In the Name of the Poor

Neil Webster is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Development Research and Co-ordinator for the programme Local Organizations and Rural Poverty Alleviation. He has undertaken research on rural development in India for more than 20 years. His publications include: Do the Poor Matter? A Comparative Study of European Aid for Poverty Reduction in India.Lars Engberg-Pedersen is head of the International Department in the Danish Association of International Cooperation (MS). He has carried out fieldwork in Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Indonesia and Karnataka, India. His publications include work on institutional change, rural development and natural resource management.

• 1. Introduction to Political Space - Neil Webster and Lars Engberg-Pedersen2. Reading the Bolivian Landscape of Exclusion and Inclusion: The Law of Popular Participation - Anne Marie Ejdesgaard Jeppesen3. The Vicissitudes of Politics and the Resilience of the Peasantry: The Contestation and Reconfiguration of Political Space in the Peruvian Andes - Karsten Paerregaard4. Voice and Representation of the 'Poor': The Struggle over Government Aid in Western Mexico - Magdalena Villarreal5. Ambiguous Political Space: Chiefs, Land and the Poor in Rural Mozambique - Astrid Blom 6. Speaking with Space: Displacements and Claims in the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe - Amanda J. Hammar7. The Limitation of Political Space in Burkino Faso: Local Organizations, Decentralization and Poverty Reduction - Lars Engberg-Pedersen8. Where Local Organizations do not work: Problems of Poverty Reduction in Tamil Nadu, India - D. Rajesekhar9. Local Institutions in Bangladesh: An Analysis of Civil Society and Local Elections - Kirsten Westergaard and Abul Hossain10. Local Organisations and Political Space in the Forests of West Bengal - Neil Webster11. Political Agencies and Spaces - Neil Webster and Lars Engberg-Pedersen

'This welcome book enables us to see the politics of poverty reduction from the perspective of the poor themselves, rather than through the sometimes distorted lenses of development agencies, political elites and national governments, thus enabling benevolent external support to be more effectively focused.' Brian Smith, University of Exeter