of gold in the Global south, and more broadly about contested sites of resource extraction. Second, it introduces the concept of institutional coalescence to explain and interpret the sociopolitical landscape of shifting power relations at the local level, which successfully meld and change the workings of formal state law, officialdom, and customary norms. In a broader perspective this contributes to understandings of relations between individual agency, organisational behaviour, institutions, and social context.

Social protection may be regarded as the conduit for governments to end poverty (SDG1) and in turn maintain civil order/peace. However, how social protectionis conceptualized alongside poverty ideology (who/what causes it and whose responsibility it is to relieve it) can negatively impact the development of social protection programs to the extent that they do not meet the social and economic needs of beneficiaries/end-users. Underpinning these views are social and political dynamics that reflect a wide range of sometimes opposing interests and social divisions. Thus, social protection inadvertently risks becoming a conduit to conflict rather than peace. In this paper we report on a living policy lab (LPL) we developed in Cairo (Egypt) to help mitigate this risk. The aim of the LPL was to facilitate dialogue between various stakeholders to support collaboration towards policy-making. First, we present an in-depth review of extant literature, discussing the viability of a ‘living policy lab’ approach to social policy making in MENA countries such as Egypt that are susceptible to conflict. Using Egypt as our focus, we critically outline its evolution of non-targeted to targeted programs and initiatives to alleviate poverty, arguing that they have been reactive and piecemeal rather than thought through (except for the universal health insurance system). We then examine findings from a project in Egypt involving a series of interrelated living policy labs (2018–2019) on social protection reform that involved a range of social actors. The aim was to explore whether, as a design process, the approach might offer an alternative shared power model that facilitates agreed policy priorities and in so doing mediates peace. In this way, we add to the scholarship on social protection by considering to what extent new approaches to policy making in contexts of conflict can support more sustainable and peace-promoting social protection interventions. We end the paper by providing recommendations in terms of research, policy and practice particularly in relation tofuture possibilities for consultative design theory.

Providing a sustainable supply of safe drinking water in rural Africa depends on sufficient revenue from user payments to maintain services. While handpumps have been the primary source of drinking water for rural Africans for decades, local revenue generation has been unstable, contributing to service disruptions and welfare losses. We examine the effect of upgrading manual handpumps to solar kiosks in rural Mali from 2019 to 2023. We model 452 monthly records of observed payments and metered water usage to estimate changes in volumetric use and revenue generation. Average revenues increase four-fold indicating stronger financial performance with solar kiosks. In contrast, we find no significant increase in the volume of water people use when a handpump is upgraded to a solar kiosk. We estimate that a 1 °C temperature increase is associated with a $9 increase in average monthly revenue and 366 more litres of water used every day per waterpoint. Our study suggests that rural Malians are more inclined to pay for water from professionally managed solar kiosks. However, seasonal volatility in water demand and uncertainty in the long-term revenue effect suggests caution in assuming solar kiosks are a definitive solution to the nuanced and dynamic nature of water user behaviours in rural Africa.