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 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.

Since the late 1980s the international relief community has seen its resources and personnel stressed beyond capacity by humanitarian crises--large-scale, man-made catastrophes such as the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Zaire, and elsewhere. Waged within collapsing states, political and ethnic strife targets civilians, causes mass population dislocation and widespread human rights abuses, and impedes the efforts of relief organizations to respond effectively. Covering topics ranging from emergency public health measures to the psychological trauma of relief workers, this volume presents both a seasoned assessment of current practice and proposals for improving operational efforts in the future. The discussion also raises important questions relating to the definition and direction of the overall humanitarian mission.

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.

Civilization rearranges nature for human convenience. Clothes and houses keep us warm; agriculture feeds us; medicine fights our diseases. It all works-most of the time. But key resources lie in the most hazardous places, so we choose to live on river flood plains, on the slopes of volcanoes, at the edge of the sea, above seismic faults. We pack ourselves into cities, Petri dishes for germs. Civilization thrives on the edge of disaster. And what happens when natural forces meet molasses holding tanks, insecticides, deepwater oil rigs, nuclear power plants? We learn the hard way how to avoid the last disaster-and maybe how to create the next one. What we don't know can, indeed, hurt us. This book's white-knuckled journey from antiquity to the present leads us to wonder at times how humankind has survived. And yet, as Author Gale Eaton makes clear, civilization has advanced not just in spite of disasters but in part because of them. Hats off to human resilience, ingenuity, and perseverance! They've carried us this far; may they continue to do so into our ever-hazardous future. The History in 50 series explores history by telling thematically linked stories. Each book includes 50 illustrated narrative accounts of people and events-some well-known, others often overlooked-that, together, build a rich connect the-dots mosaic and challenge conventional assumptions about how history unfolds. Dedicated to the premise that history is the greatest story ever told. Includes a mix of "greatest hits" with quirky, surprising, provocative accounts. Challenges readers to think and engage. Includes a glossary of technical terms; sources by chapter; teaching resources as jumping-off points for student research; and endnotes.

In Europe after World War II, U.S. economic aid helped to ensure economic revival, political stability, and democracy. In the Third World, however, aid has been associated with very different tendencies: uneven political development, violence, political instability, and authoritarian rule in most countries. Despite these differing patterns of political change in Europe and the Third World, however, American conceptions of political development have remained largely constant: democracy, stability, anti-communism. Why did the objectives and theories of U.S. aid officials and social scientists remain largely the same in the face of such negative results and despite the seeming inappropriateness of their ideas in the Third World context? Robert Packenham believes that the thinking of both officials and social scientists was profoundly influenced by the "Liberal Tradition" and its view of the American historical experience. Thus, he finds that U.S. opposition to revolution in the Third World steins not only from perceptions of security needs but also from the very conceptions of development that arc held by Americans. American pessimism about the consequences of revolution is intimately related to American optimism about the political effects of economic growth. In his final chapter the author offers some suggestions for a future policy. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A growing consensus has emerged in recent years among donors, and between aid agencies and their developing country counterparts, on development strategies. Almost everybody now agrees that sustainable development requires macroeconomic stability, substantial integration into the global economy, better public sector management, more effective poverty alleviation, and greater attention to the private sector and to civil society in general. At the same time, it has become increasingly apparent that in many countries, particularly in the least developed that are the most heavily aided, much has gone awry.

In "Perspectives on Aid and Development" a distinguished group of policy experts offer perspectives on the lessons learned from development experience and how these lessons have been translated into new thinking on aid and development issues.

Civilization rearranges nature for human convenience. Clothes and houses keep us warm; agriculture feeds us; medicine fights our diseases. It all works-most of the time. But key resources lie in the most hazardous places, so we choose to live on river flood plains, on the slopes of volcanoes, at the edge of the sea, above seismic faults. We pack ourselves into cities, Petri dishes for germs. Civilization thrives on the edge of disaster. And what happens when natural forces meet molasses holding tanks, insecticides, deepwater oil rigs, nuclear power plants? We learn the hard way how to avoid the last disaster-and maybe how to create the next one. What we don't know can, indeed, hurt us. This book's white-knuckled journey from antiquity to the present leads us to wonder at times how humankind has survived. And yet, as Author Gale Eaton makes clear, civilization has advanced not just in spite of disasters but in part because of them. Hats off to human resilience, ingenuity, and perseverance! They've carried us this far; may they continue to do so into our ever-hazardous future. The History in 50 series explores history by telling thematically linked stories. Each book includes 50 illustrated narrative accounts of people and events-some well-known, others often overlooked-that, together, build a rich connect the-dots mosaic and challenge conventional assumptions about how history unfolds. Dedicated to the premise that history is the greatest story ever told. Includes a mix of "greatest hits" with quirky, surprising, provocative accounts. Challenges readers to think and engage. Includes a glossary of technical terms; sources by chapter; teaching resources as jumping-off points for student research; and endnotes. Fountas & Pinnell Level Z+

This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong examines the competing conceptions of poverty, citizenship, family, and authority held by the state bureaucracy, socialists, bourgeois feminists, and the major religious and humanitarian welfare organizations. She shows how these conceptions reflected and generated bitter conflict in German society. And she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary government within the welfare sector in a way that paralleled the crisis of the entire Weimar political system and created a situation in which the Nazi critique of republican "welfare" could acquire broad political resonance. The book begins by tracing the transformation of Germany's traditional, disciplinary poor-relief programs into a modern, bureaucratized and professionalized social welfare system. It then shows how, in the second half of the republic, attempts by both public and voluntary welfare organizations to reduce social insecurity by rationalizing working-class family life and reproduction alienated welfare reformers and recipients alike from both the welfare system and the Republic itself. Hong concludes that, in the welfare sector, the most direct continuity between the republican welfare system and the social policies of Nazi Germany is to be found not in the pathologies of progressive social engineering, but rather in the rejection of the moral and political foundations of the republican welfare system by eugenic welfare reformers and their Nazi supporters. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In more than one hundred developing countries, international organizations continuously offer practical assistance for economic advancement and social change--assistance that in some cases forms a substantial part of national programs. This book examines international aid in three countries-Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia--in order to ascertain how assisting organizations exert influence on member governments. Professor Gordenker draws on interviews, information usually inaccessible to observers, and his own direct field observation of programs established by the United Nations' system of organizations in the three countries during the late 1960s, immediately after their independence from British administration. This period witnessed sharp changes in national development policies and the political turmoil produced by the Rhodesian revolt. The author analyzes in detail the creation, bureaucratic consideration, and execution of important projects. His conclusions cast doubt on the existence of a reliable process by which international organizations may influence national governments, and he explains why such doubt is well-founded. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.