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 to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. In their analysis, the authors apply the theoretical insights of the new institutional economics to several settings. First, they investigate the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, the authors use cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Throughout the book, the authors offer suggestions about how to improve aid's effectiveness. These suggestions include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation processes of development assistance programs. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199278849/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Krister Andersson, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, Indiana University Matthew R. Auer, Associate Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Roy Gardner, Professor of Economics, Indiana University Clark C. Gibson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California Elinor Ostrom, Professor of Government, Indiana University Sujai Shivakumar, National Research Council, Washington D.C. Christopher J. Waller, Chair of Economics, University of Notre Dame
Daniel Immerwahr tells how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. He also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, ...have been tried before, alongside grander moderization schemes—with often disastrous consequences as self-help gave way to crushing local oppression.
How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar ...discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.
Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts."
In a substantial new introduction, Escobar reviews debates on globalization and postdevelopment since the book's original publication in 1995 and argues that the concept of postdevelopment needs to be redefined to meet today's significantly new conditions. He then calls for the development of a field of "pluriversal studies," which he illustrates with examples from recent Latin American movements.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book presents methods to evaluate sustainable development using economic tools. The focus on sustainable development takes the reader beyond ...economic growth to encompass inclusion, environmental stewardship and good governance. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for outcomes. In illustrating the SDGs, the book employs three evaluation approaches: impact evaluation, cost-benefit analysis and objectives-based evaluation. The innovation lies in connecting evaluation tools with economics. Inclusion, environmental care and good governance, thought of as “wicked problems”, are given centre stage. The book uses case studies to show the application of evaluation tools. It offers guidance to evaluation practitioners, students of development and policymakers. The basic message is that evaluation comes to life when its links with socio-economic, environmental, and governance policies are capitalized on.
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But ...what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach.
The quest for prosperity Lin, Justin Yifu; Lin, Justin Yifu
2012., 20141012, 2014, 2012-09-09, 2015-01-01, 20120101
eBook
How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn't do for the poor world. InThe Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu ...Lin-the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank-focuses on what developing nations can do to help themselves. Lin examines how the countries that have succeeded in developing their own economies have actually done it. Interwoven with insights, observations, and stories from Lin's travels as chief economist of the World Bank and his reflections on China's rise, this book provides a road map and hope for those countries engaged in their own quest for prosperity.
As a community-based organization in the mountains of south-central Puerto Rico, Casa Pueblo implements alternatives to extractive capitalism that do not rely on governments or distant non-profits. ...In this book, Alexis Massol González, Casa Pueblo’s founder, reflects on its extraordinary forty-year history of experiments with community self-governance. Massol-González received the prestigious Goldman Prize (popularly known as the Green Nobel) for the organization’s initiatives to protect the environment, affirm cultural and human values, and create sustainable economic alternatives. This collective translation was undertaken in the spirit of the organization and offers a chronological account of Casa Pueblo’s evolution from a small group of concerned citizens to an internationally recognized model for activism.
Mobilizing for Development tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state ...paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. Looney's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.
