The Aid Chain: Coercion and Commitment in Development NGOs - Softcover

Wallace, Tina; Bornstein, Lisa; Chapman, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853396265 ISBN 13: 9781853396267

Verlag: ITDG Publishing US SR, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Significant proportions of aid already flow through the non-governmental sector, but questions are increasingly being asked about the role of NGOs and whether they can deliver on their ambitious claims. This study examines conditionality and mutual commitment between international aid donors and recipient NGOs, North and South.

Fieldwork and case study material from Uganda and South Africa are used to support the authors’ contention that the fast changing aid sector has--in the context of a dynamic policy environment--encouraged the mainstreaming of a managerial approach that does not admit of any analysis of power relations or cultural diversity. This increasing--essentially technical-- definition of the roles of NGOs has worked to limit the extent of the very development that the organizations were initially established to promote.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lisa Bornstein worked for many years at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal, where she was head of the SA research, and she is now teaching and researching at the University of McGill in Canada. She specialises in planning as well as development issues.

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The Aid Chain

Coercion and Commitment in Development NGOs

By Tina Wallace, Lisa Bornstein, Jennifer Chapman

Practical Action Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2006 Intermediate Technology Publications Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85339-626-7

Contents

Preface, ix, 
Acknowledgements, xi, 
Figure, tables and boxes, xiv, 
About the authors, xv, 
Acronyms, xvii, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2. The changing context for the work of development NGOs, 19, 
3. The management of development, 31, 
4. The major UK donors and the flow of aid through the NGO sector, 49, 
5. The NGO context in Uganda and South Africa, 73, 
6. Normative conditions: rational management of the aid chain, 91, 
7. The ties that bind, 109, 
8. Relationships: partnerships, power and participation, 129, 
9. Chains of influence in South Africa, 147, 
10. Listening to the past and building a new future, 161, 
Appendix, 179, 
References, 181, 
Websites, 189, 
Index, 191, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The global poverty agenda, long promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), was formally endorsed by the World Bank in 2000, marking a major shift in official approaches to aid. This new international focus has led to calls to greatly increase aid, drop the debt and change the terms of trade that keep poor countries excluded from benefiting from the global economy. Finding effective ways to reduce poverty concerns governments and NGOs, and there is at times a growing convergence of thinking around the causes and solutions to poverty among donors, governments and NGOs worldwide. Expectations run high that further increases in aid will be forthcoming and that the targets set to focus all aid efforts, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be met, albeit later than anticipated. Strategies for achieving these goals include addressing poverty directly and tackling factors such as good governance, corruption, the role of the state and civil society, and identifying drivers of growth and change that will enable positive change to be sustained.

Although figures on aid flows are contested, aid from the UK and the European Union is certainly increasing, and both are promising much more aid, especially for Africa. The volume of aid to Africa is already high, though erratic and overshadowed by the lack of direct foreign investment and debt (UNCTAD, 2000: Lockwood, 2005). Significant and increasing proportions of aid go directly to governments through direct budget support; money from donors and public-giving flows to NGOs in the countries of the north and south. Yet the problems of poverty continue to grow, and for many of the world's people, especially in Africa, poverty, hunger and economic insecurity persist and even increase. Aid is not fulfilling its promise and donors, practitioners and academics talk about the crisis of aid and the apparent failure of aid to enable many countries in Africa to progress. The need to show demonstrable and positive outcomes from aid is now critical for both donors and NGOs; assumptions of the role and performance of NGOs are being examined to see if they hold true and whether NGOs can achieve their ambitious aims (Lewis, 2003b).

Donors and NGOs have responded to questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of aid in a number of ways. Donors have introduced new mechanisms and conditions for aid going directly to states, including the concept of selectivity, which allows them to work only with states that have adopted good pro-poor policies, defined according to their criteria. The mechanisms of aid to African states are changing, from projects to programmes, sector and even budget support, tightly tied to national poverty plans that have to be agreed by donors. Direct budget support is accompanied by heavy technical support and conditions, especially around governance and accountability. For funding going via NGOs, donors have heightened their control through new conditions, tighter selectivity and growing demands for accountability, these last encoded in specific management procedures and practices. The increase in conditionality, selectivity and paperwork, especially for accountability, is widespread among donors, with most adopting similar measures and policies. Northern NGOs, in their turn, adopt and promote the new aid approaches – from needs to rights, from projects to programmes, from service delivery to advocacy – and implement them through largely standardized management procedures.

Yet many observers, including some NGO commentators, fear that part of the problem and challenge of aid lies precisely in this increasing reliance on the management models, and the ideology that underpins them, that dominate aid disbursement. They are seen as 'depoliticising development' (Ferguson, 1990), treating intensely political choices as technical and managerial ones, and imposing control and regulation through external solutions to local problems. Some critics argue that these rational, managerial models privilege the scientific and rational while devaluing essential knowledge, analysis and action at the local level; they reinforce existing relations of power and so place achieving the broad aims of poverty reduction and development at risk (Mawdsley et al., 2002; Long and Long, 1992; Mosse, 2005).

The increasingly bureaucratic management of aid, which seeks to control, count and account tightly for both finances and complex processes of social change, is underpinned by a set of beliefs about how to achieve change, which are drawn less from experience and the analysis of success or failure in practice, and more from the shifting ideologies of those designing the development project:

For many working in development, getting theory right is the key to addressing the failures and disappointments of development ... better theory, new paradigms and alternative frameworks are constantly needed (Mosse, 2005: 1).

Debates continue about which theory or framework will hold the key to success and enable aid to be most effective. The tensions between very different aid paradigms are referred to in this book; however, our key concern is to explore an area that has largely been neglected until recently, namely whether the existing aid processes widely used by NGOs are effective in tackling poverty and exclusion. We believe that the way aid is disbursed (the procedures and conditions of aid) affects the implementation of NGO policies on the ground and shapes the way they work, that is, their development practice.

We begin with the observation that aid too often follows routes and is accompanied by practices that mirror and reinforce the structural inequalities that it is there to challenge. Foreign aid, including aid that passes through international (usually northern-based) NGOs to contribute to development activities conducted by NGOs based in the south, often comes with conditions, stated or not, that limit its positive impacts. Answering the question of how much aid to whom must, in our view, be accompanied by greater attention to the mechanisms of aid and their effects on the organizations and individuals involved in the aid project. It is also important to understand what drives the constantly changing aid agenda and associated procedures, to see how far they are rooted in learning from practice and how far they are driven by the changing ideologies and perceptions of those with power. Attention must be paid to the theory and paradigms that underpin current aid practices. Yet research on NGOs rarely engages...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ITDG Publishing US SR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853396265
• ISBN 13: 9781853396267
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 220
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland