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We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend to choose easy and shallow institutional...
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Governments and organizations invest huge sums of money in development interventions to explicitly address poverty and its root causes. However, a high proportion of these do not work. This is because interventions are grounded in flawed assumptions about how change happens -- change is rarely linear, yet development interventions are almost entirely based on linear planning models. Change is also characterized by unintended consequences, which are not predictable by planners and by power...
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Local peacebuilding and global accountability -- The country context--Burundi from 1999 to 2014 -- Ingos in peacebuilding--globally unaccountable, locally adaptive -- International organizations in peacebuilding--globally accountable, locally constrained -- Bilateral development donors--accountable for global targets, not local change
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A new lens on development is changing the world of international aid. The overdue recognition that development in all sectors is an inherently political process is driving aid providers to try to learn how to think and act politically. Major donors are pursuing explicitly political goals alongside their traditional socioeconomic aims and introducing more politically informed methods throughout their work. Yet these changes face an array of external and internal obstacles, from heightened...
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On June 24th under GLocal’s UNConference, “Co-creating our future stories of hope and action”, Jindra Cekan, Holta Trandafili, and Isabella Jean presented their work on sustainability evaluations and exit strategies via local voices. We chaired a 2-hour discussion session on the following topics: Sustainability of global development projects and exit from them, The importance of valuing local partners’ and participants’ voices, How to embed ex-post evaluation of sustainability into the...
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This book is intended for all who are committed to human wellbeing and who want to make our world fairer, safer and more fulfilling for everyone, especially those who are 'last'. It argues that to do better we need to know better. It provides evidence that what we believe we know in international development is often distorted or unbalanced by errors, myths, biases and blind spots. Undue weight has been attached to standardised methodologies such as randomized control trials, systematic...
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If development means good change, questions arise about what is good, and what sorts of change matter. Answers can be personally defined and redefined. The changing words, meanings and concepts of development discourse both reflect and influence what is done. The realities of the powerful tend to dominate. Drawing on experience with participatory approaches and methods which enable poor and marginalized people to express their realities, responsible well-being is proposed as a central...
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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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Into the Unknown reflects on the journey of learning, and encourages readers to learn from observation, curiosity, critical feedback, play and fun. This book will be of interest to development professionals, including academics, students, NGO workers and the staff of international agencies
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Posts about Robert Chambers written by idsppsc
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In this sequel to "Rural Development: Putting the last first" Robert Chambers argues that central issues in development have been overlooked, and that many past errors have flowed from domination by those with power.Development professionals now need new approaches and methods forinteracting, learning and knowing. Through analyzing experience - of past mistakes and myths, and of the continuing methodological revolution of PRA (participatory rural appraisal) - the author points towards...
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This Green Paper intends to review key elements of the problem that Development actors will confront as a new decade opens up ahead of us. It will articulate a solution that we believe should become an inherent feature of Development programs and initiatives. This is the outcome of an intense period of experiences and reflections in the Development space across different geographies and institutional mandates and activities, during which the Foundation has collaborated with institutions such...
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Payment by Results (PbR), where aid is disbursed conditional upon progress against a pre-agreed measure, is becoming increasingly important for various donors. There are great hopes that this innovative instrument will focus attention on ultimate outcomes and lead to greater aid effectiveness by passing the delivery risk on to recipients. However, there is very little related empirical evidence, and previous attempts to place it on a sure conceptual footing are rare and incomplete. This...
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