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.

In spite of shared rhetorical commitments to tackling poverty worldwide, donors have varied considerably in their use of aid as an instrument for global poverty reduction. This book explains varied donor priorities by examining how societal actors, governmental actors, and the institutions that regulate their interactions influence development policy choices. The Domestic Politics of Foreign Aid challenges explanations for donor generosity that identify humanitarian values, partisan politics, and welfare state institutions as key determinants of aid-giving patterns. It explains how the preferences of diverse sets of actors are amalgamated in the domestic political arena to shape national preferences for international redistribution. Drawing on interview research conducted with a variety of stakeholders in four donor countries (Denmark, France, Switzerland and the United States) and an extensive review of primary and secondary sources on aid politics in the countries studied, the book offers both a static overview of the characteristics of aid policymaking systems and a historical treatment of policymaking dynamics over a 25-year period (1980-2005). Applying a common theoretical framework to the four case studies and using development NGO advocacy as a starting point for examining the politics of aid, this book provides a synthesis of several strands of theoretical work dealing with interest group politics and political institutions to inform the analysis of the societal and governmental determinants of aid choices.

Rethinking M&E - Challenges and Prospects in the Changing Global Aid Environment' incorporates the good examples and innovative M&E solutions of 120 development professionals from a wide range of countries, circumstances and specialisms. This book is based on INTRAC's international conference and regional M&E workshops in Ghana, India, Sweden and Peru, and includes perspectives from NGOs and CSOs, donor ministries, activists, think-tanks and foundations. Emphasising Southern perspectives and covering a rich variety of experiences, it stresses the important role of M&E in challenging many of our assumptions about poverty alleviation. It analyses practitioner issues and situates them within wider aid trends. It takes as its premise the observation that official development aid is shifting towards an increasingly technocratic, managerial, state-centred approach. It follows that M&E within the aid chain worldwide is directed away from its focus on qualitative outcomes and long-term poverty alleviation impacts. Within this context, Rethinking M&E provides innovative insights into such areas as M&E of NGOs as donors, the M&E of advocacy and the M&E of humanitarian emergencies.

Although recent global disasters have clearly demonstrated the power of social media to communicate critical information in real-time, its true potential has yet to be unleashed. Social Media, Crisis Communication, and Emergency Management: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies teaches emergency management professionals how to use social media to improve emergency planning, preparedness, and response capabilities. It provides a set of guidelines and safe practices for using social media effectively across a range of emergency management applications. Explaining how emergency management agencies can take advantage of the extended reach these technologies offer, the book supplies cutting-edge methods for leveraging these technologies to manage information more efficiently, reduce information overload, inform the public, and ultimately save lives. Filled with real-world examples and case studies, it is an ideal self-study resource. Its easy-to-navigate structure and numerous exercises also make it suitable for courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. From crowdsourcing and digital volunteers to mapping and collective intelligence, Social Media, Crisis Communication, and Emergency Management: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies facilitates a clear understanding of the essential principles of social media. Each chapter includes an example of a local-level practitioner, organization, or agency using social media that demonstrates the transformative power of social media in the real world. The book also includes numerous exercises that supply readers with models for building their own social media sites and groups-making it a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about the communication and information structures supported by social media. Visit the author's homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/conniemwhite/Home

Since the early 1990s, Japan has played an increasingly important and influential role in Africa. A primary mechanism that has furthered its influence has been through its foreign aid policies. Japan's primacy, however, has been challenged by changing global conditions related to aid to Africa, including the consolidation of the poverty reduction agenda and China's growing presence in Africa. This book analyzes contemporary political and economic relations in foreign aid policy between Japan and Africa. Primary questions focus on Japan's influence in the African continent, reasons for spending its limited resources to further African development, and the way Japan's foreign aid is invested in Africa. The context of examining Japan's foreign aid policies highlights the fluctuation between its commitments in contributing to international development and its more narrow-minded pursuit of its national interests. The contributors examine Japan's foreign aid policy within the theme of a globalized economy in which Japan and Africa are inextricably connected. Japan and many African countries have come to realize that both sides can obtain benefits through closely coordinated aid policies. Moreover, Japan sees itself to represent a distinct voice in the international donor community while Africa needs foreign aid from all sources.

While history has identified a need for improved coordination during emergencies, it has also demonstrated that community volunteers positively impact their neighborhoods during times of crisis. Laying out the rationale and process by which emergency managers, community leaders, and non-governmental aid organizations can effectively collaborate and integrate citizen response, Spontaneous Community Volunteers in Disasters explains how to engage, train, and utilize spontaneous unaffiliated community volunteers (SUCV). The book prepares leaders to integrate local volunteers into any scale emergency response. Protocols and flexible management solutions are outlined to ensure safe and effective planning and execution. Work templates provided can be modified to suit the needs of any community. This accessible manual provides the tools to: Assess your agency's role, tasks, and challenges to meet community needs in a disaster Build a plan for managing SUCVs by developing internal and external protocols Develop effective spot screening and selection methods Engage community members in information-sharing and outreach campaigns Consider policies and procedures that create relevant roles for volunteers and community groups to build a resilient team for disaster recovery Provide National Incident Management System (NIMS) compliant answers to address common barriers to using SUCVs Combining field experience and psychosocial research, the book makes a strong case as to why community involvement in disaster response will have a positive impact on a community's resilient recovery. Praise for Spontaneous Community Volunteers in Disasters: All emergency management coordinators can benefit from this book. -Howard Butt, New Jersey State Police, State CERT Coordinator Lisa Orloff has done an excellent job in both identifying a significant opportunity in emergency response and meticulously outlining how that opportunity can best be leveraged. -Dr. Michael Chumer, New Jersey Institute of Technology The Alliance for Nonprofit Management has nominated the book for the Terry McAdam Award. This award is bestowed upon the Committee's choice for the most inspirational and useful new book published for the nonprofit sector.

Emergency managers and officials have seen a tremendous increase in the planning responsibilities placed on their shoulders over the last decade. Crisis Management and Emergency Planning: Preparing for Today's Challenges supplies time-tested insights to help communities and organizations become better prepared to cope with natural and manmade disasters and their impacts on the areas they serve. Author and editor Michael J. Fagel, PhD, CEM has more than three decades of experience in emergency management and emergency operations. He has been an on-site responder to such disaster events as the Oklahoma City Bombing and the site of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of 9/11. He is an experienced professor, trainer, professional, and consultant and has pretty much seen it all. The book delves into this experience to present advanced emergency management and response concepts to disasters not often covered in other publications. It includes coverage of planning and preparedness, public health considerations, vulnerability and impact assessments, hospital management and planning, sporting venue emergency planning, and community preparedness including volunteer management. Contributions from leading professionals in the field focus on broad responses across the spectrum of public health, emergency management, and mass casualty situations. The book provides detailed, must-read planning and response instruction on a variety of events, identifying long-term solutions for situations where a community or organization must operate outside its normal daily operational windows. This book has been selected as the 2014 ASIS Book of the Year.

The spate of disaster events ranging from major to catastrophic that have occurred in recent years raises a lot of questions about where and why they happened. Understanding the history of emergency management policies and practice is important to an understanding of current and future policies and practice. Continuing in the footsteps of its popular predecessors, the new edition of Emergency Management: The American Experience provides the background to understand the key political and policy underpinnings of emergency management, exploring how major "focusing events" have shaped the field of emergency management. This edition builds on the original theoretical framework and chronological approach of previous editions, while enhancing the discussions through the addition of fresh information about the effects and outcomes of older events, such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The final chapters offer insightful discussion of the public administration concepts of emergency management in the U.S. and of the evolving federal role in emergency management. Like its predecessors, the third edition of Emergency Management is a trusted and required text to understand the formation and continuing improvement of the American national emergency management system.

In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness-the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

Paul Collier's contributions to development economics, and in regard to Africa in particular, have marked him out as one of the most influential commentators of recent times. His research has centred upon the causes and consequences of civil war, the effects of aid, and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural-resource-rich societies. His work has also enjoyed substantial policy impact, having seen him sit as a senior adviser to Tony Blair's Commission on Africa and addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations This collection of Collier's major writings, with assistance from Anke Hoeffler and Jan Gunning, and accompanied by a new introduction, provide the definitive account of a wide range of macroeconomic, microeconomic and political economy topics concerned with Africa. Within macroeconomics, there is a focus on external shocks, exchange rate and trade policies, whilst microeconomic topics focus upon labour and financial markets, as well as rural development. Collier's book The Bottom Billion had become a landmark book and this summation of the research underpinning it will be a superb guide for all those concerned with African development.

With COVID-19 comes a heightened sense of everyday risk. How should a society manage, distribute, and conceive of it? As we cope with the lengthening effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, considerations of everyday risk have been more pressing, and inescapable. In the past, everyone engaged in some degree of risky behaviour, from mundane realities like taking a shower or getting into a car to purposely thrill-seeking activities like rock-climbing or BASE jumping. Many activities that seemed high-risk, such as flying, were claimed basically safe. But risk was, and always has been, a fact of life. With new focus on the risks of even leaving the safety of our homes, it's time for a deeper consideration of risk itself. How do we manage and distribute risks? How do we predict uncertain outcomes? If risk can never be completely eliminated, can it perhaps be controlled? At the heart of these questions-which govern everything from waking up each day to the abstract mathematics of actuarial science-lie philosophical issues of life, death, and danger. Mortality is the event-horizon of daily risk. How should we conceive of it?

In 2010, Haiti was ravaged by a brutal earthquake that affected the lives of millions. The call to assist those in need was heard around the globe. Yet two years later humanitarian efforts led by governments and NGOs have largely failed. Resources are not reaching the needy due to bureaucratic red tape, and many assets have been squandered. How can efforts intended to help the suffering fail so badly? In this timely and provocative book, Christopher J. Coyne uses the economic way of thinking to explain why this and other humanitarian efforts that intend to do good end up doing nothing or causing harm.
In addition to Haiti, Coyne considers a wide range of interventions. He explains why the U.S. government was ineffective following Hurricane Katrina, why the international humanitarian push to remove Muammar Gaddafi in Libya may very well end up causing more problems than prosperity, and why decades of efforts to respond to crises and foster development around the world have resulted in repeated failures.
In place of the dominant approach to state-led humanitarian action, this book offers a bold alternative, focused on establishing an environment of economic freedom. If we are willing to experiment with aid--asking questions about how to foster development as a process of societal discovery, or how else we might engage the private sector, for instance--we increase the range of alternatives to help people and empower them to improve their communities. Anyone concerned with and dedicated to alleviating human suffering in the short term or for the long haul, from policymakers and activists to scholars, will find this book to be an insightful and provocative reframing of humanitarian action.

Heart-breaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is a Palestinian doctor's inspiring account of his extraordinary life, growing up in poverty but determined to treat his patients in Gaza and Israel regardless of their ethnic origin. A London University- and Harvard-trained Palestinian doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and 'who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians' (New York Times), Abuelaish is an infertility specialist who lives in Gaza but works in Israel. On the strip of land he calls home (where 1.5 million Gazan refugees are crammed into a few square miles) the Gaza doctor has been crossing the lines in the sand that divide Israelis and Palestinians for most of his life - as a physician who treats patients on both sides of the line, as a humanitarian who sees the need for improved health and education for women as the way forward in the Middle East. And, most recently, as the father whose three daughters were killed by Israeli shells on 16 January 2009, during Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip. It was his response to this tragedy that made news and won him humanitarian awards around the world. Instead of seeking revenge or sinking into hatred, Izzeldin Abuelaish called for the people in the region to start talking to each other. His deepest hope is that his daughters will be 'the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis'.

This book is a collection of 15 case studies on China's foreign aid and economic cooperation with developing countries. Each case introduces the general information of a China's project, analyzes its features and impacts, and especially focuses on analysis of the characteristics of China's foreign aid under South-South Cooperation framework, which shows the differences of foreign aid by emerging economies from that by traditional donors in aid ideology, principles, practices, and effects. This book is one of the research projects by China International Development Research Network (CIDRN), as part of its contribution to the activities under the Network of Southern Think-tanks (NeST).

Hunger and Health explores the multiple relationships between hunger and poor health, and how they affect the growth of individuals, physiologically and psychologically, constraining the development of nations both socially and economically. Examining the profound effect that hunger has on health, including disease prevention and treatment, it gives special attention to access to quality food and healthcare, in particular for the marginalized and poor. It also identifies critical junctures in the human life cycle when the benefits of reducing hunger and improving poor health have a profound impact.It demonstrates how aligning of hunger and health interventions can offer proven solutions that reach those most in need, and contains compelling evidence which confirms that hunger and poor health are solvable problems today. It encourages those involved in policy, programming and advocacy to take action to address some of the most urgent hunger and health problems. This is an essential reading for anyone concerned about eliminating hunger.It is written by the UN's World Food Programme, the world's most important food agency, supplying food to 90 million people in 78 countries in 2006 alone. It sheds light on a vital, hitherto neglected area of the hunger debate - the multiple relationships between hunger and poor health. It offers essential actions and affordable solutions for leaders to reach those most in need, make access to food and healthcare more equitable, and ultimately eliminate hunger. It contains compelling evidence on the profound impact that reducing hunger and improving health has at critical junctures in life as well as the benefits to national economies.

This is the first book to look at gender issues in disasters in the context of South Asia, where disasters have a crucial impact on the development process. It shows how exploring the specific capacities and vulnerabilities of men and women in disaster situations, and taking account of them, will improve the chance of success in development projects. The book also includes two sets of guidelines, for policy makers and for practitioners, to help them address these issues in planning and implementing development and disaster management programmes.

How do cities plan for the unplanned? Do cities plan for recovery from every possible sudden shock? How does one prepare a plan for the recovery after a tragedy, like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York? The book discovers the systematic features that contribute to the success of planning institutions. In cities filled with uncertainty and complexity, planning institutions effectively tackle unexpected and sudden change by relying on the old and the familiar, rather than the new and the innovative.
The author argues that planning programs institutions were successful because they were bureaucratic, and relied on standardized routines, rigorous sets of established regimes, familiar programs, and institutionalized hierarchies. Also contrary to popular perception, neither the leaders at the top of the institutions nor those workers at the grassroots level were the most important in the implementation of such routines. The key actors were middle managers, because they knew the institutionalstructures inside out, what the routines were and how to use them, and were successful go-betweens between national governments and grassroots community groups.
Case studies from Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York provide a deeper understanding of urban planning processes. The case studies reveal that systematic institutional analysis helps us understand what works in planning, and why. They also demonstrate the manner in which institutional routines serve as powerful and effective tools for addressing novel situations.

Another Day in Paradise is an anthology of first-person stories by international aid workers. Written by active aid workers and spanning the hot spots of the globe from Afghanistan to Cambodia, Rwanda to Vietnam and Ecuador to Bosnia, these stories tell it like it really is on the ground. Covering natural disaster, war and all-too-fragile peace, these stories open an uncensored window onto the lives of aid workers and the triumphs and tragedies of the people they are trying to help.

* Argues that, to be successful, development must be understood and approached as a "complex system"* Presents case studies that demonstrate the power that all actors have to make a difference* Essential reading for all aid and development practitioners, scholars, policymakers, and donorsRapid and profound changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have seen a rise in the ideals of participation and partnership and attempts to enable the voices of the poor to be heard. Yet embedded traditions, vested interests, and bureaucratic inertia mean that old behaviors persist and planning continues as though free of chaotic interactions among stakeholders. "Inclusive Aid" exposes the need to recognize the complex, nonlinear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. A host of academics, policymakers, and practitioners, expose the challenges and opportunities facing the aid community today and argue for greater attention to issues of accountability and the adoption of rights-based approaches. They reveal the highly politicized and dynamic aid environment in which they work, and challenge existing political, institutional, and personal ways of working. Crucially, the book shows how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviors of individual actors.