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Here is a summary of the topics and research questions of the articles you will find in the September edition of Development Policy Review.

• Environmental behaviour of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. What are the drivers, barriers, and incentives of SMEs in adopting environmental practices and reporting in Malaysia? Angathevar Baskaran, V. G. R. Chandran, and Divyaasiny Rajaghantham found that SMEs have adopted several environmental practices, and a few have already engaged in environmental reporting, albeit at varying levels. The perceived reputation-enhancing and knowledge-disseminating results are a strong incentive for SMEs.

• Knowledge/science and policy co-production in environmental governance in Indonesia. Muhammad Alif K. Sahide and co-authors analyse the politics among the large number of actors shaping ideas that drive environmental policy in Indonesia.

• Value-chain research and development (Open Access). Jason Donovan and Dietmar Stoian analyse how researchers and practitioners have shaped discussions on market-based development approaches.

• Women in the informal economy. In this OA article, Yogesh Ghore, Brad Long, Zeynep Ozkok and Derin Derici show how the perspective of women, informal sector workers, representing some of the most marginalized workers in society, informs and improves our understanding of human capital and its development and utilization.

• Economic relationship between labour informality and homicides. In the analysis of the relationship between the labour market and crime, the variable that comes from the labour market is generally the unemployment rate. However, there are labour market characteristics that are more significant than unemployment, such as labour informality, in the context of violent crime in low-income and middle-income countries. Magaly Faride Herrera Giraldo, Carlos Giovanni González Espitia and Héctor Ochoa Díaz estimate the spatial and economic relationship between homicides and labour informality by neighbourhood in Cali, the city with the highest homicide rate currently and historically in Colombia.

• Access to water, sanitation and hygiene and impact on children’s health. In their article, Tri Mulyaningsih and co-authors analyse the status of early childhood health in Indonesia by measuring an Early Childhood Health Index and by examining the role of access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene in improving children's health.

• Menstrual health and hygiene management in Assam. Daisy Dutta, Chhanda Chakraborti, and Pulak Mishra explore the cultural celebration of menarche and its various lesser-known details. The article aims to find out whether the celebration of menarche could be an opportunity to improve adolescent girls' menstrual health.

• Rural market imperfections in India. A longstanding and repeated observation in India is that land productivity is inversely related to farm size, an inverse relation that may well indicate imperfectly functioning land, labour, and credit markets. C. S. C. Sekhar and Namrata Thapa revisit the inverse relation, i.e. whether market imperfections still prevail in India, particularly in output, input, factor, and credit markets.

• Mobile money taxation and informal workers: Ghana’s E-levy. Nana Akua Anyidoho, Max Gallien, Mike Rogan, and Vanessa van den Boogaard assess how informal workers in Accra, Ghana, use mobile money and how they perceive Ghana's Electronic Transfer Levy (E-levy), introduced in May 2022. This study explores the equity implications of the tax, as the policy was explicitly justified as a way of taxing the informal economy but also includes measures to limit the tax burden on lower-income groups.

• Legal knowledge and child labour in Nepal. Tushi Baul and Susan L. Ostermann investigate whether legal knowledge about minimum age standards among parents supplying, and employers demanding, child labour makes a difference to child labour practices in Nepal.

• Disaster risk reduction (DDR) and development assistance. Suyeon Lee identifies trends and patterns as well as limitations in the DRR mainstreaming process in their development cooperation programmes.