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This paper seeks to shed new light on the sustainability options, and particularly the financial sustainability options, potentially available to a particular set of social accountabilities (SAcc) organizations. Such organizations tend to operate in less-developed regions of the world and often in situations in which governmental accountability structures and traditions are far from fully established. Though intended as a preliminary thought piece rather than an empirical survey of practice even among this limited array of organizations, the paper nevertheless draws on a wide variety of sources, including a substantial body of literature, numerous interviews, organizational websites, and an analysis of recent trends in nonprofit finance to suggest five concrete strategies that SAcc organizations of this type can usefully consider. The five strategies for SAcc organization financial sustainability can be discerned: (a) Building the brand; (b) selling social accountability services; (c) selling by-products of social accountability services; (d) selling government savings; and (e) securing and managing assets.

Corporate Social Responsibility --- Private Sector Development --- Social Accountability --- Social Development --- Transparency

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Whether in the domains of scholarship or practice, important advances have been made in recent years in our understanding of how culture, politics, and development interact. Today's leading theorists of culture and development represent a fourth distinctive perspective vis-a-vis their predecessors, one that seeks to provide an empirically grounded, mechanisms-based account of how symbols, frames, identities, and narratives are deployed as part of a broader repertoire of cultural "tools" connecting structure and agency. A central virtue of this approach is less the broad policy prescriptions to which it gives rise-indeed, to offer such prescriptions would be something of a contradiction in terms-than the emphasis it places on making intensive and extensive commitments to engaging with the idiosyncrasies of local contexts. Deep knowledge of contextual realities can contribute constructively to development policy by enabling careful intra-country comparisons to be made of the conditions under which variable responses to otherwise similar problems emerge. Such knowledge is also important for discerning the generalizability (or "external validity") of claims regarding the efficacy of development interventions, especially those overtly engaging with social, legal, and political issues.

Anthropology --- Cultural Heritage & Preservation --- Cultural Issues --- Cultural Policy --- Culture & Development --- Ethnicity --- Ict Policy And Strategies --- Identity --- Information and Communication Technologies --- Political Development --- Race in Society --- Social Development

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The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.

Crime --- Crime and Society --- Gender --- Gender & Law --- Income Inequality --- Inequality --- Instrumental Variables --- Poverty Reduction --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Services & Transfers to Poor --- Social Development

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Over the past decade the international community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs to increase local public service delivery in developing countries by improving local governing institutions and creating social capital. This paper evaluates one such program in Sudan to answer the question: Can the international community change the grassroots civic culture of developing countries to increase social capital? The paper offers three contributions. First, it uses lab-in-the-field measures to focus on the effects of the program on pro-social preferences without the confounding influence of any program- induced changes on local governing institutions. Second, it tests whether the program led to denser social networks in recipient communities. Based on these two measures, the effect of the program was a precisely estimated zero. However, in a retrospective survey, respondents from program communities characterized their behavior as being more pro-social and their communities more socially cohesive. This leads to a third contribution of the paper: it provides evidence for the hypothesis, stated by several scholars in the literature, that retrospective survey measures of social capital over biased evidence of a positive effect of these programs. Regardless of one's faith in retrospective self-reported survey measures, the results clearly point to zero impact of the program on pro-social preferences and social network density. Therefore, if the increase in self-reported behaviors is accurate, it must be because of social sanctions that enforce compliance with pro-social norms through mechanisms other than the social networks that were measured.

Civic Culture --- Communities & Human Settlements --- Community Development and Empowerment --- Governance --- Governance Indicators --- Governing Institutions --- Housing & Human Habitats --- Pro-Social Preferences --- Social Capital --- Social Cohesion --- Social Development --- Social Networks

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Afghanistan has a multitude of complementary, competing, and at times conflicting spaces for rule-setting and dispute resolution; state laws, Shari'a, and customary practices and norms are applied and enforced in varying situations, by state as well as non-state justice institutions. State justice institutions are those which represent the central government and the formal legal system. Non-state justice institutions include a range of both traditional and new community organizations, such as shuras (local councils), among others. Even significant individual positions in communities can represent non-state justice institutions, as can be the case for mullahs. This study looks at the gender dynamics of access to justice services in Afghanistan. It examines the intersecting spaces of state and non-state institutions and their respective bodies of law and norms to gain a better understanding of how they affect the choices that women make in resolving disputes through those institutions. By investigating barriers hindering women's access to justice services, identifying the most common disputes or cases that women and men bring before justice institutions, examining justice-seeking behaviors of women and men, and documenting levels of satisfaction with the process and its outcomes, the study aims to provide Afghan and international policy makers and program designers with quantitative evidence to devise approaches that address gender-based inequities in women's access to justice and justice outcomes. Another contribution of this study is to inform the World Bank-financed Justice Service Delivery Project (JSDP), which is aimed at improving access to justice by supporting both state and non-state justice institutions.

Access to justice --- Crime --- Gender --- Law and development --- Law and justice institutions --- Social conflict and violence --- Social development --- Violence against women