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Albert Hirschman considered <i>Development Projects Observed</i> a natural sequel to his earlier work. As Hirschman put it to an old acquaintance at the World Bank, his previous books identified the inner and often hidden mechanisms of development sequences: “Having worked out a few basic hypotheses …, I could perhaps test them (and hit on some new ones) by looking at Bank-financed projects that have had enough time to give rise to such sequences.”¹ But as much as it appeared as the logical...
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By Alan Hudson, Executive Director, Global Integrity, July 26, 2016 Politics matters. Context too. And blueprints have limited value. Our strategy is based on these insights, so we’re totally on board. A World Development Report (WDR) that puts power and politics...
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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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More and more global aid agencies believe they should replace one-size-fits-all best practices with locally tailored solutions, but they must shift from just agreeing to “go local” to preparing development experts for the task by taking on three major problems with their internal practices.
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My essay considers a central problem of reinventing foreign aid in the twenty-first century: how to reform aid agencies to enable a “best-fit” approach to development assistance. For the past decades, the aid community has tried to transplant best practices from the developed world to the developing world. Increasingly, however, it is recognized that copying best practices does not work and may even backfire; rather, aid programs work best when they are tailored to local contexts. Yet while...
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As the international humanitarian system faces a crisis of legitimacy, the Humanitarian Policy Group’s landmark report proposes a new model of humanitarian action.
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Part of the popular, reissued NoNonsense series from New Internationalist'Development' is often misunderstood and can embrace everything from building a large dam to planting trees. The idea can often mask confusion, contradiction, deceit and corruption. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know what development actually is. It covers all the key themes and critically suggests ways to bring the poor and marginalised into the process.
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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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Over the last half century, repeated calls for adaptive learning in development suggests two things: many practitioners are working in complex situations that may benefit from flexible approaches, and such approaches can be difficult to apply in practice. • Complexity thinking can offer useful recommendations on how to take advantage of distributed capacities, joint interpretation of problems and learning through experimentation in complex development programmes. • However, these...
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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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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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