Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe project approach to development assistance has been attacked for its inability to make results self‐sustaining. This has been attributed to a short time horizon, an inability to pick up recurrent costs, and a tendency to either by‐pass or fragment local institutions and therefore to neglect the need for local capacity building. At the same time, claims have been made that projects are politically advantageous due to quick high visibility results and they are useful instruments for experimentation, social learning and capacity building. This article examines both arguments and concludes that there is a need for radical changes in project development processes, but that there should not be a rush to abandon the project as an instrument for development.

AbstractDevelopment project training has two objectives: a direct objective to improve organizational performance and an indirect objective to enhance an organization's ability to function effectively within a changing environment. Traditional training approaches that emphasize knowledge transfer fail to meet these objectives because they are place‐oriented and thus emphasize giving standardized training to groups of unrelated trainees at a particular facility; they emphasize teaching the skills trainers know rather than determining management needs or building upon knowledge trainees already possess; learning is expected to occur by inference from artificial examples rather than by attacking real problems; trainees are generally drawn from only one management level at a time; actual performance and skills are not examined; and training is treated as a discrete event rather than as just one ripple in a constant stream of management development activity.To overcome these six weaknesses, an alternative approach is advocated. That approach has two major chaacteristics: it is action oriented and it has an organizational capacity development bias rather than a transfer of knowledge to individuals bias. The action orientation and enhancement orientation are described in detail, the approach is illustrated by a Jamaican example, and implications of adopting an action‐based approach are specified. The authors contend this alternative approach is practical, necessary, and rewarding to those who engage in it.