This study examines how citizens participate in urban local governance in India, focusing on everyday forms of engagement, levels of involvement, and the structural barriers that shape participation. Using a mixed-methods approach, it draws on survey and interview data from citizens, ward committee members, and elected representatives across selected urban wards. The findings suggest that political parties play a decisive role in shaping participation, often mediating who participates and how. Although ward committees were created to deepen citizen involvement, they frequently function in symbolic rather than substantive ways. Digital tools, especially social media, have widened access to information, but this rarely translates into sustained or meaningful engagement. Despite India's long-standing participatory framework, obstacles persist, including political interference, limited fiscal autonomy, weak outreach, and citizens' time and motivation constraints. The study offers practical insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to strengthen inclusive, responsive, and accountable urban governance.
Despite widespread enthusiasm for digital technologies as pathways to empowerment, critical scholarship shows that innovation alone cannot dismantle entrenched inequities. This article synthesises intersectional feminist and postcolonial critiques of "tech solutionism" through India's Aadhaar biometric system and Kenya's M-Pesa mobile money platform, arguing that mechanisms promising efficiency simultaneously reproduce gendered, racialised, and classed exclusions. Through critical narrative synthesis of 211 sources, I advance a proposed framework operationalising participatory co-design, reflexive implementation with privacy safeguards, and equity-oriented evaluation. This conceptual contribution reimagines digital development as collaborative and justice-oriented rather than techno-optimistic, offering a heuristic tool requiring empirical validation.
The "new poor" is a vulnerable group in Bangladesh that was staying afloat with steady livelihoods before COVID-19 but has undergone a substantial financial plight since the pandemic hit and struggled to recover. The identification of the "new poor" has been largely dominated by traditional income-based measures, which miss the multidimensional aspects of experiencing new poverty as well as the distinct nature of relativity where their poverty during/after the pandemic is relative to households' own condition before the pandemic. While qualitative approaches are more suited to identifying "who the poor are", there remains a scarcity of such explorations for the "new poor". This paper will narrate how we took an alternative qualitative longitudinal approach and applied it in practice to build five indicators from the ground to find the "new poor".
In article, I reflect on the gender mainstreaming lessons from an accelerated learning program in three East African countries. The program aimed to support out of school girls to re-enter mainstream basic education or vocational training. I identify the key lessons on GESI from an extensive desktop review, the development and piloting of GESI guidelines, and one month of research at 16 schools. The research methods included in-depth interviews, observations, key informant interviews and curriculum analysis. The main lessons from this project centre around questions of what constitutes gender mainstreaming, who implements it, and how it is implemented. I consider the challenge of defining gender empowerment; the complexity of who implements a project, and the question of how a project is implemented. In attending to these three questions, I suggest lessons for policymakers and program developers concerned with gender mainstreaming in diverse sectors in the Global South.
