Collaboration between local governments and businesses for poverty reduction has not yet been fully explored in China. Based on an in-depth investigation of two counties during the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign, this study proposes a multilayered and relational approach to understanding how different levels of officials collaborate with business to reduce poverty. Elite bureaucrats at the county and township levels prefer a growth-oriented strategy for attracting large-scale enterprises to make investment. Their coalition with businesses has created profits and employment but also hindered authentic participation of small- and medium-sized businesses and villagers in their selected villages. In contrast, in villages that were not prioritized by elite bureaucrats, local officials could utilize their discretion and indigenous resources to exploit development opportunities and support small- and medium-sized businesses to reach poor villagers. This study unpacks China's multilevel system to understand the various forms of government–business collaboration and their implications for rural poverty reduction.

Governments and NGOs have enthusiastically promoted value chains for lesser-known indigenous fruits in the pursuit of poverty reduction and other development goals. This paper examines experiences in Peru in building the value chain for camu-camu—a fruit native to the Amazon that is in the process of being domesticated. We look at interventions to build the chain, the environment in which the chain operates, the implications of chain development on livelihoods, and prospects for future chain development. Information was collected from gray literature as well as from primary data from household and key informant interviews. The results of this study suggest that the emergence of the camu-camu chain has led to higher farm income without generating large trade-offs in livelihood activities or the environment. However, the results also demonstrate an unrealized potential to achieve greater impact at scale due to gaps in services and inputs, limited coordination among farmers and chain actors, and a risky business environment. Building value chains for lesser-known fruits will require more than a techo-managerial focus on smallholder production. Greater attention is required to build stronger public–private collaboration to expand and diversify markets, with particular attention on strengthening institutions and growing local markets for high-value products.

Conditional Cash Transfer programmes (CCTs) have been at the core of the remarkable expansion of social protection in Latin America in the early twenty-first century. Our article reviews the origins of CCTs in the Social Investment (SI) approach to social policy design, explores their characteristics and traces their expansion in Latin America. It further questions whether CCTs designed under the influence of SI can generate long-term substantial improvements in social outcomes. Our analysis suggests that while CCTs have evidently produced a number of positive outputs they are not, on their own, enough to achieve the aim of reducing poverty. CCTs appear to be more effective in poverty alleviation when they are accompanied by – or form part of – a wider package of measures that enhance social and employment rights, integrating workers into the formal economy under better conditions. We conclude that unless the structural deficiencies that shape many of the Latin American welfare regimes are addressed, the potential of social investment policies, like CCTs, to combat poverty will remain limited.

Using a rigorous, evidence-focused review method, this literature review found eleven relevant studies that directly compare the impacts of cash transfers and remittances on a range indicators of poverty at the household level. The evidence base is small and highly context specific. The external and internal validity of most studies are limited, so the conclusions that can be drawn from this review are tentative. However, in the majority of studies both cash transfers and remittances are shown to have positive impacts on reducing poverty. Overall, remittances seem to have stronger poverty-reducing impacts. There are a number of factors that seem to explain why remittances have a greater effect. In the studies reviewed here, remittances appear to reach both a greater share of the overall population than cash transfers and a greater share of poorer households. Furthermore, remittances were higher in value in the majority of studies reviewed. Further high-quality research is needed.

This article looks at the relationship between economic ideas and policymaking in Africa over the last half century. It discusses the ways in which the focus of economists working on Africa has moved from the structuralist-developmentalist and neo-Marxist perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s, through a neoliberal phase of the 1980s and 1990s, to a more eclectic combination of neo-institutionalism, growth orientation, and welfarist interests in poverty and redistribution issues. These shifts in development thinking, while not unique to Africa, have not been the subject of much debate in Africa. The article argues that such a debate is long overdue, including an interrogation not only of the leverage of foreign interests, but also of the profession of economics itself and the implications of its material underpinnings and social construction on the integrity and credibility of its research.

Livestock play a significant role in rural livelihoods and the economies of developing countries. They are providers of income and employment for producers and others working in, sometimes complex, value chains. They are a crucial asset and safety net for the poor, especially for women and pastoralist groups, and they provide an important source of nourishment for billions of rural and urban households. These socio-economic roles and others are increasing in importance as the sector grows because of increasing human populations, incomes and urbanisation rates. To provide these benefits, the sector uses a significant amount of land, water, biomass and other resources and emits a considerable quantity of greenhouse gases. There is concern on how to manage the sector's growth, so that these benefits can be attained at a lower environmental cost. Livestock and environment interactions in developing countries can be both positive and negative. On the one hand, manures from ruminant systems can be a valuable source of nutrients for smallholder crops, whereas in more industrial systems, or where there are large concentrations of animals, they can pollute water sources. On the other hand, ruminant systems in developing countries can be considered relatively resource-use inefficient. Because of the high yield gaps in most of these production systems, increasing the efficiency of the livestock sector through sustainable intensification practices presents a real opportunity where research and development can contribute to provide more sustainable solutions. In order to achieve this, it is necessary that production systems become market-orientated, better regulated in cases, and socially acceptable so that the right mix of incentives exists for the systems to intensify. Managing the required intensification and the shifts to new value chains is also essential to avoid a potential increase in zoonotic, food-borne and other diseases. New diversification options and improved safety nets will also be essential when intensification is not the primary avenue for developing the livestock sector. These processes will need to be supported by agile and effective public and private institutions.

Payments for environmental services (PES) have been recognized as a promising mechanism for conservation, with the potential to contribute to social objectives such as poverty reduction. This paper outlines a simple framework for assessing the potential for synergies in the implementation of PES programmes, used to analyse the new watershed conservation funding (WCF) channelled through Costa Rica's national PES programme, Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA). The WCF financing can only be used in a limited number of watersheds. Given this constraint, the paper examines the mechanisms by which the WCF may potentially contribute to biodiversity conservation and to reducing social development gaps. Although there is significant spatial correlation among the priority areas targeted for the objectives of watershed conservation, biodiversity conservation and social development, the availability of the WCF per unit of land in most watersheds is limited compared to the PSA programme's prevailing payment rate of US$ 64 ha−1, potentially hindering the impact of the WCF on conservation and social development. The analysis helps guide the allocation of the PSA budget in a way that complements the WCF and improves the cost-effectiveness of the PSA budget.

Within the last few years three key concerns have come to dominate the conservation-poverty debate: (1) the activities and accountability of big international conservation NGOs, and their impacts on local communities; (2) the increasingly protectionist focus of conservation policy and the implications for communities resident in and around protected areas, in particular regarding involuntary displacements and evictions; (3) the lack of attention to biodiversity conservation on the development agenda, with the current focus on poverty reduction. The roots of these different strands of the debate lie in much older discussions of the links between environment and development. There have been periods of convergence, especially around issues of sustainable development, participation and decentralization during the 1980s and 1990s. There have also been periods of divergence, in particular the disenchantment with community-based approaches to conservation and the prioritization of poverty over environment, during the 1990s and 2000s. Reactions to the outcomes of the 2003 World Parks Congress brought the three strands of the modern debate to a head. Ongoing discussions around these strands continue at a different pace but the debate appears to be moving fastest on biodiversity's place within the development agenda, although concerns over biodiversity remain marginal compared to the current focus on climate change. But it is within the climate change agenda, and particularly the escalation of discussions around reduced emissions from deforestation, that the next formulations of the conservation-poverty debate are likely to develop.