Security concerns increasingly influence foreign aid: how Western countries give aid, to whom and why. With contributions from experts in the field, this book examines the impact of security issues on six of the world's largest aid donors, as well as on key crosscutting issues such as gender equality and climate change.

Knowing what deep participation is, and how it works, can make a critical difference in solving 21st century economic, political, and social problems. This book provides a new approach to hands-on change and begins formulation of a participatory social theory promising greater prosperity and justice for all.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere has highlighted the growing importance of the politics of civil society in the contemporary Middle East. In "Reproducing Sectarianism," Paul W. T. Kingston examines rights-oriented advocacy networks within Lebanon s postwar civil society, focusing on movements and political campaigns based on gender relations, the environment, and disability. Set within Lebanon s postwar sectarian democracy, whose factionalizing dynamics have long penetrated the country s civil society, Kingston s fascinating study provides an in-depth analysis of the successes and challenges that ensued in promoting rights-oriented social policies. Drawing on extensive field research, including interviews and a wealth of primary documents, Kingston has produced a groundbreaking work that will be of interest to Middle East experts and nonexperts alike."

How do religious groups, operating as NGOs, engage in the most important global institution for world peace? What processes do they adopt? Is there a "spiritual" UN today? This book is the first interdisciplinary study to present extensive fieldwork results from an examination of the activity of religious groups at the United Nations in New York and Geneva. Based on a three and half-year study of activities in the United Nations system, it seeks to show how "religion" operates in both visible and invisible ways. Jeremy Carrette, Hugh Miall, Verena Beittinger-Lee, Evelyn Bush and Sophie-Helene Trigeaud, explore the way "religion" becomes a "chameleon" idea, appearing and disappearing, according to the diplomatic aims and ambitions. Part 1 documents the challenges of examining religion inside the UN, Part 2 explores the processes and actions of religious NGOs - from diplomacy to prayer - and the specific platforms of intervention - from committees to networks - and Part 3 provides a series of case studies of religious NGOs, including discussion of Islam, Catholicism and Hindu and Buddhist NGOs. The study concludes by examining the place of diplomats and their views of religious NGOs and reflects on the place of "religion" in the UN today. The study shows the complexity of "religion" inside one of the most fascinating global institutions of the world today.

This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.

The authors present an overview of private development aid in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the EU as a whole. They illustrate how private aid organisations receive support as well as the relations they have with their respective governments.

The research and analysis contained in the volume depicts the broader patterns of an emerging environmental politics in China - a more assertive and restive citizenry in environmental affairs, the rise of interest groups, and international influences on domestic policy debates. "The China Environment Yearbook, Volume 3" is an indispensable source for scholars and policy makers concerned about how China's environmental policies and practices will affect its own future and the future of the earth.

This volume provides a novel and relational sociological approach to the study of EU civil society. It focuses on the interactions and interrelations between civil society actors and the forms of capital that structure the fields and sub-fields of EU civil society, through new and important empirical studies on organized EU civil society.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the contributions, constraints and opportunities available for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in peacemaking and peacebuilding. This book will critically appraise both NGO assets, such as their typical idealism, organizing talents and mediation capabilities, as well as their deficits (including the NGO tendency to polarize and to politicize, to disorganize and to destabilize, and to delegitimate and at once to legitimate) and to make recommendations for more effective interventions.

It is increasingly being accepted that there is a benefit to both parties when a relationship is established between an NGO and a company. Consequently a considerable number of strategic alliances have been established. It must be accepted that such alliances are not necessarily mutually beneficial but little research has been undertaken to determine the factors which facilitate or mitigate against such mutual benefit. Indeed it is only recently that such relationship shave started to be examined at all. The contributions in this volume seek to redress this by researching various aspects of such relationships in order to arrive at some conclusions regarding the potential benefits and pitfalls of such relationships. The various contributors speak from different perspectives and different locations around the world and have different experiences and interpretations to offer. The results therefore present a diverse but balanced picture of the potential of any relationship between NGOs, companies and corporate social responsibility.

By highlighting the scope and limitations of local NGO agencies, this book presents a unique perspective of the relationship between peacebuilding theory and its application in practice, outlining how well-educated, well-connected local decision makers and thinkers navigate the uneven power dynamics of the international aid system.

In recent decades there has been a great expansion in the number, size and influence of International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) involved in international relief and development. These changes have led to increased scrutiny of such organisations, and this scrutiny, together with increasing reflection by INGOs themselves and their staff on their own practice, has helped to highlight a number of pressing ethical questions such organisations face, such as: should INGOs attempt to provide emergency assistance even when doing so risks helping to fuel further conflict? How should INGOs manage any differences between their values and those of the people they seek to benefit? How open and honest should INGOs be about their own uncertainties and failures?

This book consists of sustained reflections on such questions. It derives from a workshop held at Melbourne University in July 2007 that brought together a group of people - for the most part, reflective practitioners and moral and political philosophers - to discuss such questions. It explores honestly some of the current challenges and dilemmas that INGOs face, and also suggests some new ideas for meeting these challenges. Our hope is that the kind of explicit reflection on the ethical issues INGOs face exemplified in this publication will help to promote a wider debate about these issues, a debate that in turn will help INGO managers and others to make better, wiser, more ethically informed decisions.

Notwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the impending departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. Europeanization in Sweden assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent's wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the "Swedish model" can guide European integration.

Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the "associational revolution" in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country's "transition" through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

Since the early 1990s, China has witnessed an influx of international NGOs, many of which have Christianity as their foundation. The presence of international Christian agencies in China, however, is not new. Christian missionaries went to China in the age of imperialism. Historians argue the work of missionaries was inextricably linked to the idea of a 'civilizing mission'. This book critically assesses the idea of a Christian 'civilizing mission' over time, and explores the relevance of the idea to the contemporary context. By examining the non-Han people's perception of international Christian agencies, this book advocates the importance of engagement through in-depth dialogue between international Christian NGOs and ethnic communities.

This edited volume explores development in the so-called 'fragile', 'failed' and 'pariah' states. It examines the literature on both fragile states and their development, and offers eleven case studies on countries ranking in the 'very high alert' and 'very high warning' categories in the Fund for Peace Failed States Index.

Development education is a radical form of learning that addresses the structural causes of poverty and injustice in the global North and South. This volume debates development education practice and the policy environment in which it is delivered. It affirmatively points to the transformative power of education as a means toward social change.

The world of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) has dramatically changed during the last two decades. The author critically analyses the engagement of INGOs within the contemporary international development landscape, enabling readers to further understand INGOs involvement in the politics of social change.

This volume of the China Environment Yearbook is the fourth in the seminal series by China's first environmental NGOs, Friends of Nature. The fourth English translation updates readers on environmentally significant issues of 2008, a year of both tragedy and hope. 2008 was an eventful year that included such setbacks as the Sichuan Earthquake, debilitating snow and ice storms, an algae bloom at the site of the Olympic sailing venue prior to the games, and a worsening global economic crisis. But there were also events that filled the country with optimism, including a successful Beijing Olympic Games with good air quality, the upgrading of the State Environmental Protection Agency to ministerial level status, and significant developments in China's environmental legal system and environmental public information disclosure mechanism. Other topics explored in this volume include marine pollution, wetlands, road ecology, eco-compensation, debates surrounding the newly instituted "plastic bag restriction" policy, public interest litigation, the concept of a low carbon economy, and the environmental performance of enterprises in 2008. Volume four is essential for those looking for a window into issues affecting China's environment from the viewpoint of civil society.

Drawing on years of research and direct experience in Bangladesh, Stiles pulls together theoretical strands from economics, sociology, and anthropology to help explain an emerging social structure in the Third World. These structures, which he calls intermestic development circles, bring together international donor agencies with various domestic community and private organizations. In Bangladesh not-for-profit agencies are dramatically transforming their operation and organizational cultures, while in turn Western NGOs are themselves changing in subtle ways. Scholars of development will find Stiles's intriguing account of the reciprocating effects of extensive interaction, cooperation, and tensions between international donors and domestic recipients informative and provocative.

Moving through three discernable phases, each one explainable by resort to different theories, these development circles grow from mere trading arrangements to a coherent social structure, separate from the rest of civil society in Bangladesh. While in the process of the not-for-profits receiving assistance become wealthier and more effective, they lose much of their local identity and become part of a transnational network. At the same time, donors must recast themselves in order to work effectively with these agencies, which often creates tension between local and home offices. The book closes with some recommendations that might attenuate some of the more troubling effects of this transformation.

This book reviews the remarkable growth, diversity and challenges of child sponsorship. It features the latest progress in child sponsorship practice and necessary tensions experienced by some organisations as they seek to maximise impact.

This book investigates whether international standards of good governance are applied to sub-state actors as well as to states. By examining the international response to self-determination claims, this project demonstrates that the international community does indeed hold sub-state groups accountable to such standards. Claimant groups that have internalized human rights and democratic norms are more likely to receive international support in the form of empowerment (promoting some form of self-governance). To illustrate the causal forces at work, the book presents three qualitative case studies--Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Western Sahara--to demonstrate that predictable changes in the international response occur as international perception of each claimant group's democratic record varies over time.

This book provides the reader with a broad overview of the current debate on the evaluation of transnational NGOs, combining the academic with the practitioners perspectives. The contributions to this edited volume deal with the key concepts of legitimacy, accountability and representation, covering a variety of issue areas and NGOs.