3 Scientific objectives, as responses to 3 main issues

Issue #1 : The absence of a general picture of how DI are managed and the nonexistence of a coherent corpus of scientific knowledge on this particular type of economic process. 
Objective 1 : Give a general and comparative visibility to the recent development/neo-liberal configuration of DI : a global  picture of this unknown sector of the development field will be provided on the base of a literature review, including in-depth analysis of DI projects implemented worldwide

Issue # 2: The poor understanding of how –practically- DI projects are implemented, managed and perceived by stakeholders and the global lack of request for results in the development realm.                               
Objective 2:  Understand how DI are managed by communities and used by individuals: this will be achieved through a cross analysis of data on local management committees and household budgets, gathered over three years, in three study sites. 

Issue # 3: The absence –in monitoring and assessment practices used by policy-makers– of tools integrating local perceptions of -taken-for-granted- concepts such as “development”, “well-being” and “social sustainability”. 
Objective 3: Seek to improve policies through the development of better fitted monitoring tools. Perceptions built by locals about the above mentioned notions will be collected and analyzed; locally sound criteria and indicators of development and well-being will be co-built with local people, using, field research results and tested in the 3 survey sites.   

In doing so, DI will be approached from a completely new multidisciplinary perspective. Scientific tools usually employed for assessing development programs will be enriched with tools inherited from the Anthropology of Economy and the Social Economy as well as with those built in the context of recent theories on well-being. 

Equally, by looking at topics which are usually ignored in the current classical economic approach or seen as "absurd" from a western point of view (goods exchanged for mere prestige or unproductive expenditure), this research will also focus on methodological problems unresolved so far. 

Finally, our research also presents a strong applied commitment as it will lay the groundwork for a future extended research implying a broad collaboration between academic, policy-makers and civil society representatives who will work on further improving criteria and indicators within assessment and monitoring policy framework.