At the end of the twentieth century, academics and policymakers welcomed a trend toward fiscal and political decentralization as part of a potential solution for slow economic growth and poor performance by insulated, unaccountable governments. For the last two decades, researchers have been trying to answer a series of vexing questions about the political economy of multi-layered governance. Much of the best recent research on decentralization has come from close collaborations between university researchers and international aid institutions. As the volume and quality of this collaborative research have increased in recent decades, the time has come to review the lessons from this literature and apply them to debates about future programming. In this volume, the contributors place this research in the broader history of engagement between aid institutions and academics, particularly in the area of decentralized governance, and outline the challenges and opportunities to link evidence and policy action.

Social workers are increasingly engaged in supporting individuals and communities in long-term disaster recovery. Rebuilding Lives Post-Disaster brings together an international team of social work researchers who have investigated the experiences, perspectives, challenges, and complexities in disaster recovery. It features country case studies drawing from field research undertaken in disaster-affected communities in Canada, the United States, Australia, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and China. In so doing, the volume provides a comprehensive perspective on the realities of disaster recovery and explores key concepts such as resilience, community-based disaster risk reduction, and social and gendered construction of vulnerability and capabilities. Undergraduate and graduate students and professionals in the fields of social work, community development, international social work, emergency management, and related fields will find the text to be a helpful resource.

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies-from omnipresent media broadcasts to relief fund efforts and promises to "Never Forget." Recuber explains how a specific and "real" kind of emotional connection to the victims becomes a crucial element in the creation, use, and consumption of mass mediation of disasters. He links this to the concept of "empathetic hedonism," or the desire to understand or feel the suffering of others. The ineffability of disasters makes them a spectacular and emotional force in contemporary American culture. Consuming Catastrophe provides a lively analysis of the themes and meanings of tragedy and the emotions it engenders in the representation, mediation and consumption of disasters.

Is China a rogue donor, as some media pundits suggest? Or is China helping the developing world pave a pathway out of poverty, as the Chinese claim? In the last few years, China's aid program has leapt out of the shadows. Media reports about huge aid packages, support for pariah regimes, regiments of Chinese labor, and the ruthless exploitation of workers and natural resources in some of the poorest countries in the world sparked fierce debates. These debates, however, took place with very few hard facts. China's tradition of secrecy about its aid fueled rumors and speculation, making it difficult to gauge the risks and opportunities provided by China's growing embrace.
This well-timed book, by one of the world's leading experts, provides the first comprehensive account of China's aid and economic cooperation overseas. Deborah Brautigam tackles the myths and realities, explaining what the Chinese are doing, how they do it, how much aid they give, and how it all fits into their "going global" strategy. Drawing on three decades of experience in China and Africa, and hundreds of interviews in Africa, China, Europe and the US, Brautigam shines new light on a topic of great interest.
China has ended poverty for hundreds of millions of its own citizens. Will Chinese engagement benefit Africa? Using hard data and a series of vivid stories ranging across agriculture, industry, natural resources, and governance, Brautigam's fascinating book provides an answer. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with China's rise, and what it might mean for the challenge of ending poverty in Africa.

Formed 50 years ago, in 1961, the Peace Corps sends American volunteers to serve at the grassroots level in villages and towns across the globe to meet its three-point legislative mandate of promoting world peace and friendship by improving the lives of those they serve, helping others understand American culture, and sharing their experiences with Americans back home. To date, nearly 200,000 Peace Corps volunteers have served in 139 countries. This book examines the Peace Corps, with a focus on the problems of safety and security for its volunteers world-wide and the challenges facing the organisation to remain relevant and productive for the next fifty years.

U.S. foreign aid programs began in earnest with the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe following World War II. Arguably, the underlying rationale for aid during most of the post-war period was to counter Communist influence in the world. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, aid programs have increasingly been justified within the context of anti-terrorism. Despite changing global conditions and challenges, U.S. foreign aid programs, their organisational structure, and their statutory underpinnings, reflect the Cold War environment in which they originated. This book focuses on the role that foreign assistance can play as a foreign policy tool within the current international environment.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed the severe consequences of breakdowns in emergency communications used by first responders. Failures in emergency communications resulted in numerous lost lives and exacerbated already challenging situations. These past events have increased focus on the need to enhance emergency communications to respond more effectively to future catastrophic disasters. Effective response to catastrophic disasters will require that first responders - law enforcement personnel, fire-fighters, and others first on the scene - have reliable communication systems, including supporting infrastructure, facilities and staff. This book focuses on the issues and vulnerabilities to emergency communications systems, the federal assistance available and other challenges with these efforts.

More fascinating and harrowing accounts of the volunteer professionals who risk their lives to help those in desperate need.

Praise for the second edition:

"Direct and evocative, this well-written book pushes readers to the edge of a world of grueling realities not known by most Americans."
-- Choice

Doctors Without Borders (aka Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) was founded in 1971 by rebellious French doctors. It is arguably the most respected humanitarian organization in the world, delivering emergency aid to victims of armed conflict, epidemics and natural disasters as well as to many others who lack reliable health care.

Dan Bortolotti follows the volunteers at the forefront of this organization and its work, who daily risk their lives to perform surgery, establish or rehabilitate hospitals and clinics, run nutrition and sanitation programs, and train local medical personnel. These volunteer professionals: Perform emergency surgery in war-torn regions of Africa, Asia and elsewhere
Treat the homeless in the streets of Europe
Honor cultural customs and understand societal differences that affect health care
Witness and report the genocidal atrocities so often missed by mainstream media

This new and revised third edition includes updates and new inside stories from recent relief operations, and it covers changes within the organization, such as its new emphasis on nutrition. There are also many new and revealing color photographs and insights gained from the author's 2009 trip to Haiti, where he found three different arms of MSF operating in dire conditions.

"Hope in Hell" is a widely acclaimed portrait of a renowned Nobel-winning humanitarian organization, revealing how Doctors Without Borders provides immediate and outstanding medical care.

This book is structured in four sections. Section 1 looks at the issues related to theoretical and methodological considerations. Chapter 1 to 5 deal with gaps in measuring effectiveness of development aid programs including issues related to evaluability assessment, outcome mapping and sustainability (Chapter 1), perspective in measuring effectiveness (chapter 2), the application of narrative and dialogue methods in defining and redefining effectiveness (chapter 3), the role of economic modelling in measuring the impact and effectiveness of aid programs (chapter 4) and the outline of how the effectiveness of HIV prevention is currently being measured at a global level, and the requirements at local and national levels (chapter 5). Section two looks at principles and practice with some case studies. Chapter 6, selling humanitarian emergencies to the media, focuses on the relationship between journalists and aid workers and suggests practical strategies relief agencies can take to raise the media profile.

This book collects and examines information on federal policies that would be implemented in the event that terrorist attacks occur again. It then asks about each of these policies: Based on experiences gained thus far, should Congress consider changes in federal consequence management policies to address the effects of possible future attacks? The book explores two types of issues-selected administrative issues pertinent to delivery of assistance, and selected policy issues about the assistance provided. The 12 section in the book follow a common format: an issue statement, background information, and analysis (including information specific to terrorist attacks) and policy options.

At no time during the Great Depression was the contradiction between agriculture surplus and widespread hunger more wrenchingly graphic than in the government's attempt to raise pork prices through the mass slaughter of miliions of unripe little pigs. This contradiction was widely perceived as a paradox. In fact, as Janet Poppendieck makes clear in this newly expanded and updated volume, it was a normal, predictable working of an economic system rendered extreme by the Depression. The notion of paradox, however, captured the imagination of the public and policy makers, and it was to this definition of the problem that surplus commodities distribution programs in the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations were addressed.
This book explains in readable narrative how the New Deal food assistance effort, originally conceived as a relief measure for poor people, became a program designed to raise the incomes of commercial farmers. In a broader sense, the book explains how the New Deal years were formative for food assistance in subsequent administrations; it also examines the performance--or lack of performance--of subsequent in-kind relief programs.
Beginning with a brief survey of the history of the American farmer before the depression and the impact of the Depression on farmers, the author describes the development of Hoover assistance programs and the events at the end of that administration that shaped the historical moment seized by the early New Deal. Poppendieck goes on to analyze the food assistance policies and programs of the Roosevelt years, the particular series of events that culminated in the decision to purchase surplus agriculture products and distribute them to the poor, the institutionalization of this approach, the resutls achieved, and the interest groups formed. The book also looks at the takeover of food assistance by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its gradual adaptation for use as a tool in the maintenance of farm income. Utliizing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, the author reveals with unusual clarity the evolution from a policy directly responsive to the poor to a policy serving mainly democratic needs.

A well-trained tracking dog can be the deciding factor that determines success in both criminal investigations and search-and-rescue operations. When the stakes are high, demanding the highest level of performance from your K9, you need training methods relied upon by police forces and SAR teams around the world. Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak show you how to train your dog in clean-scent tracking, a proven method that trains dogs to follow a particular scent on a track, while ignoring cross-tracks and other odors. In K9 Professional Tracking, you'll learn how to train a clean-scent tracking dog you can count on. You'll also learn to fully understand what your K9 is and is not capable of in the field. With the right knowledge and techniques, you'll be able to train tracking dogs to the highest professional standards.

From award-winning ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, and written using exclusive interviews and information comes the definitive account of the dramatic story that gripped the world: the miracle rescue of twelve boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave miles underground for nearly three weeks-a pulse-pounding page-turner by a reporter who was there every step of their journey out.

After a practice in June 2018, a Thai soccer coach took a dozen of his young players to explore a famous but flood-prone cave. It was one of the boys' birthday, but neither he nor the dozen resurfaced. Worried parents and rescuers flocked to the mouth of a cave that seemed to have swallowed the boys without a trace. Ranging in age from eleven to sixteen, the boys were all members of the Wild Boars soccer team. When water unexpectedly inundated the cave, blocking their escape, they retreated deeper inside, taking shelter in a side cavern. While the world feared them dead, the thirteen young souls survived by licking the condensation off the cave's walls, meditating, and huddling together for warmth. In this thrilling account, ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman recounts this amazing story in depth and from every angle, exploring their time in the cave, the failed plans and human mistakes that nearly doomed them, and the daring mission that ultimately saved them.

Gutman introduces the elite team of volunteer divers who risked death to execute a plan so risky that its American planners admitted, "for us, success would have meant getting just one boy out alive." He takes you inside the meetings where life and death decisions were grimly made and describes how these heroes pulled off an improbable rescue under immense pressure, with the boys' desperate parents and the entire world watching. One of the largest rescues in history was in doubt until the very last moment. Matt Gutman covered the story intensively, went deep inside the caves himself, and interviewed dozens of rescuers, experts and eye-witnessed around the world.

The result is this pulse-pounding page-turner that vividly recreates this extraordinary event in all its intensity-and documents the ingenuity and sacrifice it took to succeed.

Empire of Humanity explores humanitarianism's remarkable growth from its humble origins in the early nineteenth century to its current prominence in global life. In contrast to most contemporary accounts of humanitarianism that concentrate on the last two decades, Michael Barnett ties the past to the present, connecting the antislavery and missionary movements of the nineteenth century to today's peacebuilding missions, the Cold War interventions in places like Biafra and Cambodia to post Cold War humanitarian operations in regions such as the Great Lakes of Africa and the Balkans; and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 to the emergence of the major international humanitarian organizations of the twentieth century. Based on extensive archival work, close encounters with many of today's leading international agencies, and interviews with dozens of aid workers in the field and at headquarters, Empire of Humanity provides a history that is both global and intimate.

Avoiding both romanticism and cynicism, Empire of Humanity explores humanitarianism's enduring themes, trends, and, most strikingly, ethical ambiguities. Humanitarianism hopes to change the world, but the world has left its mark on humanitarianism. Humanitarianism has undergone three distinct global ages imperial, postcolonial, and liberal each of which has shaped what humanitarianism can do and what it is. The world has produced not one humanitarianism, but instead varieties of humanitarianism. Furthermore, Barnett observes that the world of humanitarianism is divided between an emergency camp that wants to save lives and nothing else and an alchemist camp that wants to remove the causes of suffering. These camps offer different visions of what are the purpose and principles of humanitarianism, and, accordingly respond differently to the same global challenges and humanitarianism emergencies. Humanitarianism has developed a metropolis of global institutions of care, amounting to a global governance of humanity. This humanitarian governance, Barnett observes, is an empire of humanity: it exercises power over the very individuals it hopes to emancipate.

Although many use humanitarianism as a symbol of moral progress, Barnett provocatively argues that humanitarianism has undergone its most impressive gains after moments of radical inhumanity, when the "international community" believes that it must atone for its sins and reduce the breach between what we do and who we think we are. Humanitarianism is not only about the needs of its beneficiaries; it also is about the needs of the compassionate."

Bread from Stones, a highly anticipated book from historian Keith David Watenpaugh, breaks new ground in analyzing the theory and practice of modern humanitarianism. Genocide and mass violence, human trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background for this exploration of humanitarianism's role in the history of human rights. Watenpaugh's unique and provocative examination of humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development projects. Employing a wide range of source materials literary and artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and international organizations help victims of war, care for trafficked children, and aid refugees. Bread from Stones is required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.

The dilemmas of African development continue to haunt both African and western institutions and governments. Here Christopher Rowan offers an original interpretation of the evolving concept of partnership as it operates within the current relationship between the European Union and the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific group. Framing his discussion in terms of the human right to water, Rowan presents detailed case studies of water aid from the EU to Lesotho and Mozambique, and explores the persisting inequities in the discourse and processes of development. With a close analysis of the interaction between non-governmental organizations, local elites, states and international actors, this book is a timely and insightful addition to perspectives on relations between the global North and South.

'This book is valuable for and beyond the international development industry. It deftly leads a non-specialist through the maze of ideas and arguments plaguing the concept of civil society, and critically examines how and what happens, when the international aid system tries to turn confusing and complex political theory into effective development policy and practice fitting the individual preconditions and historical trajectories of the worlds varied nations. The comparative evidence, analysis and recommendations on offer are essential reading for anyone attempting to understand or ''build'' someone else's - as well as their own - civil society, especially when justifying the use of tax payers' money to do so.' ALAN FOWLER, CO-FOUNDER, INTRAC 'This book will be really useful to numerous readers, 011 a subject becoming ever more topical in the world of development and beyond. It puts order into the deeply confused debate about civil society, describes what the aid donors are doing to pursue their new goals, offers four penetrating case studies, and concludes with sensible suggestions for future policy. The authors have made a practical and lucid assessment of the huge civil society literature; they have also contributed valuably to it, and deserve to he listened to.' PROFESSOR ROBERT CASSEN, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Northern governments and NGOs are increasingly convinced that civil society will enable people in developing countries to escape the poverty trap. Civil Society and the Aid Industry, the product of extensive research by the prestigious North-South Institute in Canada, makes a critical appraisal of this new emphasis in the aid industry. It explores the roles of Northern governmental, multilateral and non-governmental agencies in supporting civil society, presenting in-depth case studies of projects in Peru, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Hungary, and gives detailed policy recommendations intended to improve the effectiveness and appropriateness of future projects. Originally published in 1998

This study of Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) casts new light on the organization's founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its "without borders" transnational vision. Pioneering medical sociologist Renee C. Fox spent nearly twenty years conducting extensive ethnographic research within MSF, a private international medical humanitarian organization that was created in 1971 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999. With unprecedented access, Fox attended MSF meetings and observed doctors and other workers in the field. She interviewed MSF members and participants and analyzed the content of such documents as communications between MSF staff members within the offices of its various headquarters, communications between headquarters and the field, and transcripts of internal group discussions and meetings. Fox weaves these threads of information into a rich tapestry of the MSF experience that reveals the dual perspectives of an insider and an observer. The book begins with moving, detailed accounts from the blogs of women and men working for MSF in the field. From there, Fox chronicles the organization's early history and development, paying special attention to its struggles during the first decades of its existence to clarify and implement its principles. The core of the book is centered on her observations in the field of MSF's efforts to combat a rampant epidemic of HIV/AIDS in postapartheid South Africa and the organization's response to two challenges in postsocialist Russia: an enormous surge in homelessness on the streets of Moscow and a massive epidemic of tuberculosis in the penal colonies of Siberia. Fox's accounts of these crises exemplify MSF's struggles to provide for thousands of people in need when both the populations and the aid workers are in danger. Enriched by vivid photographs of MSF operations and by ironic, self-critical cartoons drawn by a member of the Communications Department of MSF France, Doctors Without Borders highlights the bold mission of the renowned international humanitarian organization even as it demonstrates the intrinsic dilemmas of humanitarian action.