European development cooperation and the poor, by AIDAN COX and JOHN HEALEY (London: Macmillan in association with ODI, 2000, pp. 236, £16.99 p/bk). Evaluating development aid: issues,problems and solutions, by BASIL CRACKNELL(London: Sage, 2000, pp. 386, £14.99 p/bk).. Social impact analysis of poverty alleviation programmes and projects, by SUSANNE NEUBERT (London: Frank Cass, 2000, pp. 157, £16.50 p/bk).

✍ Scribed by Oliver Morrissey

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 39 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.849

✦ Synopsis

liberalism, far from giving NGOs the chance to shine with real, local, people-centred, participatory development, has actually damaged the NGO sector, fragmenting it and fomenting competition in which, as the free-market argues, only the most ef®cient survive. The rush to ef®ciencyappears to have been at the cost of the time-consuming and messy business of debating other values, such as how greater ef®ciency could be pursued without a cost to social objectives (p. 23).

Pearce then introduces papers that describe some of the tensions inherent in the roles being played by NGOs, and asks whether NGOs truly stand for anything fundamentally different from the agencies on whose largesse they increasingly depend. The book is littered with excellent reality checks, one of my favourites being No matter how good the personal relationship between the Northern NGO and the Southern NGO, the latter must accept the humiliation of being the receiver of charity. Perforce, there is a relationship of unequals. And inequality never built capacity: it nurtures dependence, it establishes the materials basis for dancing to the tune of the donor (Firoze Manji, p. 78). Gino Lofredo's enjoyable comic-tragic tale of EN-GE-OHs (sic) for Sustainable (Self ) Development is a masterful satirical description of the ¯ourishing of an industry for personal gain rather than public good. Development turns into just another business' for some Southern professionals. The serious point here is that charlatans', to use Richard Holloway's description, risk much in too quickly and unquestionably adopting the of®cial donor agenda and spouting the development-speak that goes along it.

Quite a number of articles come from 1996 and not all have been worked on since, and even the more recent contributors like Amina Mama have now being overtaken by the switch in Nigeria's political dispensation from military to civilian rule. One of the strongest papers is by Goodhand and Chamberlain on NGOs' survival strategies in Afghanistan, but it is a 1996 paper and the one short footnote on the Taliban indicates how much events have moved on and how historical the otherwise excellent piece has become. Even the af®liation listed for Goodhand is ®ve years out-of-date.

In a paper which demonstrates that doing research that builds theory and knowledge from the ground up may be a more fruitful way forward than the attempt to take such principles into the ®eld and apply them, a team of Nigerian women researchers lead by the able Amina Mama investigated how a gender perspective could be incorporated into a regional programme to strengthen civil society. The paper is ground-breaking, yet it seemed strange how Mama rightly makes great play of the use of local researchers but their names and positions remain absent from the text and bibliographic references.

This book is a noted, useful effort, but the reviewer had one nagging questionÐdo the subscribers to Development in Practice (DinP) feel cheated that they could have waited a little while and then picked up treats like this book at a fraction of the cost of the annual subscription? So what audience does this publication have? Those who cannot afford the DinP subs? Maybe this is too harsh, as the mix of academic and practitioner contributions, and of contributors from the South and the North, means the book is equally useful for development practitioners and policy makers, and for students of development studies. It has the merits of containing a specially-commissioned overview and an annotated bibliography of current and classic titles which together constitute an essential reading list on the theme.

SIMON HEAP INTRAC, Oxford