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For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On ...

For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry." He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help.

To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories.

Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground.

In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies andexperts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.

This interdisciplinary study applies human rights theory to the problems of rural poverty in the Third World. Considering the interdependence of minimal food and health security with minimal assurance of basic freedoms, political scientist Alan G. Smith traces the linkage to the need of the ...

This interdisciplinary study applies human rights theory to the problems of rural poverty in the Third World. Considering the interdependence of minimal food and health security with minimal assurance of basic freedoms, political scientist Alan G. Smith traces the linkage to the need of the food-insecure to seek "clientelistic dependencies" on better-off neighbors--relationships that often operate to restrict freedom of choice. In contrast to conventional rural development aid, which can introduce new client dependency if pursued alone, Smith stresses the need to find other forms of aid that would provide the option of assured minimal survival while avoiding the constraints imposed by dependency. Arguing for bolstering bottom-up human rights momentum, he suggests the transfer of simple, appropriate tools into the hands of the target group. Recipients would make use of them to enhance autonomous food-crop production, thereby making client dependency a matter of choice rather than necessity.

This imformative book is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the classic introduction to urbanization in developing areas. Using case studies of cities drawn from around the world, including Bangkok, Delhi, Manila, Mexico City, Singapore and cities in Zimbabwe, this key text confronts three ...

This imformative book is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the classic introduction to urbanization in developing areas. Using case studies of cities drawn from around the world, including Bangkok, Delhi, Manila, Mexico City, Singapore and cities in Zimbabwe, this key text confronts three main questions: Is there still a Third World, does it have a common urban form, and what is the relationship between urbanization and sustainability? The text analyzes:- the dimension of urban growth in the third world- historical perspectives on urban growth- urban population growth- employment and incomes in the city- basic needs and human rights- environmental problems in third world cities- planning and management of cities.Containing a wealth of student-friendly features including boxed case-studies, discussion questions and guides for further reading, this text provides an invaluable introduction to the issues and processes of the city in the Third World.Containing a greater depth of content and referencing, and with new chapters and subjects covered, this new second edition utilizes its larger format to make extensive use of illustrations, diagrams, global case studies, and further reading. Overall, these changes have contributed to this book's continuance as an extremely accessible student text.