Religions, Poverty Reduction and Global Development Institutions

Religious traditions have always played a central role in supporting those experiencing poverty, through service delivery as well as the provision of spiritual resources that provide mechanisms for resilience at both the individual and community level. However, the fact that religions can be seen to support social structures and practices that contribute towards inequality and conflict, also underscores a role for religious traditions in creating conditions of poverty. While the Western-led modern global development institutions that have emerged since the Second World War have tended to be secular in nature, over the past decade or so there has been an apparent ‘turn to religion’ by these global development institutions, as well as in academic development studies. This reflects the realization that modernization and secularization do not necessarily go together, and that religious values and faith actors are important determinants in the drive to reduce poverty, as well as in structures and practices that underpin it. This paper traces three phases of engagement between religions and global development institutions. In phase one, the ‘pre-secular’ or the ‘integrated phase’ seen during the colonial era, religion and poverty reduction were intimately entwined, with the contemporary global development project being a legacy of this. The second phase is the ‘secular’ or the ‘fragmented’ phase, and relates to the era of the global development industry, which is founded on the normative secularist position that modernization will and indeed should lead to secularization. The third phase is characterized by the ‘turn to religion’ from the early 2000s. Drawing the three phases together and reflecting on the nature of the dynamics within the third phase, the ‘turn to religion’, this paper is underpinned by two main questions. First, what does this mean for the apparent processes of secularization? Is this evidence that they are being reversed and that we are witnessing the emergence of the ‘desecularization of development’ or of a ‘post-secular development praxis’? Second, to what extent are FBOs working in development to be defined as neo-liberalism’s ‘little platoons’—shaped by and instrumentalized to the service of secular neo-liberal social, political and economic systems, or do we need to develop a more sophisticated account that can contribute towards better policy and practice around poverty reduction

Modeling and visualizing object-oriented programs with Codecharts

Software design, development and evolution commonly require programmers to model design decisions, visualize implemented programs, and detect conflicts between design and implementation. However, common design notations rarely reconcile theoretical concerns for rigor and minimality with the practical concerns for abstraction, scalability and automated verifiability. The language of Codecharts was designed to overcome these challenges by narrowing its scope to visual specifications that articulate automatically-verifiable statements about the structure and organization of object-oriented programs. The tokens in its visual vocabulary stand for the building-blocks of object-oriented design, such as inheritance class hierarchies, sets of dynamically-bound methods, and their correlations. The formalism was tailored for those pragmatic concerns which arise from modeling class libraries and design patterns, and for visualizing programs of any size at any level of abstraction. We describe design verification, a process of proving or refuting that a Java program (i.e. its native code) conforms to the Codechart specifying it. We also describe a toolkit which supports modeling and visualization with Codecharts, as well as a fully-automated design verification tool. We conclude with empirical results which suggest gains in both speed and accuracy when using Codecharts in software design, development and evolution