Blockchain Papers

Essossinam Ali

No abstract is available for this record.

Julian Fong Chuan Yu

Insurance governance fundamentally concerns the legitimate authority to price risk, allocate capital, and absorb correlated losses. Traditional models centralize this authority in credentialed institutions, while existing decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols either replicate centralized control or treat critical actuarial parameters as exogenous inputs. This paper resolves the decentralized insurance governance trilemma by proposing the first complete theoretical framework built on a three-tier architecture of capital-backed parameter markets, extending and completing the Risk Coin framework (Yu, 2025). The architecture transforms actuarial assumptions into endogenously discovered economic variables. At the Risk-Pool Tier, insurers commit capital to bid on parameters of an MBBEFD exposure curve. Policyholders signal their private risk assessments by declaring a coverage limit and a total premium payment; from these, an implied retention multiplier is derived after market pricing. At the Catastrophe-Pool Tier, reinsurers likewise commit capital to bid on parameters for pricing optional excess-of-loss reinsurance. The core governance innovation is a recursive design: a Catastrophe Pool operates identically to a Risk Pool, with Risk Pools as its policyholders, thereby unifying the governance logic of primary and reinsurance markets under the same capital-backed mechanism. The ecosystem is anchored by the Risk-Coin-Fund Tier, which centralizes all capital—including the base risk premiums (corresponding to actuarial costs), policyholders’ voluntary supra-actuarial contributions, and professional investment reinsurance capital—and serves as the ultimate residual risk bearer. A core innovation is the consistent application of Risk Coin as a dual-purpose claim on the collective capital pool. RC tokens are issued to participants based on two principles: (1) as compensation for voluntary capital investment (the portion of declared premiums exceeding actuarial cost), and (2) as payment for risk-bearing, with the latter quantified by the market-determined exposure curve 𝐺(⋅). This creates a unified incentive system where capital commitment confers pricing authority, and better risk management preserves RC value. We formalize the mechanism and prove its core properties: incentive-compatible parameter bidding, asymptotic information aggregation, dynamic stability of parameter markets, systemic resilience via an exponential solvency guarantee for diversifiable risks, and regulatory non-intrusiveness. A pivotal theoretical extension is the introduction of a protocol-native capital coverage ratio (ρ), which emerges from the recursive markets. This ratio is governed by a target (𝜌target) and serves as a real-time, transparent solvency signal. It demonstrates how decentralized systems can achieve endogenous stability while providing a direct interface for financial oversight, effectively bridging cryptographic economics with prudential regulatory frameworks. The framework demonstrates that legitimate pricing authority and financial stability can emerge organically from cryptographic economics where tokens serve not as speculative instruments but as verifiable, economically-founded claims on underwriting capacity and capital pool ownership. By solving the governance trilemma through recursive capital-backed parameter markets, a unified RC-based capital accounting system, and a native regulatory interface, this work provides more than a new insurance mechanism—it offers a blueprint for stable, transparent, incentive-aligned, and regulatorily-compatible financial ecosystems that reimagine the foundations of risk-sharing and financial governance.

Djornele Mpiere, Kawther Tehami, Issouf Coulibaly, Caleb Mbaiogaou

Disaster risk, climate change, and unsustainable development are growing and interconnected challenges across Africa, where socio-economic vulnerabilities, environmental degradation, and institutional fragility converge to amplify risks. While the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change provide complementary global frameworks for tackling these complex issues, the true extent of their integrated implementation in the African context has remained largely unexplored. Existing research has tended to examine these frameworks in isolation, failing to capture their potential synergies and combined impact. This study fills this gap by assessing the integration of these global frameworks into national and sub-national planning and implementation processes in Africa. The study conducted a systematic review, complemented by a review of grey literature, covering the period from 2000 to 2024. The analysis combined qualitative thematic synthesis with quantitative assessment using MATLAB to identify trends, patterns, and integration gaps. Key funding reveals that while these frameworks are formally endorsed in Africa, their integration remains limited and inconsistent. Analysis shows that only 6.5% of Africa’s measurable SDG targets are on track, with 67.7% requiring acceleration and 25.8% off track for achieving the 2030 goals. Furthermore, fewer than 30% of African countries have adopted comprehensive strategies aligning DRR, climate adaptation, and SDGs. The study also confirms that fragmented financing, weak decentralization, and incompatible data systems persist as major barriers, limiting operational coherence and impact.

Clement Oteng, Aklesso Y. G. Egbendéwé

No abstract is available for this record.

Innocent Pangapanga‐Phiri, Hambulo Ngoma, Christian Thierfelder

Abstract Smallholder farming systems need climate-proofing and sustainable intensification practices such as conservation agriculture (CA), are promising options. However, there is a general perception that the adoption of CA systems in southern Africa is low. Sentinel sites, where CA has been promoted for a long time, offer forward-looking new insights. This paper, thus, takes a deep dive at Nkhotakota district of Malawi to understand what could have led to the success of CA promotion and subsequent perceived high adoption. We use survey data from 620 farmers, with 298 farmers sampled from treatment areas – known to have had contact with host farmers and 320 from a control group. Overall, 31% of the farmers in both groups adopted full CA over at least a 2-year period. We also find that about 57% of farmers in the treatment area adopted full CA and only 7% of farmers in the control areas. This highlights that longer-term CA promotion with dedicated extension support can enhance the uptake of CA practices. In essence, this paper offers a different perspective to the current narrative that CA systems are too complex and knowledge intensive to be adopted despite its long-term promotion and significant investments. However, there are some nuances: sustained adoption even in sentinel sites is neither 100% nor persistent over the long term. We find an appreciable adoption decay, showing large declines from highs of 57 and 7% in adoption for at least 2 years for treatment and control, respectively, to 12% in the treatment group and practically zero in the control when we condition full CA adoption to at least 7 years. This means that fewer farmers adopted CA for a longer period and suggests some dis-adoption over time even in sentinel sites. The key adoption enablers in the sentinel sites include the availability of training, dedicated longer-term extension support coupled with farmer experiential learning through demonstration plots managed by host farmers. Based on our findings, there is need to consistently promote CA using farmer-centric approaches that include peer-to-peer learning over long periods. This allows farmers time to experiment with different CA options, enable behavioral and lasting change. At policy level, there is need to build and strengthen farmer groups to facilitate easier access to inputs like leguminous crop seeds for farmers practicing CA and to offer market-smart incentives to induce initial adoption in the short term to facilitate sustained adoption.

Avinandan Taron, Surajit Ghosh, Giriraj Amarnath

No abstract is available for this record.

Mookie Goodson

Support for sustainable smallholder farming has long been recognized as a key to healthy and resilient food production. The ideal situation – a global community of geographically dispersed smallholders enmeshed in local economies, thereby reducing waste – is incompatible with the centralizing forces currently dominating development. One need only view the COVID�19 pandemic and associated supply chain breakdowns to see the weakness of an overly connected global food system rife with perverse incentives, namely the centralizing nature of specialization and industrialization. Crop insurance is a form of proactive disaster risk management used to diffuse risks to agricultural production across space and time with other producers. It is a form of support that countries have long endeavored to implement so that farmers avoid turning to suboptimal traditional risk coping mechanisms. Notwithstanding, traditional insurance programs have been plagued by well-documented challenges creating a severe gap in service offerings, especially among smallholders in the developing world. As climate change raises agricultural risks through heightened uncertainty, it is increasingly necessary to augment the security of smallholder farms through closing the coverage gap. Fortunately, recent technological advancements have improved the prospect of overcoming barriers to reaching smallholders. Combining the decreasing cost and increasing sophistication of remote sensing and satellite technology with smart contracts and other innovations enabled by distributed ledger technology has the potential address many of the challenges of traditional insurance provision. Blockchain technology affords this potential through providing architecture to reduce transaction costs, increase trust and access, and deepen opportunities for reinsurance. The transparency and immutability of blockchain engenders a unique coordinating capability that allows for benefits superior to other organizing instruments. Despite limitations concerning the current state and maturity of blockchain technology, the pace and direction of development offer promise for near-term composability with key systems and functionality. This research uses a literature review to trace historical challenges in providing crop insurance and analyzes the opportunity for blockchain to mitigate them. It focuses on evaluating the potential to bolster the provision and uptake of a particular type of crop insurance – index�based microinsurance – through the combination of blockchain technology and public-private partnerships. The aim is to provide an analysis of how blockchain applications can improve existing crop microinsurance schemes and a guideline for how public-private partnerships should be organized to optimize implementation. Furthermore, this research holds in mind the ultimate goal of creating true at cost peer-to-peer index-based crop insurance. That is, after initial investment, coordination, and monitoring by a public-private partnership to overcome startup barriers, it is possible, and optimal, to create new regional smallholder insurance regimes running on decentralized infrastructure.

Runhuan Feng, Chongda Liu, Stephen Taylor

No abstract is available for this record.

Reimund Schwarze, Oleksandr Sushchenko

Climate insurance has become a crucial issue due to the increasing number of climate-related catastrophic events and the associated losses for the economy in general and insurance companies in particular. The extremely hot and dry summers of 2018 and 2019 in some European countries highlighted existing weaknesses in European agricultural insurance mechanisms, with farmers having to wait for months before compensation payments could be made. Our paper compares features of yield-based insurance and index-based insurance (IBI) in agriculture in the light of new developments and trends in information technology (IT). The results show that applying Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) in combination with IBI could not only resolve existing problems but also facilitate the development of innovative risk management tools under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020 reform.

Madhubala Maurya

In this chapter, I have analyzed economic thoughts of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, mainly economic ideas reflected in his writings such as, ‘The Problem of Rupee: Its origin and its solution’, ‘The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralization of imperial finance’, It can be said that Indian economy at present is facing many problems similar to that at the time of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as instability of money leading to inflation, its socioeconomic implications and its unequal effects on various strata of society, uneconomical public expenditure and rising fiscal deficits, increasing inequalities of income and wealth, and so on. Are Ambedkar’s economic thoughts relevant to understand these problems as well as to provide its solutions? Analyzing his economic ideology, it can be said that India could have been more inclusive if his ideas had been followed in its true spirit. So we can say that India needs to follow his economic ideology in her short term as well as long term economic planning and policy making to shape Inclusive India.

Вікторія Вострякова, M. Lakshmi Swarupa, Олена Рубаненко, Sree Lakshmi Gundebommu

No abstract is available for this record.

Thushara Kamalrathne, Dilanthi Amaratunga, Richard Haigh

The entire world is in an unprecedented dysfunction since 11 th March 2020 when the WHO declared a global pandemic as unprecedented health and socioeconomic issues emerged with the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated 53 coronavirus diseases (COVID-19). This challenging pandemic has created a greater shock on regular activities of every social strata resulting in a significant decline in economic growth and health sector progression. A serious wearing down of infrastructure, human resources and emergency response in the public health sector was visible in many countries, irrespective of the level of economic and social development. In this backdrop, many scholars are exploring appropriate and effective resilient systems to govern pandemic risks in varied settings. It is observed that Sri Lanka's pandemic response is not properly embedded with the country's Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) framework and in many aspects, it is heavily reliant on the public health sector authority. In further elaborating the identified gap, this study explored many possible policy amalgamations that can be considered to improve the effectiveness of pandemic response activities at sub-national levels in Sri Lanka. Many government authorities, universities, volunteer agencies including NGOs, private sector organisations and the community can be efficiently integrated into pandemic response activities, vesting necessary responsibilities and authority for contingency and financial decision making at the sub-national level. This system further ensures the unique and contextual approach in pandemic response at the Divisional Secretariat level of each sub-region, which consists of diverse cultures. A large number of public officers are employed at District Secretary (DS) level in different areas of work such as finance, statistic and information, development, public health, livelihood, legal, police, child protection and probation, social welfare, elderly care, poverty alleviation, etc. within the public administration protocol adopted in Sri Lanka. These official positions can also be effectively integrated with the pandemic preparedness and response mechanisms at sub-national level.

Alexandra Panman, Ian Madison, Nyambiri Nanai Kimacha, Jean‐Benoît Falisse

Abstract This paper explores the role of savings groups in resilience to urban climate-related disasters. Savings groups are a rapidly growing phenomenon in Africa. They are decentralized, non-institutional groups that provide millions of people excluded from the formal banking sector with a trusted, accessible, and relatively simple source of microfinance. Yet there is little work on the impacts of savings groups on resilience to disasters. In this paper, we use a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence from Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) to shed new light on the role that savings groups play in helping households cope with climate-related shocks. Drawing on new data, we show that approximately one-quarter of households have at least one member in a group, and that these households recover from flood events faster than those who do not. We further argue that the structure of savings groups allows for considerable group oversight, reducing the high costs of monitoring and sanctioning that often undermine cooperative engagement in urban areas. This makes the savings group model a uniquely flexible form of financing that is well adapted to helping households cope with shocks such as repeated flooding. In addition to this, we posit that they may provide a foundation for community initiatives focusing on preventative action.

Oleksandr Sushchenko, Reimund Schwarze

Climate insurance is already a hot topic due to the increased number of climate-related catastrophic events accompanied by associated losses for the economy in general and insurance companies, in particular. The extremely hot and dry summer of 2018 in some European countries highlighted existing weaknesses of the agricultural insurance mechanisms in Europe, where the farmers had to wait for months before compensation payments could bemade. Our paper aims to compare features of the yield-based insurance2and the index-based insurance (IBI)3in agriculture in the light of new developments and trends in information technologies (IT). The results show that an application of the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in combination with IBI could not only resolve existing problems, but also facilitate development of the innovative insurance mechanisms at the EU level –providing effective protection against climate-related risks and preventing a systemic risk escalation

Hang Xiong, Tobias Dalhaus, Puqing Wang, Jiajin Huang

The blockchain is a ledger of accounts and transactions that are written and stored by all participants. It promises a reliable source of truth about the state of farms, inventories and contracts in agriculture, where the collection of such information is often incredibly costly. The blockchain technology can track the provenance of food and thus helps create trustworthy food supply chains and build trust between producers and consumers. As a trusted way of storing data, it facilitates the use of data-driven technologies to make farming smarter. In addition, jointly used with smart contracts, it allows timely payments between stakeholders that can be triggered by data changes appearing in the blockchain This article examines the applications of blockchain technology in food supply chains, agricultural insurance, smart farming, transactions of agricultural products for both theoretical and practical perspectives. We also discuss the challenges of recording transactions made by smallholder farmers and creating the ecosystem for utilizing the blockchain technology in the food and agriculture sector.

T.Q. Nguyen, Ananta Kumar Das, L. Tran

Agriculture insurance has developed across emerging economies in South East Asia (SEA). New products are introduced to farmers to lessen financial losses of crops with low commercialised. Drought-based crop insurance has launched in some SEA countries to protect farmers from extreme weather events. The evaluation process for insurance value coverage is costly and lengthy. Farmer participation in crop insurance schemes, hence, remains low. Additionally, while dealing with extreme events, stated-owned irrigation water companies with complex bureaucratic systems delay decisions. This adds a heavy toll on farmers' shoulders when facing drought. To solve these problems, a blockchain-based smart contract linking with oracle services to ensure asymmetric information is proposed to reduce the evaluation costs and lengthy process of evaluating compensation is a. Currently, building smart contract that oracles can push required information to is not used in the case of agricultural insurance. Hence, we proposed a blockchain-based smart contract framework that applies to weather-based index insurance. We selected NEO for our experiment due to its easy access tokens. While developing a smart contract on NEO, we designed 5 functions that can be triggered if certain conditions are met and built a virtual oracles server. This initial experiment promised a scalable and trusted platform that can lessen farmers' potential damages and reduce their vulnerability.

Tao Bian, Zhong‐Ping Jiang

This paper presents a new theory, known as robust dynamic programming, for a class of continuous-time dynamical systems. Different from traditional dynamic programming (DP) methods, this new theory serves as a fundamental tool to analyze the robustness of DP algorithms, and, in particular, to develop novel adaptive optimal control and reinforcement learning methods. In order to demonstrate the potential of this new framework, two illustrative applications in the fields of stochastic and decentralized optimal control are presented. Two numerical examples arising from both finance and engineering industries are also given, along with several possible extensions of the proposed framework.

Emil Teșliuc, Lucian Pop, Margaret Grosh, Ruslan Yemtsov

Outlines the institutional and financing arrangements of the last-resort income support (LRIS) programs in seven country cases and distills lessons from the programs’ various approaches to administrative and financial decentralization. The implementation arrangements of LRIS programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia were shaped, to different degrees, by two factors: (1) the legacy of the social protection systems of the former socialist regimes and (2) the decentralization reforms affecting all transition countries during the 1990s. Most countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region have several tiers of administration involved in the management and implementation of LRIS programs, and in general, the institutional map of the programs is complex. An important issue in almost all countries reviewed in this study is the lack of clear procedures for program administration. Lessons include a prominent warning against decentralized funding, which runs the risk of creating inequities and may lead to serious resource constraints.

Sandeep Tambe, M. L. Arrawatia, Anil K. Ganeriwala

Rural development is a vast sector that encompasses infrastructure creation, sustainable livelihoods, and decentralized governance. Mountain landscapes, with their inherent constraints of remoteness, sensitive ecosystem, and marginality, pose unique challenges to rural development. We undertook an assessment of the evolution of development themes and rural development progress made in the mountain state of Sikkim over the past decade. We found that a rapidly growing national economy has facilitated a 4-fold rise in investment in key rural development subsectors in Sikkim over the past 5 years. This significant enhancement in financial investment, coupled with good governance and innovative policies, has ensured that human development indicators, along with social infrastructure creation, have shown impressive progress. Setting up village cluster-level support offices to strengthen governance, transforming regular programs to mission mode with great political determination by adopting a saturation approach, financing improved earthquake-resistant housing for poor households, and promoting climate change adaption measures to enhance rural water security are some of the innovative approaches that have the potential to be transferred to other mountain areas. We propose a further expansion of capacities and economic opportunities in rural areas by prioritizing the self-employment sector, by expanding the nonfarm rural economy, youth training and placement, and continuing commitment to strengthening democratic institutions and procedures to ensure more rapid and inclusive growth of the rural economy.

Wei Gao

Constructing a multi-level rural finance system is the hardcore for the new countryside construction.Agriculture insurance has played an irreplaceable role in decentralization and debasing the systematic risks of agriculture finance system.In response to the present absence of agriculture insurance laws and provisions,it's compulsory for China to persist in the correct legislation rule,and gradually consummate agriculture insurance legislation so as to accelerate the promotion of new countryside construction.

Koko Warner, Georg Ch. Pflug, Leslie Martin, J. Linnerooth‐Bayer · 6 authors

This report was commissioned by the Natural Disasters Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue. This report constitutes Phase 2 of this project. While the first phase of the study discusses the components of a national system, the second focuses on instruments for financing reconstruction after a disaster. The research compares centralized, government-directed management systems with those that are localized and decentralized, and also analyzes the factors affecting the financial and political stability of alternative approaches. As natural disasters may result in major resource gaps for governments facing the task of financing reconstruction, the report presents case studies of four countries-Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador-to highlight the various policy options. Alternative sources of ex ante funding are identified, including reserve funds, contingent credit, and insurance. These innovative methods of funding are compared with ex post funding possibilities through international aid, loan diversions and increased external debt, budget reallocations, and tax increases.

Renzo Jiménez Sotelo

The paper argues that agricultural loans granted by commercial banks in Peru are not being properly structured because they have not adequately considered the additional risks faced regarding commercial loans. Therefore, in order to improve their credit practices and policies, they require (i) to understand in detail the functioning of production and price formation processes in agricultural markets and (ii) to seek adequate measures to cover the risks that are not controllable by them or by farmers. The first aspect aims to reduce existing information asymmetries to contribute to lower interest rates and better structure financing, especially with credits in national currency indexed to inflation for agricultural loans that are not directed to exports. The second aspect is to manage price risk with the access to an efficient and decentralized agricultural commodity exchange, while climatic and biological risks should be covered by agricultural insurances.

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a