The Complex Nature of Policy Research Today

Abstract

This time, the Journal of Development Policy and Practice (JDPP) brings together a combination of issues that cover a broad spectrum of contemporary challenges faced by public policy and the development sector. Climate change and public debt are concerns that are transnational. A globalised world has a large crisis on its hands, with climate change in the recent past impacting the weather, cropping patterns, disease outbreaks, unpredictable droughts and surprising floods. At the same time, monetary policy in the United States impacts, almost in real time, capital markets in faraway lands. Interest rates in Japan hold the key to money supply across several borders, and profligate governments in continental Europe brought not only the continent but also all of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) group of powerful nations to near shutdown. This issue’s articles bring out the diversity of development concerns that occupy public policy across the globe today. Abusaleh Shariff’s article on the District Diversity Index—A Methodology That Promotes Evaluation and Assessment of Development and Welfare Programmes in India—makes a case for linking of communities with governance at the local level to achieve inclusive development. By highlighting Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), the bureaucracy and the community as stakeholders in the process, the article draws attention to the need to better equip existing institutions or create new ones to take on a more proactive role to bring about economic and social development. During the course of his field research, the author also finds essential programmatic items which would address improvements in education, health and material well-being. The article also discusses some disturbing issues that concern the marginalised and vulnerable minorities and their space in the policymaking dialogue. With people all over the world being confronted with the reality of climate change, a detailed sub-regional analysis of socio-economic and agriculture sectors in Karnataka by K. V. Raju, R. S. Deshpande and Satyasiba Bedamatta attempts an understanding of the socio-economic context of climate change. The study focuses on indicators that measure both the state of socio-economic development of people as well as their capacity to progress. By using an approach different Editorial