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Does the way international assistance is organized make sense? Is it working as we mean it to? This book approaches these questions through the experiences of people living on the receiving side of international assistance. It reports on the ideas, insights, and analyses of almost 6,000 people across 20 countries where international aid has been provided. From such a range of locations and people, one might expect vastly different ideas and opinions. However, remarkably consistent patterns...
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Writing from diverse locations, contributors critically examine some of the key terms in current development discourse. Why should language matter to those who are doing development? Surely, there are more urgent things to do than sit around mulling over semantics?
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Quite often, "lack of political will" is identified as the culprit for poorly performing anti-corruption programmes. Yet despite the frequency with which it is used to explain unsatisfactory reform outcomes, political will remains under-defined and poorly understood. Further, assessments are often conducted retrospectively, looking back at failed programmes. By applying a model of political will that specifies a set of action-based components that are observable and measurable, and amenable...
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In this essay, Andrew Natsios gives a first-hand account of what he finds most hinders USAID—layers of bureaucracy that misguide and derail development work.
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* Geographically diverse examples of participatory governance in action* Practical case studies show how citizens can participate more fully in the political process Despite a recent wave of democratization around the world, traditional systems of representative democracy seem to be in crisis. Citizens in both the North and the South lack opportunities, rights and access to information and have expressed growing disillusionment with their governments. Ordinary citizens (especially women,...
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We are all aware of the extreme hunger and poverty that afflict the world's poor. We hear the facts, see the images on television, buy the T-shirt and are moved as individuals and governments to dig deep into our pockets. Yet what happens to all this aid? Why after 50 years and $2.3 trillion are there still children dying for lack of twelve cents medicine? Why are there so many people still living on less than $1 a day without clean water, food, sanitation, shelter, education or medicine? In...
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Significant proportions of aid already flow through the non-governmental sector, but questions are increasingly being asked about the role of NGOs and whether they can deliver on their ambitious claims. This study examines conditionality and mutual commitment between international aid donors and recipient NGOs, North and South. Fieldwork and case study material from Uganda and South Africa are used to support the authors’ contention that the fast changing aid sector has--in the context of a...
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Contributing to debates about transitions and system changes, this article has two aims. First, it uses criticisms on the multi-level perspective as stepping stones for further conceptual refinements. Second, it develops a typology of four transition pathways: transformation, reconfiguration, technological substitution, and de-alignment and re-alignment. These pathways differ in combinations of timing and nature of multi-level interactions. They are illustrated with historical examples.
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Only for the recipients of foreign aid is something akin to central planning seen as a way to achieve prosperity. The end of poverty is achieved with free markets and democracy—where decentralized “searchers” look for ways to meet individual needs—not Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The PRSPs and MDGs create lots of bureaucracy but hold no one specific agency in foreign aid accountable for any one specific task. Planners in foreign...
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What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related...
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Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider. Yet all is not lost. Robert Chambers, one of the ?glass is half full? optimists of international development, suggests that the problems can...
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This article critically reviews the role of participatory theory in managing development projects and programmes in poor countries. Participation has emerged in response to global demands for greater individual and social control over the activities of state and private agencies, and especially to the manifest failures of traditional ‘top-down’ management systems in LDCs. Claims made on behalf of these participatory methodologies are critically reviewed and a distinction is drawn between...
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This book is the first in a three-part series, about the common patterns that emerged from the poor people's experiences in many different places. Chapter 1 sets out the conceptual framework and methodology. Chapter 2 discusses poverty from the perspective of the poor. Chapter 3 examines poor people's experience with the state, and includes case studies of access to health care and education. Chapter 4 addresses the nature and quality of poor people's interactions with civil society. Chapter...
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The logical framework approach has spread enormously, including increasingly to stages of review and evaluation. Yet it has had little systematic evaluation itself. Survey of available materials indicates several recurrent failings, some less easily countered than others. In particular: focus on achievement of intended effects by intended routes makes logframes a very limiting tool in evaluation; an assumption of consensual project objectives often becomes problematic in public and...
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