Community Resilience: Practical Applications to Strengthen Whole Communities in Disaster blends resilience theory and empirical analysis with lessons learned from recent activities to implement and test community resilience strengthening strategies and measure resilience progress. Contributions from key settings and disciplines on the role of resilience theory and science in local implementation are included, providing a stronger operational framework for resilience science than has previously been offered. The book also elevates the discussion by integrating theory where practical handbooks have missed those considerations.

After 30 years of ever increasing aid, most African countries are no better off than they were at independence - indeed, many are slipping back and earlier economic and political achievements are being undermined. This book attempts to answer the questions: Why? What went wrong" The author argues that the widespread theory of "putting the last first" is fine in theory but that in practice the "last" is unaffected He looks at aid as an essentially "top-down" exercise and discusses the failure of ambitious projects because of over-ambitious targets and inadequate controls. He also tackles the thorny question of whether aid to Africa shouldd be stopped so that the continent's economic evolution should be allowed to proceed at its own pace, without outside attempts to short-circuit the process. He looks at various approaches: aggressive intervention, greater financial accountability as a condition of aid, long stays in the field by donor staff, and finally and most radically the ultimate in "bottom-up" approaches: direct cash transfer. All these issues are informed by the author's long experience as a development official in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

This volume is the second attempt by a joint international research team (consisting of Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian and American ethnologists) to contribute to the domain of ecological anthropology. The editors of and contributors to this collection share the understanding that catastrophic events challenge society to rework a specific methodology, and to activate a specific resource, to adapt to and cope with crises ecologically, socially and ideologically. The main aim of this volume is to reveal the important role of studying and taking into account the cultural stereotypes in this process. Through detailed analysis of different case studies, the contributors further generalize the definition of disasters and critical situations as situations that arise from the violation of a balance in individual and collective life, as any deviation from "normality" in the particular context of each discreet culture.This interpretation informs a structural grouping of the materials in this collection into three main parts. The section on "Cultural Responses to Natural and Biological Disasters" (specific case studies) follows the "Conceptualization of Cultural Knowledge about Disasters". The contributors to the collection share the conviction that the ecology of social crises (presented in the volume's third section on "Cultural Management of Social Crises") is a valuable and necessary addition to the field of natural and technological, bio- and man-made disasters. They believe this is proved by the texts presented in this volume.The empirical data employed in the volume and the forms of disasters researched include materials from the Tibetan Pastoral area and the Pamir Plateau in Asia, the Rhodopes and Strandja Mountains in the Balkans, Macedonia and Central and Western Bulgaria, to ethnic minority areas in Central and Western China, Ukraine and Moldova.

This work, produced by the Task Force on African Famine of the American Anthropological Association, is the first of a multi-part project dealing with the long-term and ongoing food crisis in Africa primarily at the level of local production - the microperspective. It offers a series of anthropological and ecological views on the cause of the current problem and on coping strategies used by both indigenous people and developmental planners.;The three sections of this volume review current explanations for food problems in Africa, focusing mainly on production and consumption at the household level, they offer a number of perspectives on the environmental, historical, political, and economic contexts for food stress, and include a series of case studies showing the ways in which Africans have responded to the threat of drought and hunger. This work should be of interest to all persons concerned with this ultimately global dilemma, particularly those involved in planning and relief efforts.

After war, many countries, such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the transition to a democratic market economy extremely difficult. This failure to thrive, "Dead Ends of Transition" demonstrates, is often the result of national reliance on foreign aid. Rentier states, the contributors to this study argue, have few incentives to respond to the needs of their societies. Taking a closer look at the policies of rentier economies, this book further identifies new ways in which these countries and their international partners could work together to ease the critical transition to democracy.

Powerful global trends demand a wholesale rethinking of the system of international development assistance. A key issue is the future of concessional aid provided by multilateral development banks. What should be the future role of MDB concessional aid? And what is needed to maintain donor countries' support?

In a rapidly changing global environment there is still a strong case for maintaining MDB concessional aid. But that case only holds, provided a new approach is taken which adapts the roles of MDB aid to development lessons of the recent past and changing global conditions -- and does so in a way that improves aid's effectiveness.

This study argues that without these conditions, continued donor country support cannot and should not be expected. The study lays out a new "framework" for future decision-making of MDB funding, based on: (1) a new performance-based approach to aid allocations among countries: (2) an expansion of MDB investments in regional and global problem solving; (3) the resolution of specific operational issues that stand in the way of greater effectiveness in delivery of aid; and (4) changes in the burden-sharing and governance arrangements of individual MDBs.