Understanding and assessing the legitimacy of civil society advocacy is important given its critical role as a form of development intervention. However, this legitimacy has been left implicit in much study on civil society legitimacy, and its study has been skewed towards a limited set of aspects. In this article, we identify key themes in the debate on civil society legitimacy and show how advocacy legitimacy has been addressed. We also discuss the extent to which research on advocacy legitimacy in the development context has yielded specific insights. We identify key learnings emerging from these literatures as well as limitations and knowledge gaps. We position the papers in this issue in relation to the existing literature and present key innovative elements and insights emerging from them.
This article examines how non-governmental organizations (NGO)-led participatory adaptation interventions shape pastoralism and pastoralists’ adaptive capacity. Drawing on a locally led adaptation framework and qualitative fieldwork in Samburu West, Kenya, the study explores NGO-supported hay production as a widely promoted climate adaptation strategy. Findings show that hay production diversifies livelihoods and creates new opportunities, including for women and youth, yet distributes benefits unevenly, making the practice both empowering and exclusionary. This points to a need for more inclusive interventions. Yet amid climate change, shifting land tenure and other socio-ecological pressures, hay production tends to reinforce sedentarization, contributing to the broader transformation of pastoralism.
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.
