In her controversial, no-holds-barred expose Linda Polman shows how a vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid. "The Crisis Caravan" takes us to war zones around the globe, showing how aid operations and the humanitarian world have become a feature of military strategy. Impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman "gives some powerful examples of unconscionable assistance...a world where aid workers have become enablers of the atrocities they seek to relieve" ("The Boston Globe").

Cash on Delivery (COD) Aid proposes a new approach to foreign assistance --one that links aid payments more directly to desired outcomes to promote accountability, responsibility, learning, and strengthening of local institutions.

Using an example from education, this book outlines how COD Aid could work in practice. It offers guidance on the identification of measurable outcomes and mechanisms for verification and the management of a variety of risks. The authors provide practical advice, documents, term sheets, and other supporting material that donors and potential recipient governments can use as a basis for designing and implementing COD Aid in particular settings.

It also shows how COD Aid could be applied to other sectors and includes guidance for assessing whether COD Aid is achieving its goals.

International health and aid policies of the past two decades have had a major impact on the delivery of care in low and middle-income countries. This book argues that these policies have often failed to achieve their main aims, and have in fact contributed to restricted access to family medicine and hospital care. Presenting detailed evidence, and illustrated by case studies, this book describes how international health policies to date have largely resulted in expensive health care for the rich, and disjointed and ineffective services for the poor. As a result, large segments of the population world-wide continue to suffer from unnecessary casualties, pain and impoverishment. International Health and Aid Policies arms health professionals, researchers and policy makers with strategies that will enable them to bridge the gaps between public health, medicine and health policy in order to support robust, comprehensive and accessible health care systems in any political environment.

Foreign aid is one of the few topics in the development discourse with such an uninterrupted, yet volatile history in terms of interest and attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Does aid work in promoting growth and reducing poverty in the developing world? Will a new 'big push' approach accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals or will another opportunity be missed? Can the lessons of almost half a century of aid giving be learnt? These are truly important questions in view of the emerging new landscape in foreign aid and recent developments related to the global financial crisis, which are expected to have far reaching implications for both donors and recipients engaged in this area. Against this shifting aid landscape, there is a pressing need to evaluate progress to date and shed new light on emerging issues and agendas.
This volume brings together leading aid experts to review the progress achieved so far, identify the challenges ahead, and discuss the emerging policy agenda in foreign aid. A central conclusion of this important and timely volume is that, since development aid remains crucial for many developing countries, a huge effort is needed from both donors and aid recipients to overcome the inefficiencies and make aid work better for poor people. After all, as global citizens, we have a moral obligation to do the best we can to lift people out of poverty in the developing world. The findings of this book will be of considerable interest to professionals and policymakers engaged in policy reforms in foreign aid, and provide an essential one-stop reference for students of development, international finance, and economics.

Low-income countries continue to face significant challenges in meeting their vast development needs while maintaining a sustainable debt position, even after many of these countries have benefited from substantial debt relief. These challenges are further exacerbated by changes in the financial landscape, including the emergence of new creditors and investors, the use of more complex financing vehicles, and the development of domestic markets. The joint World Bank/IMF debt sustainability framework is well placed to help address these challenges and reduce the risks of renewed episodes of debt distress. This paper explains the analytical underpinnings of the framework and the means to ensure its full effectiveness.--Publisher's description.

Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has launched a revolution in U.S. foreign aid. At no time since the administration of President Kennedy have there been more changes in the volume of aid, in aid's purposes and policies, in its organization, and in its overall status in U.S. foreign relations. George Bush's Foreign Aid: Transformation or Chaos? analyzes in detail the array of recent reforms of U.S. economic assistance and the difficult issues these reforms raise, while placing the changes and the manner of their implementation in a historical and political context. Lancaster draws out the challenges and opportunities this transformation of U.S. aid offer for the next administration to engage the emerging world of the 21st century.

Finally, a complete resource on shoring and stabilization of emergency scenes. This new book takes the reader step-by-step through the basic principles of emergency shoring operations so they may learn to operate in a safe and efficient atmosphere while conducting search and rescue operations in unstable environments. O'Connell thoroughly covers the engineering aspects involved in shoring and stabilization, carefully explaining how to maintain the strength and integrity of any and all structurally damaged or unstable elements such as beams, joists, girders, columns, arches, headers, or bearing walls. This book includes a glossary and covers the basic terminology and instructions for shoring.
Key Features & Benefits
- Teaches safe & effective size-up techniques for shoring operations
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- Outlines the risks involved in stabilization
- Suitable for all firefighters, military, and construction personnel, as well as urban search and rescue teams

While military intervention in Iraq was being planned, humanitarian organizations were offered US government funds to join the Coalition and operate under the umbrella of "Operation Iraqi Freedom". In Kosavo, Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, NGOs had previously been asked to join in "just" wars. Indeed many aid agencies cooperated eagerly, subordinating their specific aims to the greater goal of "peace, democracy and human rights". Few Afghans or Sierra Leoneans regret the interventions. However, the inconvenient victims of these triumphs, those from the "wrong" side, are quickly forgotten. These are individuals whom humanitarian organizations have the duty to save, yet in doing so they must remain independent of the warring parties, and refrain from joining in the "struggle against evil" or any other political agenda. Then there are places where the pretence of providing assistance allows donor governments to disguise their backing of local political powers. Lastly there are those whose sacrifice is politically irrelevant in the wider scope of international relations. In circumstances such as these, what little international aid is available collides head-on with the mutal desire of the adversaries to wage "total" war that may lead to the extermination of entire populations. In this book, international experts and members of the MSF analyse the way these issues have crystallized over the five years spanning the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The authors make the case for a renewed commitment to an old idea: a humanitarianism that defies the politics of sacrifice.

In 1996, the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, declared that his organization would henceforth be "the knowledge bank." This statement marks the beginning in earnest of a new discourse of knowledge-based aid, which has spread rapidly across the development field. This book is the first detailed attempt to analyze this new discourse and practice. Through an examination of four agencies--the World Bank, the British Department for International Development, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency--the book explores what this new approach to aid means in both theory and practice. It argues that too much of the emphasis of knowledge-based aid has been on developing capacity within agencies rather than addressing the expressed needs of Southern "partners." Moreover, it questions whether knowledge-based aid leads to greater agency certainty about what constitutes good development.

First Published in 1993, this is part of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva series. This study looks at whether scholars of international politics attempt to understand cooperative behavior in the light of the theories developed by the observers of both conflict and of cooperation. This volume expands the short list of such works and does so with insight, a wide range of scholarship and a willingness to test particular cases against existing theory. The author has written a book which expands the knowledge of, but also a thoughtful improvement of existing theoretical approaches. Uvin's universe of enquiry excludes military power and its application. It concentrates on the long-term, complex organization of cooperative transnational behavior and its rationale. Its focusses on functional issues involving world hunger, a haunting background and result, and perhaps even one cause, of the dreadful violence that characterizes our world even as the threat of catastrophic nuclear warfare has declined.

Food aid has played a key role in responding to the extreme poverty and disasters afflicting millions of people in the developing world. It is at the centre of much political discussion, both nationally and internationally, and there have been notable successes, yet there is doubt and criticism about the appropriateness of food aid and confusion about the deep-rooted problems which perpetuate these calamities. Is food aid doing more harm than good? Can food aid help, not hinder, long-term development and self-reliance? Would a cheque not be better than food?;This book is designed to give a clear insight into the key issues, presenting a balanced assessment of the uses and misuses of food aid and relating these to the complex realities of the international economy. It is aimed at first-degree courses in development economics, scholars and policy-makers in the field and the general reader concerned with these issues.

While humanitarianism is unquestionably a fast-growing subject of practitioner and scholarly engagement, much discussion about it is predicated on a dangerous dichotomy between 'aid givers' and 'relief takers' that largely misrepresents the negotiated nature of the humanitarian enterprise. To highlight the tension between these relationships, this book focuses on the 'humanitarian spaces' and the dynamics of 'humanitarian diplomacy' (both 'local' and 'global') that sustain them. It gathers key voices to provide a critical analysis of international theory, geopolitics and dilemmas underpinning the negotiation of relief. Offering up-to-date examples from cases such as Kosovo and the Tsunami, or ongoing crises like Haiti, Libya, Darfur and Somalia, the contributors analyse the complexity of humanitarian diplomacy and the multiplicity of geographies and actors involved in it. By investigating the transformations that both diplomacy and humanitarianism are undergoing, the authors prompt us towards a critical and eclectic understanding of the dialectics of humanitarian space. Negotiating Relief aims to present humanitarianism not only as a relief delivery mechanism but also as a phenomenon in dialogue with both localised crises and global politics.

Industrial Disasters, Toxic Waste, and Community Impact focuses on hazardous and toxic wastes releases, industrial disasters, the consequent contamination of communities and the environment, and the subsequent social impacts, including adverse health effects, deaths and property destruction, psychosocial problems, and community disruption. This book explains the emergence of a sociological study of risk and of natural, technological, and hybrid disasters, along with a review of the accumulated body of knowledge in the field. It is unique in its integration of sociological perspectives with perspectives from other disciplines when discussing the problems posed by technological hazards both in advanced industrialized societies and in the underdeveloped world. Francis O. Adeola extends the field through an innovative presentation of topics which up to now have had sparse treatment in sociology texts. This book starts by presenting the sociology of hazardous waste, risk, and disasters as a relatively new development, engendering both a growing passion and an increasing volume of empirical research among scholars. Next, it describes how hazardous and toxic wastes disposal, exposure, remediation, and proximate adverse health consequences have risen to the level of endemic social problem both in the United States and around the world. After discussing these cases in relation to contemporary theories of industrial and organizational disasters, Adeola delves into classifying of hazardous wastes, indicating the characteristics of each type of waste, and identifying what makes them especially dangerous to people and the environment. Other major topics addressed in the rest of the book include electronic waste (e-waste) as a new species of trouble in terms of the volume and toxicity of global e-waste generation and management, the environmental and health risks of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), case studies of contaminated communities within the United States and across the globe, the international flows of toxic waste, analysis of risk and environmental contamination by race and ethnicity in the United States, and the juxtaposition of the issues of environmental justice and human rights. With its many contributions to environmental sociology, Industrial Disasters, Toxic Waste, and Community Impact will be a valuable addition to the libraries of students, scholars, and practitioners interested in the intersection of toxic waste releases, human exposure to contaminants, and public health.

The international development community invests billions of dollars to improve organisational capacity. But real-life practice is poorly understood and undervalued as a distinct professional domain. Written by practitioners, this innovative publication is designed to make capacity development more professional and increasingly effective in achieving development goals. This title includes practical illustrations that draw on experiences from the civic, government and private sectors. A central theme is to understand capacity as more than something internal to organisations. This book shows how capacity also stems from connections between different types of actor and the levels in society at which they operate. The content is crafted for a broad audience of practitioners in capacity development - consultants, managers, front-line workers, trainers, facilitators, leaders, advisors, programme staff, activists, and funding agencies.

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans' daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize--winning "Times-Picayune," Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city's collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn't or wouldn't leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches' brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.
Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense-all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.
Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In "Breach of Faith," Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.

"From the Hardcover edition."

En financant le Programme plurinational contre le SIDA (PPS), la Banque mondiale a permis un considerable elargissement de l'acces aux services de prevention, de soins et de traitement lies au VIH en Afrique. C'est ce que demontre le present 'Programme plurinational de lutte contre le SIDA en Afrique 2000 2006: bilan des interventions de la Banque mondiale face a une crise de developpement', lequel se base largement sur les donnees recueillies dans le cadre d'enquetes nationales ou de programmes VIH/SIDA specifi ques. Les fonds du PPS ont fourni les moyens d'apporter une aide tant aux enfants qu'aux adultes affectes par le SIDA; de prevenir la transmission du virus de la mere a l'enfant; de soutenir les pays qui entreprennent de renforcer les capacites de leurs institutions afi n d'etre en mesure d'ameliorer et d'etendre leurs services, y compris en matiere de soins therapeutiques; et enfi n d'attirer de tres substantiels supplements de fi nancement. Les donnees recueillies a travers 30 pays -- dont certaines ne sont pas encore publiees -- sont rassemblees ici pour offrir un premier apercu des resultats obtenus, notamment par l'entremise du PPS. Le PPS a la particularite de privilegier un acheminement direct des fonds vers les collectivites, associations de base, organisations de la societe civile et ONG. Les temoignages d'individus et de groupes, rapportes de l'Ouganda, d'Ethiopie et du Rwanda, proposent d'edifi ants exemples des progres accomplis grace aux efforts de la base, et a l'echange des savoirs et des pratiques entre pays, que ce soit sous forme de gains de sante, de qualite de vie et de longevite, ou de recul des prejuges et de l'ostracisme. Ils attestent par ailleurs l'avenement d'un sentiment nouveau d'espoir, chez les personnes seropositives ou affectees par le VIH. Cet ouvrage introduit enfi n des outils nouveaux, concus pour mesurer et rendre compte plus justement des realisations des programmes SIDA fi nances par la Banque en Afrique: ce sont le Cadre des resultats d'une part, et les Feuilles de resultats d'autre part. Tous ceux qui interviennent dans les domaines de la mobilisation de la societe civile, de la sante publique, du recul de la pauvrete, du developpement social, ou de la demographie et de la sante de la reproduction, ou encore qui se livrent a l'examen des actions entreprises face au SIDA en Afrique, au niveau national ou au niveau mondial, liront avec un interet certain la presentation des acquis decrits ici."

Rapid and profound changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have promoted the ideals of participation and partnership, yet key decisions affecting people's lives continue to be made without sufficient attention to the socio-political realities of the countries in which they live. Embedded working traditions, vested interests and institutional inertia mean that old habits and cultures persist among the development community. Planning continues as though it were free of unpredictable interactions among stakeholders. This book is about the need to recognise the complex, non-linear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. The book begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of aid, exposing the challenges and opportunities facing aid professionals today. It argues for greater attention to accountability and the adoption of rights based approaches. In section two, practitioners, policy makers and researchers discuss the realities of power and relationships from their experiences across sixteen countries. Their accounts, from government, donors and civil society, expose the highly politicised and dynamic aid environment in which they work. Section three explores ways forward for aid agencies, challenging existing political, institutional and personal ways of working. Authors describe procedural innovations as strategic ways to leverage change. Breaking the barriers to ensure more inclusive aid will require visionary leadership and a courageous commitment to change. Crucially, the authors show how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviours of individual actors. Only then is the ambitious agenda of the Millennium Development Goals likely to be met. The result is an indispensable contribution to the understanding of how development assistance and poverty reduction can be most effectively delivered by the professionals and agencies involved.

The importance of involving the poor recipients in planning and implementing development policies has long been recognized, and has been the official aim of large donors, including the World Bank and major donor agencies. This text assesses their success and the results of the "primary stakeholder participation" achieved. It analyzes the institutional changes necessary for stakeholders to participate in decision-making, and the strategies and behaviour of other parties involved, including NGOs. From this review and analysis, it draws an important range of lessons for future donor and NGO policies and organizational reform.

Development aid is often ineffective and unsustainable. The scale of problems being faced by the Third World demands large scale, replicable solutions but the high rate of failure in aid projects is often ascribed to inadequate consideration of local culture and conditions. Can demands for actions be reconciled with location-specific solutions? "The Critical Villager" argues that community-based participatory research and "transfer of technology" are not rival models of development, but complementary components of effective aid. The eight practical principles for evaluation and action describes a call for students, development workers, policy makers and researchers to put themselves in the shoes of the intended beneficiaries of aid. "The Critical Villager" suggests that despite the wide range of cultures and circumstances, there are certain constant principles underlying how people select new technologies and practices which can guide how aid interventions are designed.

The magnitude of refugees movements in the Third World, widely perceived as an unprecedented crisis, has generated widespread concern in the West. This concern reveals itself as an ambiguous mixture of heartfelt compassion for the plight of the unfortunates cast adrift and a diffuse fear that they will come "pouring in." In this comprehensive study, the authors examine the refugee flows originating in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and suggest how a better understanding of this phenomenon can be used by the international community to assist those in greatest need. Reviewing the history of refugee movements in the West, they show how their formation and the fate of endangered populations have also been shaped by the partisan objectives of receiving countries. They survey the kinds of social conflicts characteristic of different regions of the Third World and the ways refugees and refugee policy are made to serve broader political purposes.

This report reveals that recent trends in global aid since 2001 demonstrate the foreign policy priorities of donors in the global "war on terror." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have captured more than a third of the new aid resources allocated by donors since 2001. While recent aid resources have been diverted, new aid pledges made in 2005 still fall far short of the urgently needed financing to meet even the minimal Millennium Development Goals. In 2007 the international community has an opportunity to replace rhetoric and policy "slights-of-hand" with policies and resources that could truly make a difference for a decade devoted to ending global poverty and creating conditions for peace.

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.

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.