Publications

Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World

Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the...

Ian Scoones

Socio-economic Assessment and Genetically Engineered Crops in Africa: Building Knowledge for Development?

How could we know if agricultural development interventions make contributions to sustainable development goals (SDGs)? Genetically engineered (GE) crops are celebrated as a class of technological interventions that can realize multiple SDGs. But recent studies have revealed the gap between GE...

Dominic Glover & 8 others

Taxing Mobile Money in Africa: Risk and Reward

ICTD explored the impact of different approaches to DFS taxation in Africa through its DIGITAX programme, which ran from 2020 to 2024.

Martin Hearson & 8 others

Pathways Into the Tax Net: Better Ways to Register African Taxpayers

ICTD African Tax Administration Paper 34

Based on recent experience in a range of African countries, we list some taxpayer registration practices that should be abandoned or used sparingly, and some that should be used more widely, to better target registration on those businesses and individuals who should be paying tax.

Young people, livelihood building and the transformation of African agriculture: A reality check

Over a ten-year period, we, together with colleagues, have used qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore the dominant narratives and ‘conventional wisdom’ about young people and agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Throughout, we have sought to carefully consider the...

James Sumberg & 5 others

Implementation Obstacles and Political Appeal of Environmental Taxes in Sub-Saharan Africa: Reflections from Selected Countries

ICTD Working Paper 177

Increasing the slow pace of adoption of environmental taxes across low-income countries has become a significant priority among international financial institutions, multilateral development banks, and international donors. Yet little is known about the practical institutional, administrative,...

Giovanni Occhiali

Using Machine Learning to Create a Property Tax Roll: Evidence from the City of Kananga, D.R. Congo

ICTD Working Paper 176

Developing countries often lack the financial resources to provide public goods. Property taxation has been identified as a promising source of local revenue, because it is relatively efficient, captures growth in real estate value, and can be progressive. However, many low-income countries do...

Introduction: Enacting Peace Amid Violence: Nonviolent Civilian Agency in Violent Conflict

Worldwide, civilians experiencing violence make agential choices about how they interact with conflict landscapes. This special issue assembles contributions that specifically deepen our understanding of nonviolent civilian agency amid violence.

Jeremy Allouche & 2 others

Digital Citizenship in Africa: Technologies of Agency and Repression

Since the so-called Arab Spring, citizens of African countries have continued to use digital tools in creative ways to ensure that marginalised voices are heard, and to demand for the rights they are entitled to in law: to freely associate, to form opinions, and to express them online without...

Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty

  CPAN’s Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty produced by the IDS-hosted Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), provides evidence and analysis on how policies and programmes shaped and were shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to help decision-makers and multi-lateral agencies...

Vidya Diwakar

Andrew Shepherd

Pathways to Equitable Food Systems

IDS Report

Globally, our food systems are highly inequitable. In a world with enough food, hunger is becoming normalised for large numbers of people, while diets are worsening and obesity is rising. Racialised minorities are more at risk from obesity than other groups; indigenous communities have...

Lídia Cabral & 4 others

Confronting Uncertainties in Pastoral Areas: Transforming Development from Control to Care

Pastoralists must continuously confront uncertainties, responding to high levels of vari- ability and volatility where the future is unknown. Yet mainstream modernising development in pastoral areas aims to create stability through control, enacted through restrictive plans and...

Ian Scoones