Suchergebnisse

This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these specific interventions has varied greatly over the past years, and we highlight the channels through which funds reach their target recipients. An important conclusion to note is the need for donors to align their programmes with government-defined priorities in order to ensure the achievement of national development objectives, long-term sustainability, and success.

The Lisbon Treaty left the question of the future organization of the European Union's external assistance and development aid largely unanswered. It was only after its entry into force on 1 December 2009 and with the adaptation of the European External Action Service (EEAS) that a major organizational revision of the EU's foreign aid was set in motion. Development - and in its extension neighbourhood - is now the crucial area of work that straddles both the EEAS and the Commission. This article outlines the dispute over the division of labour of the programming and management cycle and the tools of European external assistance and development aid. The subsequent reorganization of powers between the EEAS, the new DG DEVCO and the up-graded EU Delegations is examined and the general impact of this rearrangement on the future paths of the EU's foreign policy is tackled. The focus lies on strategic planning and programming of EU's main external action instruments for the years 2014-2020: the European Development Fund (EDF), the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI) and the new European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI).

Despite a wide recognition of the importance of learning capacity and diversification, enabling and constraining factors, and external assistance in facilitating long-term livelihood recovery (LTLR), there is a paucity of comparison for a nuanced understanding of interconnections among the three themes (learning capacity and diversification, enabling and constraining factors, and external assistance) in different societal and disaster scenarios. Accordingly, this article employs a cross-national comparative approach in examining the interplay of these three factors in LTLR, within rural communities, following the two international post-disaster case studies, the 2007 Cyclone Sidr, Barguna, Bangladesh and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, Sichuan, China. This cross-national comparison indicates that the affected communities in both cases experienced extreme challenges in LTLR while illustrating the differences. Learning capacity and diversification facilitated asset loss recovery and risk mitigation in the Sidr case, while the Wenchuan case demonstrated a limited learning opportunity for livelihood diversification. Enabling and constraining factors were identified in both case studies. Particularly, people-place connections positively shaped the LTLR in the Wenchuan case while producing negative results in the Sidr case. External assistance facilitated livelihood provisioning, protection, and promotion for the Sidr case; in contrast, giving little, if any, credence to the local traditional livelihood practice, the top-down external interventions in the Wenchuan case jeopardized the rural communities LTLR. This article defends that promoting grassroots participation in community reconstruction and recovery and strengthening grassroots livelihood learning and practice capacities would advance LTLR.