Process" approaches to economic and social development appear to be more flexible and offer greater prospects of success than traditional "project" methods.Development as Process addresses the questions raised by the different natures of the two approaches. The authors examine development projects through experience in water resources development in India and in organizational learning by a Bangladeshi NGO. Inter-agency contexts are examined in the setting of an aquaculture...

Internet Studies has been one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding interdisciplinary fields to emerge over the last decade. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies has been designed to provide a valuable resource for academics and students in this area, bringing together leading scholarly perspectives on how the Internet has been studied and how the research agenda should be pursued in the future. The Handbook aims to focus on Internet Studies as an emerging field, e...

Quality assurance (QA) in open and distance learning (ODL) can be a contentious issue. Some argue that it should be judged by the same criteria and methods as face-to-face education, while others claim that it is so different in its organization, enrolments and operations that conventional QA mechanisms cannot apply. Some advocate the use of specific guidelines and standards for e-learning; others believe that, regardless of the technology, the basic principles of quality teaching and lear...

Doing Development Research is a comprehensive introduction to research in development studies, that provides thorough training for anyone carrying out research in developing countries. It brings together experts with extensive experience of overseas research, presenting an interdisciplinary guide to the core methodologies.Informed by years of research experience, Doing Development Research draws together many strands of action research and particip...

Robert Chambers returns with a new book that reviews, together for the first time, some of the revolutionary changes in the methodologies and methods of development inquiry that have occurred in the past forty years, and reflects on their transformative potential for the future.This book breaks new ground by describing and analysing the evolution of a sequence of approaches. Starting with the dinosaurs of large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys, and the biased visits and pe...

Digital Government: Managing Public Sector Reform in the Digital Era presents a public management perspective on digital government and technology-enabled change in the public sector. It incorporates theoretical and empirical insights to provide students with a broader and deeper understanding of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of digital government initiatives, impacts and implications.The rise of digital government and its increasingly integral role in many gove...

The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South. This book addresses two aspects— Impact of rese...

This book presents an academically rigorous yet practical guide to efforts to understand how knowledge, policy and power interact to promote or prevent change.It offers a power analysis perspective on the knowledge-policy process, illustrated with rich empirical examples from the field of international development, combined with practical guidance on the implications of such an approach. It provides ways to identify and address problems that have hampered previous attempts to improve the s...

A social anxiety currently pervades the political classes of the western world, arising from the perception that young people have become disaffected with liberal democratic politics. Voter turnout among 18-25 year olds continues to be lower than other age groups and they are less likely to join political parties. This is not, however, proof that young people are not interested in politics per se but is evidence that they are becoming politically socialized within a new media environment.

Distance education, combining the use of correspondence texts, broadcasting and limited opportunities for face-to-face study, has been used in at least a hundred teacher training programmes over the last 25 years. Distance Education for Teacher Training is the first comparative review of the use of distance education and open learning for the training and upgrading of teachers. The book contains case studies using a broadly common format both to describe and analyse distance teacher traini...

This book discusses political controversies involved in global biodiversity policy, and the practical opportunities that are opened up in solving them through increased citizen participation and democratic deliberation. It examines the emerging practice of deliberative global governance and its political consequences.The collection focuses on the intersection of global biodiversity policy and the promise of deliberative democracy. In doing so, it examines how new discursive logics ...

As lifelong learning grows in popularity, few comprehensive pictures of the phenomenon have emerged. The Routledge International Handbook of Lifelong Learning provides a disciplined and complete overview of lifelong learning internationally.The theoretical structure puts the learner at the centre and the book emanates from there, pointing to the social context beyond the learner.Up-to-the-minute syntheses from many of the leading international experts in the field g...