Brazil

Lack of working capital hinders collective commercialisation of recyclables. Social exclusion and bureaucratic constraints prevent recyclers from obtaining official bank loans. As they continue to depend on intermediaries, the cycle of poverty, dependency, and exclusion is perpetuated. The article discusses collective commercialisation and the micro-credit fund created among 30 recycling groups in the Brazilian city […]

An important feature of contemporary globalisation has been the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ across the global south, as numerous new regions of export horticulture emerge to supply global retailers. Much literature details the poor conditions faced by women workers. This article details the formation and expansion of a highly globally integrated export horticulture sector in north-east […]

Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for […]

Understanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, however, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Cear, Brazil, is a joint effort of the public sector and civil society designed to […]

Grassroots women’s leadership is important if democracy is to be ‘deepened’ – that is, if representative democracies are to formally include citizen participation in more ways than simply voting in elections. One approach to deepening democracy is to encourage and support spaces – both literal and metaphorical – that enable grassroots women to organise as […]

Although the emphasis in current thinking about work with street children has changed from aid-dependency towards youth protagonism, many organisations ignore the role of the children’s families in their interventions. In so doing, they reproduce obsolete welfare traditions and also violate rights guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and national legislation. […]

This review essay focuses on the most crucial points in the evolution of Celso Furtado’s contribution to economic and political thought in relation to development, in the hope that a wider readership will appreciate the importance of his ideas to Latin America’s ‘development’ during the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps even see value in reviving […]