Suchergebnisse

SUMMARYConsultants are an integral component of development aid. Their involvement is based on an assumption of the transferability of knowledge to clients and beneficiaries. However, this role, its efficacy and the concept of knowledge transfer have all been questioned. Although research has shown interest in northern development consultants in recent years, detailed processes and practices of southern consultants' engagement with knowledge production are less analysed. Drawing on debates about knowledge, power and managing development interventions and on extensive fieldwork exploring a Bolivian consultancy company's assignments for northern development agencies, we analyse the 'knowledge engagements' between clients, consultants and beneficiaries. The results suggest a novel theorisation: knowledge engagements are shaped by power relations exercised through discourses and financial aid on one hand and shared and unshared lifeworlds and backgrounds of actors on the other. They are also characterised by collusive behaviour with the discourses and practices of aid on the part of consultants and beneficiaries, which in turn influences outcomes. Southern consultants, although aware of these issues, are in a difficult position to challenge these relationships. A greater recognition of the tensions could lead to a new role for consultants if collective action were to renegotiate their terms of engagement and aim for a new mutuality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Approaches to sustainable development in cities of the South have focused too exclusively on narrow technical aspects of environmental protection, with no benefit to most residents in cities and peri-urban areas. However, in many countries of the South the disengagement of government along with budgetary constraints, a reliance on cost-recovery mechanisms within structural adjustment packages and increasing disparity between poor and rich, further reduces access by the poor to even the most rudimentary services. Development and Cities focuses on the political, social and economic viability of new or alternative approaches to urban management in the South that aim to increase access to adequate levels of basic services and healthy living and working conditions for all. Case-studies include cities in Argentina, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

AbstractAn annotated bibliography of this developmental intersection.

The sources of the notion of development may be detected in three currents of European thought in the eighteenth century. The first arises from the philosophy of enlightenment, with history being viewed as a gradual advance towards the supremacy of reason. The second is linked to the idea of the accumulation of wealth, in which it is taken for granted that the future holds out promise of increased well-being. The third is related to the idea that the geographical spread of European civilization means access to superior modes of life for the other people of the world, considered to be more or less "backward." Capitalist society, which bears the seeds of the type of material civilization predominant almost everywhere today, when reproducing itself generates a process of accumulation that tends to outstrip population growth. This produces pressure to increase the proportion of labor in the social product, favoring agents who innovate with a view to economizing labor. Technological progress fulfills a dual role: it reduces the pressure for social equality & maintains growth of consumption by middle- & high-level income groups creating a permanent flow of new products. The combined action of technical innovation & accumulation makes it possible for the perpetuation of privilege to continue, & to exist side-by-side with the social forces that challenge it. It is precisely in term of the values of this material civilization that an awareness has been born of international inequalities in living standards, of "underdevelopment." The dissemination of capitalism was much swifter as a modernization process (adoption of the new patterns of consumption) than in bringing about relevant changes in production methods & social structures: development & underdevelopment are historical processes stemming from the same initial impetus, ie, they have their roots in the acceleration of accumulation that took place in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. AA.