As of March 2026, this website is no longer being updated. I now work mainly on climate issues, especially in Brighton and Hove, and new work can be found on the website of Climate:Change, our independent think-tank on socially inclusive action in the City: www.climatechangebh.org.uk.
Meanwhile, however, this website has over 850 entries, mostly representing my work on international development from 2010-2025. Among much else, there are over 50 book reviews, more than 20 papers and training cases on bridging research and policy and on managing think-tanks, nearly 100 articles on climate change, and many papers on other topics, including aid, food security and nutrition, and the future of international development. See ‘Topics and Themes’ for more details. I can be reached at sm@simonmaxwell.net.
New Trends in Development Thinking and Implications for Agriculture
New Trends in Development Thinking and Implications for Agriculture, (with R. Percey), in K. Stamoulis (ed) Food, Agriculture and Rural Development: Current and Emerging Issues for Economic Analysis and Policy Research. FAO: Rome. June 2001
The food, agriculture and rural development sectors (FARD) have a symbiotic relationship with development more generally, providing livelihoods for poor people in rural areas, but also contributing foreign exchange, food for the cities, raw materials, a market for industry, and an investible surplus for the country as a whole. By the same token, thinking about FARD has had a symbiotic relationship with wider thinking about development, contributing many ideas about growth, distribution, and poverty reduction, and also receiving many ideas in return. These relationships justify attention to context in a volume dealing with future priorities for research in food, agriculture and rural development.
In tackling context, the paper deals mainly with thinking about development, rather than with changes in the objective reality confronting the FARD sectors. However, a small deck-clearing operation examines whether the changes experienced and to come constitute slow trends or substantial discontinuities. Beyond that, the paper identifies a current conventional wisdom on FARD and then tests it against themes in current thinking about development. From a long list of candidates, the paper focuses particularly on thinking about
- poverty, social exclusion and sustainable livelihoods,
- globalization,
- the `post-Washington Consensus', and
- aid.
The paper ends with a summary of the implications for economic and policy research in the FARD sectors..... (for full article see link above)