[PDF] Challenging The Aid Paradigm eBook

Author : J. Sörensen
Publisher : Springer
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 21,52 MB
Release : 2015-12-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0230277284

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Challenging the Aid Paradigm critically examines central aspects of Western international aid policy, while at the same time exploring non-western, especially Chinese, aid and assesses to what extent these may be competitive or complementary.

Author : Pablo Yanguas
Publisher : Zed Books Ltd.
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 21,90 MB
Release : 2018-02-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1783609362

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Foreign aid is about charity. International development is about technical fixes. At least that is what we, as donor publics, are constantly told. The result is a highly dysfunctional aid system which mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation and gets attacked across the political spectrum, with the right claiming we spend too much, and the left that we don't spend enough. The reality, as Yanguas argues in this highly provocative book, is that aid isn't – or at least shouldn't be – about levels of spending, nor interventions shackled to vague notions of ‘accountability’ and ‘ownership’. Instead, a different approach is possible, one that acknowledges aid as being about struggle, about taking sides, about politics. It is an approach that has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world, providing political coverage for local reformers to open up spaces for change. Drawing on a variety of convention-defying stories from a variety of countries – from Britain to the US, Sierra Leone to Honduras – Yanguas provides an eye-opening account of what we really mean when we talk about aid.

Author : Jonathan Glennie
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 18,53 MB
Release : 2020-11-29
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1000261263

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International cooperation has never been more needed, but the current system of “aid” is outdated and ineffective. The Future of Aid calls for a wholesale restructuring of the aid project, a totally new approach fit for the challenges of the 21st century: Global Public Investment. Across the world, billions of people are struggling to get by in unequal and unsustainable societies, and international public finance, which should be part of the answer, is woefully deficient. Engagingly written by a well-known expert in the field, The Future of Aid calls for a series of paradigm shifts. From a narrow focus on poverty to a broader attack on inequality and sustainability. From seeing international public money as a temporary last resort, to valuing it as a permanent force for good. From North-South transfers to a collective effort, with all paying in and all benefitting. From outdated post-colonial institutions to representative decision-making. From the othering and patronising language of “foreign aid”, to the empowering concept of Global Public Investment. Ten years ago, in The Trouble with Aid, Jonathan Glennie highlighted the dangers of aid dependency and the importance of looking beyond aid. Now he calls for a revolution in the way that we think about the role of public money to back up our ambitious global objectives. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, it is time for a new era of internationalism.

Author : Dambisa Moyo
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 21,26 MB
Release : 2009-03-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781429954259

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In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse. In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the "need" for more aid. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance. Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.

Author : Ben Ramalingam
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 471 pages
File Size : 48,49 MB
Release : 2013-10-25
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0191503436

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Many agree that the foreign aid system - which today involves virtually every nation on earth - needs drastic change. But there is much conflict as to what should be done. In Aid on the Edge of Chaos, Ben Ramalingam argues that what is most needed is the creative and innovative transformation of how aid works. Foreign aid today is dominated by linear, mechanistic ideas that emerged from early twentieth century industry, and are ill-suited to the world we face today. The problems and systems aid agencies deal with on a daily basis have more in common with ecosystems than machines: they are interconnected, diverse, and dynamic; they cannot be just simply re-engineered or fixed. Outside of aid, social scientists, economists, business leaders, and policy makers have started applying innovative and scientific approaches to such problems, informed by ideas from the 'new science' of complex adaptive systems. Inspired by these efforts, aid practitioners and researchers have started experimenting with such approaches in their own work. This book showcases the experiences, insights, and often remarkable results of innovative thinkers and practitioners who are working to bring these approaches into the mainstream of aid. From transforming child malnutrition to rethinking economic growth, from building peace to reversing desertification, from rural Vietnam to urban Kenya, the ideas of complex systems thinking are starting to be used to make foreign aid more relevant, more appropriate, and more catalytic. Aid on the Edge of Chaos argues that such ideas and approaches should play a vital part of the transformation of aid. Aid should move from being an imperfect post-World War II global resource transfer system, to a new form of global cooperation that is truly fit for the twenty-first century.

Author : Arjan de Haan
Publisher : Kumarian Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 24,60 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1565492870

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Why is aid contested?. The aid industry defined. How the thinking about aid and international development has evolved. Development projects: rationale and critique. Hard-nosed development: reforms, adjustment, governance. Country-led approaches and donor coordination: can the aid industry let go?. Development's poor cousins: environment, gender, participation, rights. How does the industry knows what works and what doesn't. Challenges for the 21st century

Author : Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 22,53 MB
Release : 2007-03-23
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0262260395

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An encouraging account of the potential of foreign aid to reduce poverty and a challenge to all aid organizations to think harder about how they spend their money. With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global poverty is our greatest moral challenge. The large and pressing practical question is how best to address that challenge. Although millions of dollars flow to poor countries, the results are often disappointing. In Making Aid Work, Abhijit Banerjee—an "aid optimist"—argues that aid has much to contribute, but the lack of analysis about which programs really work causes considerable waste and inefficiency, which in turn fuels unwarranted pessimism about the role of aid in fostering economic development. Banerjee challenges aid donors to do better. Building on the model used to evaluate new drugs before they come on the market, he argues that donors should assess programs with field experiments using randomized trials. In fact, he writes, given the number of such experiments already undertaken, current levels of development assistance could focus entirely on programs with proven records of success in experimental conditions. Responding to his challenge, leaders in the field—including Nicholas Stern, Raymond Offenheiser, Alice Amsden, Ruth Levine, Angus Deaton, and others—question whether randomized trials are the most appropriate way to evaluate success for all programs. They raise broader questions as well, about the importance of aid for economic development and about the kinds of interventions (micro or macro, political or economic) that will lead to real improvements in the lives of poor people around the world. With one in every six people now living in extreme poverty, getting it right is crucial.