The rapid rise of effective altruism (EA) has reshaped contemporary global health and development by promoting the allocation of resources towards interventions that maximize measurable impact. While widely praised for its analytical rigour and commitment to evidence-based decision-making, EA has also attracted critique for its reliance on quantification, its technocratic orientation and its limited engagement with structural forms of inequality. This commentary builds on these debates but advances a more specific argument: that EA systematically underestimates negative unintended effects, resulting in an asymmetrical assessment of impact. We argue that this asymmetry reflects not only methodological biases—such as the preferential treatment of measurable outcomes— but also a deeper neglect of the distributional consequences of interventions. Framed throughthe guiding question, ‘effective for whom?’, the commentary examines two prominent EA-supported interventions—cash transfers and bed net distribution—to demonstrate how benefitsfor direct recipients may be accompanied by costs for non-recipients, local systems or public institutions. These costs are often diffuse, delayed or difficult to quantify, and therefore insufficiently incorporated into cost-effectiveness models. We propose three practical shifts: systematicallytracking non-recipient and system indicators, elevating qualitative and participatory evidence,and applying conservative downside adjustments when harms are plausible but hard to quantify.EA deserves a methodology that is capable of seeing the whole picture.
This article examines how gendered capabilities are reshaped at the intersection of patriarchy and precarity in Musina, South Africa’s changing border economy. Although research on border livelihoods highlights economic instability, less is known about how these pressures unevenly affect men’s and women’s agency within households. Drawing on 32 interviews, the article shows that patriarchal norms continue to restrict women’s access to resources, while rising precarity also constrains men through provider-based expectations. Using the capability approach, the analysis reveals how informal trade, mobility and care demands force households to renegotiate gender roles. Addressing these dynamics requires recognizing how both patriarchy and precarity limit freedoms.
This article examines the evolution of African migration governance in the context of global agendas and foreign interventions on migration. With a focus on African responses to external pressure from Europe, we explore how African actors adopt, adapt, resist or subvert interventions concerning migration and analyze the implications for states’ governance and development trajectories. The ongoing interactions both reflect and reshape power asymmetries, contributing to a reconfiguration of migration governance in Africa. We discuss how this is visible through parallel forms of governance and the cementation of external norms, with consequences for local agency, development priorities and future African-European relations.
Individuals experiencing poverty face dual indignity: material deprivation and engagement with stigmatizing social policy. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often pitched as a dignifying alternative to both challenges. This article presents a 2-year ethnographic investigation within a UBI pilot in South Indian urban slums. I explore the dignifying potential of ‘UBI way’—unconditionality, universality, individualization, regularity—of delivering cash. Participants report enhanced recognition, strengthened social relations and increased agency through the intervention’s design features. Importantly, the narratives accompanying the delivery of a UBI were key to these experiences of dignity. This study also presents a novel conceptual framework to operationalize dignity, based on recognition, relationality and autonomy, aiming to make dignity a ‘useful’ concept in development policy and practice.
This article examines how a heterogeneous group of Senegalese civil society organizations (CSOs) attempted to reshape Senegal's migration policy agenda. By analysing a policy process in which they (with support from the German Heinrich B & ouml;ll Foundation) engaged, we trace how CSOs mobilized to push the government towards adopting a more decolonial national migration policy centred on sovereignty, national and regional interests, as well as migrants' rights, rather than European containment objectives. We examine the conflicting interests among the CSOs and the role of German Heinrich B & ouml;ll Foundation that supported them as well as European funding and agenda-setting. We argue that, ultimately, the structural, donor-driven migration governance landscape offered only limited and largely superficial political space to recentre the migration debate. Instead, CSOs once again became instrumentalized in performative, participatory roles-commenting on the national migration policy without fundamentally altering its trajectory.
This article describes the outsized influence of international human rights actors in determining how justice should be pursued for Rohingya women and explains how efforts to consult with this community have been largely limited to informing them about already-existing mechanisms, operating in accordance with pre-defined conceptualizations of justice. We argue both that current international justice processes focused on crimes committed against the Rohingya are unable to respond to the needs of female victims and that international justice mechanisms in general have been much better at engaging with and responding to international civil society than they have been with victim communities.
From the 1990s onwards, ethnic minorities in Latin America have been granted collective property rights to protect their natural livelihoods and culture from extractivism and armed conflict. In the Colombian case, this legal innovation was largely the product of Afro-Colombian communities' activism around cultural identities whose legal outcomes have been celebrated in post-development literature as evidence for subaltern groups regained self-determination and emancipation from unsustainable extractivist development models and violence. While other authors have since pointed to collective land rights' essentializing tendencies and actual limitations in challenging extractive capitalism, including the Colombian drug economy, less attention has been given to what explains their limited outcomes in securing alternative livelihoods. Drawing on evidence from two Afro-Colombian communities, this article argues that ethnic land rights tend to disregard the communities' own material entanglement with extractivist capitalism and that this complicates the search for effective ways of securing ethnic communities' livelihoods.
This article examines how Khasi Indigenous activists in Bangladesh navigate land dispossession under contested environmental governance. Their struggles against commercial tourism, tea estates, rubber plantations and state-sanctioned deforestation often remain marginal to public debate, as media and state agencies tend to align with elite development agendas. In such settings, Indigenous communities without formal land entitlement are required to rely on strategic alliances to gain visibility, representation and legal expertise. Drawing on in-person and digital ethnography, this article argues that legitimacy is not a fixed status but a situational and continuously negotiated practice shaped by shifting political and institutional conditions. The analysis develops a framework of four recurring legitimacy dilemmas that structure this process: the risks and necessity of becoming visible in public and legal arenas; tensions in translating cultural claims into state- and media-legible frames; uneven access to legal, organizational and representational resources; and strains on autonomy when external support threatens to overshadow community authority. This framework illuminates broader dynamics of grassroots advocacy in postcolonial contexts where visibility can empower claims yet heighten exposure, dependency and contestation. The article, thus, contributes to debates on legitimacy and Indigenous activism by demonstrating how legitimacy is processual and temporally reconfigured through four recurring dilemmas across evolving advocacy trajectories under contested environmental governance.
Acknowledging the genocide and scholasticide in Gaza-and the ensuing student encampments in solidarity as a critical rupture-this article reflects on how lecturers, students and alumni within an International Development Studies (IDS) programme at a Western, internationalized university grapple with epistemic injustice, decolonial praxis and institutional complicity. Using a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach and insights from a co-created workshop, we examine how IDS' normative commitments to justice and decolonization are strained by everyday teaching practices, university management and the emotional and political complexities of learning during interconnected polycrises. Drawing on regenerative development theory and the Three Lines of Work framework, complemented with decolonial perspectives and critical pedagogical frameworks, we explore the significance of pedagogies of discomfort, hope and entanglement in responding to the 2024 campus protests in solidarity with Palestine. We propose three key pedagogical premises-paradigm shifting for systemic change, co-creative dialogical learning cultures and the cultivation of imperturbability as a core capacity-as pathways towards more regenerative, accountable and justice-oriented learning spaces. These premises may inform the work and inquiry of development educators, students and practitioners seeking to foster epistemic justice in how, what and why we teach and learn about present and future polycrises.
Landscape approaches mobilize stakeholders across sectors and scales to negotiate development-conservation trade-offs and land-use allocation. Building on the concept of earth system justice, we examine how efforts to operationalize such approaches in Ghana, Zambia and Indonesia advance landscape justice. We observed contributions to procedural, recognitional and intergenerational justice, while interspecies justice remains overlooked. Yet, power asymmetries, exclusionary practices and institutional constraints hinder progress towards intragenerational and substantive-distributive, corrective, restorative and transformative justice. In contexts lacking commitment to transformative change, trade-offs are inevitable. Pursuing incremental change rather than 'perfect' justice may represent a second-best but more realistic pathway towards just landscape governance.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments widely recognized a duty to ensure global access to vaccines. What this duty entailed, however, became highly contested. I highlight how different actors formulated this duty and the political consequences that this duty-making had during the pandemic and its aftermath. I show that wealthy countries acknowledged a duty to share vaccine doses, while activists and Global South governments formulated a duty to share the 'vaccine recipe'. I suggest moreover that the pandemic also facilitated the emergence of a negative duty 'not to hoard vaccines'-in addition to a duty to help. I argue that global crisis response should seek to mobilize global solidarity initiatives (duty of charity) and simultaneously limit the negative consequences of countries' own domestic responses (duty of justice).
Multi-dimensional 'wellbeing' is used to assess micro-level development across Global South settings. We explore the added value of 'wellbeing' to understand urban marginality in a high-income context, and how a bottom-up approach can contribute to just development. From a study in Amsterdam, we conclude that (a) 'wellbeing' allows for comprehensive measurement of 'development' by inclusion of material, subjective and relational needs. These need analysis in relation to local socioeconomic and relational (institutional) reference points, and (b) the bottom-up methodology generates credible indicators that do more justice to the lived realities of marginalized communities. Therefore, the co-created Wellbeing Dashboard forms a potential stepping-stone towards epistemic and procedural justice.
This study investigates how theatre-based pedagogy can legitimize advocacy within postgraduate psychology education in South Africa. Conducted with 20 students through participatory action research, the project integrated role-play, ensemble performance, reflective essays and advocacy artefacts. Data were analysed thematically using an integrated visual-textual approach. Findings indicated that students redefined legitimacy as a dynamic, co-constructed process grounded in cultural responsiveness, moral alignment and stakeholder engagement. Theatre unsettled academic hierarchies, fostered critical consciousness and supported socially responsive practice. Student-generated artefacts also extended beyond the classroom, positioning theatre as a tool for knowledge mobilization, public dialogue and advocacy within civil society.
This article examines how caste shapes access to credit in India's formal and informal lending markets. Using nationally representative data from the India Human Development Survey (2011-2012), we analyse loan application rates and loan amounts and compare outcomes between General Castes (GC) and three lower-caste groups: Other Backward Castes (OBC), Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). We find that GC households are more likely to apply for and receive larger loans from formal banks, while lower-caste households rely more heavily on informal moneylenders. A substantial share of these credit gaps-particularly in bank lending-remains unexplained by observable characteristics, pointing to potential caste-based discrimination. In contrast, moneylenders do not appear to penalize lower-caste borrowers to the same extent and, in some cases, lend more than expected to OBC households. These findings suggest that entrenched caste hierarchies continue to influence credit access in India, with formal institutions reinforcing rather than correcting social inequalities.
The relationship between justice and international development has long been contentious. Activists and scholars persistently challenge what is carried out in the name of development: for whom, by whom, and at whose expense? Their critiques expose how conventional development practices often entrench injustice rather than redress it. This special issue builds on this critical tradition by discussing how justice is being redefined within contemporary development thought and practice. To establish a shared conceptual foundation, contributors were invited to engage with the Earth System Justice (ESJ) framework and vocabulary, using their analyses to test, expand, and refine its dimensions. Spanning diverse cases—from social movements and environmental sustainability to systemic equity, educational reform, and urban inclusivity—the contributions ask what makes development just or unjust. Collectively, they underscore the necessity of centering justice in development. Ultimately, they advocate for transformative approaches that recognize contextual specificities and dismantle systems of power, enabling historically marginalized communities to define development and justice on their own terms.
Since the mid-2010s, scholars and practitioners have been increasingly interested in the integration of development cooperation, humanitarian action and peacebuilding, known as the 'triple nexus' approach. In parallel, the necessity of including sexual and gender minorities in these three areas has also garnered growing attention, recognizing the marginalization and specific needs of LGBTQI+ people. This critical literature review examines both scholarly and 'grey' publications on the place of sexual and gender minorities in each of the triple nexus's three areas, documenting what is known and what is not. It also examines the challenges for implementation and achieving impact before proposing a global research agenda on LGBTQI+ people and the triple nexus.
