Cullather has written an engrossing history of how the United States government, along with private philanthropies like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, aimed to win the hearts and bodies of ...rural Asia in the post World War II decades by crafting strategies to develop and modernize agriculture and the peasant’s way of life. He explains how America used foreign aid, modernization theory, nutrition, statistics, and technology, to try to reconstruct the social and political order of the decolonized and disadvantaged countries in the region. Initially the issue of how best to intervene in Asia’s rural countryside was contentious, with clashing visions of development and humanitarian aid being argued throughout the 50’s and 60’s. Ultimately, one strategy displaced all the others—the “Green Revolution" and the ability to feed millions through the miracle of genetically designed dwarf strains of grain and rice. Cullather provides a detailed explanation of how this policy of feeding Asian peasants became the single strategy of “progress" adopted by the US rather than industrialization or land reform. As current controversy swirls about how best to aid Africa in the crisis of nation-building, famine, and a poverty-stricken peasantry, the story of the U.S. interventions in Asia become starkly relevant.
The wave of neoliberal economic reforms in the developing world since the 1980s has been regarded as the result of both severe economic crises and policy pressures from global financial institutions ...such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using comparative evidence from the initiation and implementation of IMF programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe, From Economic Crisis to Reform shows that economic crises do not necessarily persuade governments to adopt IMF-style economic policies. Instead, ideology, interests, and institutions, at both the international and domestic levels, mediate responses to such crises.
Offering a clear and logical analysis of the panoply of European Union aid policies and a theoretically informed evaluation of their operation, Patrick Holden contends that the major thrust of EU aid ...policy is an effort to augment the EU's structural power through targeted political and economic liberalization. Although historically grounded, this book concentrates on EU aid to key world regions in the 21st century. As such, it provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking account of EU aid policy and will be of interest to a wide range of academics, students and policy makers.
Medical humanitarianism-medical and other health-related initiatives undertaken in conditions born of conflict, neglect, or disaster -has a prominent and growing presence in international ...development, global health, and human security interventions.Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practicefeatures twelve essays that fold back the curtains on the individual experiences, institutional practices, and cultural forces that shape humanitarian practice.
Contributors offer vivid and often dramatic insights into the experiences of local humanitarian workers in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas, national doctors coping with influxes of foreign humanitarian volunteers in Haiti, military doctors working for the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and human rights-oriented volunteers within the Israeli medical bureaucracy. They analyze our contested understanding of lethal violence in Darfur, food crises responses in Niger, humanitarian knowledge in Ugandan IDP camps, and humanitarian departures in Liberia. They depict the local dynamics of healthcare delivery work to alleviate human suffering in Somali areas of Ethiopia, the emergency metaphors of global health campaigns from Ghana to war-torn Sudan, the fraught negotiations of humanitarians with strong state institutions in Indonesia, and the ambiguous character of research ethics espoused by missions in Sierra Leone. In providing well-grounded case studies,Medical Humanitarianismwill engage both scholars and practitioners working at the interface of humanitarian medicine, global health interventions, and the social sciences. They challenge the reader to reach a more critical and compassionate understanding of humanitarian assistance.
Contributors:Sharon Abramowitz, Tim Allen, Ilil Benjamin, Lauren Carruth, Mary Jo DelVecchio-Good, Alex de Waal, Byron J. Good, Stuart Gordon, Jesse Hession Grayman, Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, Peter Locke, Amy Moran-Thomas, Patricia Omidian, Catherine Panter-Brick, Peter Piot, Peter Redfield, Laura Wagner
The U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan mobilized troops, funds, and people on an international level not seen since World War II. Hundreds of thousands of individuals and tens of billions of ...dollars flowed into the country. But what was gained for Afghanistan—or for the international community that footed the bill? Why did development money not lead to more development? Why did a military presence make things more dangerous? Through the stories of four individuals—an ambassador, a Navy SEAL, a young Afghan businessman, and a wind energy engineer—Noah Coburn weaves a vivid account of the challenges and contradictions of life during the intervention. Looking particularly at the communities around Bagram Airbase, this ethnography considers how Afghans viewed and attempted to use the intervention and how those at the base tried to understand the communities around them. These compelling stories step outside the tired paradigms of 'unruly' Afghan tribes, an effective Taliban resistance, and a corrupt Karzai government to show how the intervention became an entity unto itself, one doomed to collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy and contradictory intentions.
Impact evaluation has grown more popular as a method for identifying the causal links between interventions and outcomes. These kind of evaluations assess changes that can be attributed to a ...particular intervention. Both innovations in statistical methods and the demand for evaluations that can measure such development results are increasing. The World Bank Group is the largest producer of impact evaluations among all development institutions. Thus, IEG has evaluated the relevance, quality, and influence of World Bank and IFC impact evaluations. IEG finds that the World Bank Group portfolio of impact evaluations is largely aligned with sector strategies and project objectives. Selection and coordination of impact evaluations has been improving. Most World Bank impact evaluations meet either medium or high quality standards, and about half of IFC impact evaluations did. Issues related to funding, staff capacity, and incentives, however, constrain the scope and coverage of impact evaluations in the Bank Group. IEG makes five recommendations to strengthen the Bank Groups impact evaluation efforts, revolving around consistency, coordination, quality standards, and ensuring operational relevance. Both development and evaluation professionals will find valuable lessons in this evaluation. There are real benefits from impact evaluations, including their influence on development practices through contributions to project assessment and design of future projects. Thus, development practitioners engaged in designing projects, evaluators interestedin using similar methodology, and the general evaluation community will be able to use the lessons IEG sets out in this report.
