This book examines how international aid donors and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) can assist countries in the Asia-Pacific region achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The book examines the progress countries have made towards the MDGs and highlights the need to tailor the goals to individual country circumstances.

Barrie Ireton tells the unique history of Britain's international development efforts from colonial times to the present day set in a global context. He brings together original research material as well as his personal knowledge over a 40 year career in government. He argues that the Department, led by successive Ministers, continued to pursue its basic mission of poverty reduction in the poorest countries. He also acknowledges important deviations from this trend, particularly during the 1980s when the Aid and Trade Provision became an aggressive use of aid to win export orders at the behest of the interventionist Department of Trade and Industry under an otherwise not interventionist conservative government.

The new growth patterns and shifting wealth in the world economy fundamentally alter the basis for Western aid. This book demonstrates how Western development aid has been transformed over time, in particular in the 1990s, when the West enjoyed world hegemony. Western aid, once a helping hand to other countries' development strategies, has increasingly been seen as a tool for large-scale attempts to transform states, societies and minds according to Western models. The authors claim that this has made aid more complex and less useful to poor countries in their fight against poverty.
Emerging economies, such as China, have demonstrated that other paths to growth and poverty alleviation are available. They are attractive partners in development, offering collaboration without paternalism. Most poor countries experience growth, and are able to finance development with homegrown resources or in collaboration with non-Western partners. Having other options, they may increasingly challenge and reject Western aid if it is accompanied with goals of transforming the recipients based on Western blueprints.
The authors claim that aid has a role in the fight against poverty in the future, but only if Western donors are willing to adapt to the new world order, leave paternalism behind and rethink their role in development. Donors must change the way they relate to poor sovereign states, redefine the meaning of 'development', and reinvent aid to make it simpler and more manageable.

More and more Third World countries are providing development assistance to other developing countries. This book examines a range of these "South-South" aid projects sponsored by such countries as China, Korea, Cuba and Brazil.

This book presents an accounting framework to critically review existing studies of aid's macroeconomic effects and as a basis for four country studies on Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, Tanzania and Zambia. This framework focuses on the impact of different types of aid on the level and composition of key macroeconomic aggregates such as imports, investment and government expenditure. The importance of the relationship between aid and policy reform is also stressed. The case studies find that aid has had a generally positive contribution, though recommendations to further improve aid impact are also given.

Many aid agencies advocate approaches to development which are people-centered, participatory, empowering, and gender-fair. This volume of essays explores some of the middle ground between such values-based approaches and the methods and techniques that the agencies adopt. The selection offers critical assessments of fashionable tools such as Participatory Rural Appraisal and Logical Framework. It demonstrates how these are linked (conceptually and in practice) to the wider ideological environment in which they are used, and shows how they depend upon the skills of the fieldworker and/or organisation applying them. Contributors argue that tools and methods will contribute to a values-based approach only if those using them have a serious commitment to a social agenda which is genuinely transformative.

Industrialization in Africa has relied heavily on state institutions of various kinds and on the inflow of foreign capital, especially foreign aid. With particular reference to technology and on the basis of a wide range of case-studies, this book explains how these features of the African experience have jointly contributed not only to the many cases of failure in the public sector, but also to a number of exceptional cases that can be regarded as success stories.

"Bearing Gifts to Greeks" focuses on the under-documented work of the relief agencies involved in dealing with wartime famine and humanitarian aid in Greece during the tripartite German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation and the ensuing civil war in the 1940s. The written contributions are supported by a selection of remarkable photographs of the effects of the famine in Greece, many of which have not been published before.

"Told through the voices of local community leaders, this book analyzes how communities respond to natural disasters and how outsiders contribute positively--or negatively--to their response, promoting debate on the role of aid and the media in times of crisis"--

Climate change impacts upon the world's poorest most heavily. It is therefore essential that international development initiatives focus on improving the ability of developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change. This book, a product of research by the JICA-RI (Research Institute of the Japan International Cooperation Agency), examines climate change adaptation from the perspective of development cooperation in order to provide useful lessons for those engaged in research, policy and practice in this vital area. In this book the editors have brought together a wide range of case studies from across Africa and Asia, covering urban and rural areas and different sectors including water, agriculture and disaster management, in order to examine the following: high-resolution climate change projection in Asia and how this can be used in planning appropriate adaptation responses; in-depth case studies of climate change projections, social, economic and environmental impact and vulnerability assessment and adaptation in rural Thailand and urban Philippines; cases across Africa for which climate data is less readily available and alternative approaches need to be adopted; the current situation amongst international donors; emerging issues caused by climate change. In the introductory section, the editors draw together the full implications from the case studies to discuss how international communities can support adaptation in developing countries and to give an assessment of bilateral projects. They reflect on the lessons learned and offer recommendations for future research and international development cooperation.

Food aid is a controversial form of development assistance and this book, first published in 1979, seeks to counter allegations from critics by taking account of both direct and indirect affects. Based on field research in Tunisia, Botswana, Upper Volta and Lesotho, it considers aid from the UK, EEC, USAID, the World Food Programme, Canada and France, and draws a number of policy-orientated conclusions about the impact of food aid on nutrition, consumer prices and agricultural production. In the light of the evidence from field studies it is shown that many of the claims advanced by food aid supporters and by critics cannot be sustained, and that the real impact of food aid is rather different from that assumed by the conventional wisdom on the subject.

First published in 1971, this reissue considers the main aspects of foreign aid to developing countries in terms of economic concepts and principles. The author gives an economic definition of aid and considers the motives for giving aid and the principles on which it may be allocated. He looks at the effect on the economic growth of developing countries of both the aid given and the need to repay the debt, and the effect on trade patterns and resource allocation of tying aid to one particular project, or one source of goods. While economic analysis is only a first step in providing a basis for policy decisions on foreign aid, Dr Healey shows that many issues can be clarified by looking at them from the economists' point of view.

Much about India's economy and aid flows has changed in the last two decades. India's growth rate has quickened since economic liberalisation, the poverty head count has fallen and the volume and composition of its aid have changed as new issues of climate change and the environment have emerged.. Yet Does Aid Work in India?, first published in 1990, remains of great interest as a study of aid effectiveness in India's pre-liberalisation era. It identifies those sectors where aid-funded interventions succeeded, and where they failed. It explains how India avoided problems of aid dependence, and managed the political tensions that are associated with aid policy dialogue. More generally, it contains a useful commentary on and criticism of donors' aid evaluation procedures at that time and it highlights donor efforts in the difficult area of institution building. Despite the passage of time, many of the insights from India's earlier experience remain highly relevant to key issues of development assistance today.

This reissue, first published in 1976, considers the rapid rate of economic growth in Kenya, combined with its apparent political stability, to determine whether or not this is indeed a case of 'growth without development' and, if so, where the responsibility for aid lies in this situation. The book concludes that while Kenyan growth has not been to an ideal pattern, accompanied by an increase in inequality, there is little or no reason to believe that living standards have not improved. It examines the impact of aid on Kenya's progress at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic level and provides an institutional study of the impact of aid on Kenyan Government policy formation and administration and a discussion of British aid's political purposes and influence in Kenya. The authors conclude that some of the effects predicted by the critics of aid are visible, but that the net effect on general living standards has been strongly positive, concluding that the problems constitute a case for improving aid procedures, but not against aid itself.

Japan's arrival since World War Two as a major industrial nation has meant that she has had to bear a greater share of the developed world's contribution to the developing nations and foreign aid has become an integral part of foreign policy. This book describes the roots of Japan's aid policy and shows that this side of her international economic policy is based largely on domestic conditions, structures and forces. To understand the pattern of Japanese aid as it stands today, it is important to appreciate the complexities of the Japanese decision-making process. This book clearly explains the patterns of Japanese aid policy-making.

This book establishes a new, holistic framework for disaster recovery and mitigation, providing a multidisciplinary perspective on the field of risk management strategies and societal and communal resilience. Going beyond narrow approaches that are all too prevalent in the field, this work builds on an optimum combination of community-level networks, private market mechanisms and state-based assistance strategies. Its chapters describe best practices in the field and elucidate cutting-edge research on recovery, highlighting the interaction between government, industry and civil society. The book uses new data from a number of recent disasters across southeast and east Asia to understand the interactions among residents, the state, and catastrophe, drawing on events in Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, China and Thailand. Grounded in theories of risk mitigation and empirical research, the book provides practical guidance for decision makers along with future research directions for scholars.

"The Asian region is highly prone to natural disasters which devastate large and mostly poor populations. This book deals with some of the root issues underlying the continued vulnerability of these societies to catastrophic shocks. The book is unusual in that it comprehensively covers resilience and fragilities from community levels to market mechanisms and governance and it analyses these issues in very different economic and structural settings. Recommended for development and disaster risk managers without question."

Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir

Director, Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED); Professor, University of Louvain, Research Institute Health and Society."

The proceedings of the Development Studies Association conference held in Dublin on the 150th anniversary of the Great Irish Famine examine the historical background and the reasons why the spectre of famine continues to haunt much of the developing world today. Set in the context of the concepts of food security and insecurity it emphasises our moral responsibility to act collectively and to tackle less dramatic problems of food insecurity.

Natural disasters that have struck Asian countries in recent years have brought global attention to the work of local Buddhist communities and international humanitarian groups operating on Buddhist principles. Buddhist monks and nuns, even in the most conservative tradition, have engaged with survivors and families of the deceased in difficult contexts and are making active contribution to the development of civil society. Contributors of this volume have conducted research in India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Cambodia and examine both local Buddhist communities and international organizations engaged in a variety of relief work in China, Taiwan and Japan. They explore the variety of ways in which Buddhist traditions and organizations are being reconstructed through local and international aid work in ways more engaged with and more relevant to human problems in the contemporary world.

The absolutely poor, who are mostly rural people, are a large part of the developing world's population and their numbers are growing. Government development programmes, aided by the big donors, have made the poor poorer and have rendered them more powerless in relation to the rest of society. They have done this by sustaining and reinforcing existing exploitative economic, social and political structures. Yet people's movements. religious organizations, voluntary groups, universities and so on have often devised 'alternative' development strategies whose programmes are specifically intended to empower the powerless and selectively enrich the poorest. These groups lack the funds and the political punch to make much more than a dent in the situation. This book brings together some of these workers from the South who describe the problems and provide the answers. They are a challenge to the received 'wisdom' of the North. Originally published in 1989

How do ''types'' of aid differ? Why are there different kinds? When is one more appropriate than another? How can you tell ''good'' aid from ''bad''?Friends of the Earth commissioned Teresa Hayter, author of Aid as Imperialism and Aid: Rhetoric and Reality, to examine Britain's aid policy and practice, paying particular attention to its effects on the worlds forests. In this book she describes the history of the different forms of aid and their effects. On behalf of one of the West's most effective environmental lobbies, Exploited Earth show how and why British aid needs to change.Originally published in 1989

Is it possible to see famines coming, to be prepared and to save possibly hundreds of thousands of lives?Or is this the wrong question? A famine is not a single natural catastrophe: it has different stages. Many societies have sophisticated strategies for coping ? but these are becoming dramatically limited.Famine Early Warning System is about the people who are caught up in the process of famine. Peter Walker looks at how they perceive their predicament and what they do to avert mass starvation: and at what genuinely useful help can be offered in order to prevent irreversible disaster. Originally published in 1989

Surgical care is increasingly recognized as a critical component of global health, and strong surgical skills, teamwork, and poise under pressure become even more imperative during conflict or disaster. When faced with hospital bombings or devastating earthquakes, healthcare personnel must develop special techniques and abilities to ably care for patients despite limited resources and a disrupted health system. In Operation Crisis, Dr. Adam L. Kushner brings together 22 medical experts from around the world to recount their experiences in the field when disaster struck. These candid firsthand accounts from both local and international aid surgeons provide clinicians and public health practitioners with insightful lessons for effectively treating surgical patients under the most grueling of circumstances. Moving from conflict settings that include war zones in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, and South Sudan, Operation Crisis also touches on post-earthquake Haiti and Nepal and post-tsunami Indonesia. Individual themed chapters cover mass casualty training, burn care, obstetric care, sexual violence, and landmine injuries. Combining personal stories with lessons learned and possible interventions, these vivid and affecting essays detail the immediate aftermath of conflict and disaster while pointing the way to improving care for future victims of crisis. Intended to spark further discussion and function as an advocacy tool while highlighting situations where surgical care can save lives and reduce disability, this book is a valuable resource for medical professionals, students, policy makers, international aid organizations, and philanthropic donors. Contributors: Kapendra Shekhar Amatya, Samer Attar, Jeffrey A. Bailey, Lucas C. Carlson, James C. Cobey, Dattesh R. Dave, Dan L. Deckelbaum, Richard A. Gosselin, Shailvi Gupta, Edna Adan Ismail, Thaim B. Kamara, T. Peter Kingham, Adam L. Kushner, Judy M. Lee, Maria "Tane" Pilar Luna, Brijesh Mishra, Kyle N. Remick, Lauri J. Romanzi, Michael Sinclair, Barclay T. Stewart, Marten van Wijhe, Evan G. Wong

This book describes how NGOs' efforts to promote sustainable development are affected by their funding, management strategies, and relationships with government, communities, and other NGOs. The authors explore implications for theory and offer suggestions for increasing NGO effectiveness.