This study examines whether the existing aid processes widely used by donors and NGOs are effective in tackling poverty and exclusion and shows how the fast changing aid sector has encouraged the mainstreaming of a managerial approach that does not admit of any analysis of power relations or cultural diversity.
Explores the current patterns of donor-giving to UK nongovernmental organizations, how their work is influenced by the conditions from donors, and what drives the adoption of managerial approaches to development. Considers local partnerships, exemplified by case studies from Uganda and South Africa.
The Aid Triangle focuses on the human dynamics of international aid and illustrates how the aid system incorporates power relationships, and therefore relationships of dominance. Using the concept of a triangle of dominance, justice and identity, this timely work explains how the experience of injustice is both a challenge and a stimulus to personal, community and national identity, and how such identities underlie the human potential that international aid should seek to enrich. This insightful new critique provides for the reader an innovative and constructive framework for producing more empowering and more effective aid.
"This book furthers the scholarly understanding of SCM in disaster relief, particularly establishing the central role of logistics in averting and limiting unnecessary hardships"--Provided by publisher.
Winner of the 2015 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission? Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”
This book is about the institutions, incentives and constraints that guide the behaviour of people and organizations involved in the implementation of foreign aid programmes. While traditional performance studies tend to focus almost exclusively on the policies and institutions in recipient countries, this book looks at incentives in the entire chain of organizations involved in the delivery of foreign aid, from donor governments and agencies to consultants, experts and other intermediaries. Four aspects of foreign aid delivery are examined in detail: incentives inside donor agencies, the interaction of subcontractors with recipient organizations, incentives inside recipient country institutions, and biases in aid performance monitoring systems.
Psychology of Aid provides an original, psychological approach to development studies, focusing as it does on the social aspects of aid and the motivational foundations. Designed as a practical tool for looking at development projects in a new and structured way, the authors bring many of the social apsects of development and aid together in one book; from the needs of the Northern donor to the public tensions between Third World host and foreign development agencies.
International aid is about much more than money. The UN Millennium Development Goals and major events like Live 8 have focused the world spotlight on issues of poverty relief and aid like never before, but have not concentrated on the quality of relationships that can make aid succeed or fail. This book, authored by an internationally renowned group of aid practitioners, reveals the contradictions and challenges involved in forging these relationships. International development organizations combine the unbridled play of power and arrogant amnesia with serious and innovative efforts to create a more democratic world, to support transformative learning and to strengthen accountability. The book explores recent attempts from within aid agencies to go against the current flow of top-down results based management by learning how to build lasting partnerships that transfer power to those at the receiving end of aid. More than just a critique, the authors offer a practical framework for understanding relationships in the international aid system and look at the relevance of organizational learning theory, which is widely used in business.
This book explores what difference development aid has made to the size, complexity, style of functioning, values and future direction of the NGO sector in India. It does this, first, by giving a comprehensive documentation of the experience of Indian NGOs with foreign aid since Independence. Simultaneously, it also analyses, in a broad historical perspective, some of the issues which are the subject of contemporary debate regarding the voluntary sector and aid, such as who decides ‘what’ is development and ‘how’ it should be brought about; whether foreign donors have hidden agendas, and if their aid amounts to cultural imperialism; and whether aid has made NGOs more self-reliant. The book also looks at the tripartite relationship between NGOs, donors, and governments, examining, for instance, whether the government is justified in imposing restrictions on receipt of funds by NGOs on the grounds that terrorist activities and religiously motivated communal strife are often financed with funds from abroad, with NGOs being used as fronts for both.