Suchergebnisse

"Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding them and studying them. The book starts by laying out a theoretical framework based on complexity thinking, before going on to explore the ten most prevalent kinds of unintended effects of foreign aid: backlash effects, conflict effects, migration and resettlement effects, price effects, marginalization effects, behavioural effects, negative spillover effects, governance effects, environmental effects, and ripple effects. Each chapter revolves around a set of concrete case studies, analysing the mechanisms underpinning the unintended effects and proposing ways in which policymakers, practitioners, and evaluators can tackle negative side effects and maximize positive side effects. The book also includes personal testimonies, a succinct overview of unintended effects, and suggestions for further reading. Providing a clear overview of what side effects to anticipate when planning, executing, and evaluating aid, this book will be an important resource for students, development practitioners, and policymakers alike"--

chapter 1 Introduction -- part Part I Mapping and testing potential determinants of geographic choices of international NGOs -- chapter 2 What determines geographic choices of NGOs? An exploration -- chapter 3 Geographic decisions of Dutch NGOs: Myths and realities -- part Part II Explaining the geographic concentration of international NGOs -- chapter 4 The concentration of NGOs: An evolutionary economic geography approach -- chapter 5 Do country images affect the concentration of NGOs? -- chapter 6 Back donors' influence on concentration: marketization or slipstream? -- part Analysing the implications of the geographic choices of international NGOs -- chapter 7 The consequences of concentration of NGOs: does it affect cooperation? -- chapter 8 Implications of the research findings.

By analysing a comparative case study investigating a development project implemented in Uganda and Vietnam, the article aims to understand how donor directives travel and translate into actual practices in aid chains. Making use of Norman Long's concept of the interface, we focus on the interfaces between organizations to examine the negotiation of everyday project practices. Based on practice theory, our analysis unpacks how directives are filtered through the power relationships that shape practices at the various interfaces. We find that organizational relations between southern organizations are just as power-laden as north–south relations. Our analysis also shows that neither the management directives nor the freedoms that were granted to the participating organizations resulted in uniform practices and that practices did not have the same implications for organizations. Hence, the aid chain concept tends to simplify the complexities inherent in project systems comprising a multiplicity of vertical and horizontal organizational relations.

According to 'generational' thinking, traditional, non-participatory service-delivery oriented organisations are expected to gradually evolve into participatory organisations aiming for structural change. Strikingly, it appears that this conventional wisdom has never been tested rigorously. This research seeks to help address this gap, employing a unique longitudinal study design, tracing the evolution of Dutch small-scale development initiatives in Kenya. We found that the overwhelming majority changed neither strategy nor manner of intervention. Our analysis highlights various, often mutually reinforcing factors that form an impediment to change. Only a few of these organisations were able to overcome the constraints, with additional financial resources being a key determinant. Although this research has various limitations stemming from the specific character of the sample, it does at least suggest consideration of the need for a nuancing in generational thinking and a more open understanding of NGOs' potential change trajectories.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

AbstractThis article pioneers new thinking on learning by organizations created by international environmental agreements, especially the boundaries within which learning can take place. It hypothesizes that there are ideological, institutional and technical boundaries to learning, which negatively impact the effectiveness of international environmental programming. This theory is rigorously tested by applying it to a group of new programmes, the forest-focused payment for environmental services programmes, which find their origin in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The article systematically researches unintended effects of these programmes and clusters them into four categories. The uncovering of these unintended effects leads to the main research question: do international organizations actually succeed in adapting to these unintended effects? By combining three methods (a structured literature review, a systemic internal programme document analysis and expert interviews), the research finds that organizations struggle to adapt to these unintended effects. Whereas some of the limits to learning can be overcome by enhancing technical capacities, other limits, notably those that are induced by ideological thinking and institutional imperatives, are hard to overcome.