Canada’s foreign aid programs are an area of ongoing interest, yet there is little knowledge of Canada’s 70-year aid history, the historic forces that have shaped Canadian aid policy, and the many complex factors that affect Canada’s future foreign aid policy. A Samaritan State Revisited brings together a refreshing group of emerging and leading scholars to reflect on the history of Canada’s overseas development aid. Addressing the broad ideological and institutional origins of Canada’s official development assistance in the 1950s and specific themes in its evolution and professionalization since the 1960s, this collection is the first to explore Canada’s history with foreign aid with this level of interrogative detail.Extending from the 1950s to the present and covering Canadian aid to all regions of the Global South, from South and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Africa, these essays embrace a variety of approaches and methodologies ranging from traditional, archival-based research to textual and image analysis, oral history, and administrative studies. A Samaritan State Revisited weaves together a unique synthesis of governmental and non-governmental perspectives, providing a clear and readily accessible explanation of the forces that have shaped Canadian foreign aid policy

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Canada’s foreign aid programs are an area of ongoing interest, yet there is little knowledge of Canada’s 70-year aid history, the historic forces that have shaped Canadian aid policy, and the many complex factors that affect Canada’s future foreign aid policy. A Samaritan State Revisited brings together a refreshing group of emerging and leading scholars to reflect on the history of Canada’s overseas development aid. Addressing the broad ideological and institutional origins of Canada’s official development assistance in the 1950s and specific themes in its evolution and professionalization since the 1960s, this collection is the first to explore Canada’s history with foreign aid with this level of interrogative detail. Extending from the 1950s to the present and covering Canadian aid to all regions of the Global South, from South and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Africa, these essays embrace a variety of approaches and methodologies ranging from traditional, archival-based research to textual and image analysis, oral history, and administrative studies. A Samaritan State Revisited weaves together a unique synthesis of governmental and non-governmental perspectives, providing a clear and readily accessible explanation of the forces that have shaped Canadian foreign aid policy

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In 2013 almost half of Africa’s top aid recipients were ruled by authoritarian regimes. While the West may claim to promote democracy and human rights, in practice major bilateral and international donors, such as USAID, DFID,the World Bank and the European Commission, have seen their aid policies become ever more entangled with the survival of their authoritarian protégés. Local citizens thus find themselves at the receiving end of a compromisebetween aid agencies and government elites, in which development policies are shaped in the interests of maintaining the status quo. Aid and Authoritarianism in Africa sheds light on the political intricacies and moral dilemmas raised by the relationship between foreign aid and autocratic rule in Africa. Through contributions by leading experts exploring the revival of authoritarian development politics in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, Mozambique and Angola, the book exposes shifting donor interests and rhetoric as well as the impact of foreign aid on military assistance, rural development, electoral processes and domestic politics. In the process, it raises an urgent and too often neglected question: to what extent are foreign aid programmes actually perpetuating authoritarian rule?

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Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but kids don’t learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity-building efforts. The book then analyzes this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back—particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem-driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

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Development assistance to fragile states and conflict-affected areas can be a core component of peacebuilding, providing support for the restoration of government functions, delivery of basic services, the rule of law, and economic revitalization. What has worked, why it has worked, and what is scalable and transferable, are key questions for both development practice and research into how peace is built and the interactive role of domestic and international processes therein. Despite a wealth of research into these questions, significant gaps remain. This volume speaks to these gaps through new analysis of a selected set of well-regarded aid interventions. Drawing on diverse scholarly and policy expertise, eight case study chapters span multiple domains and regions to analyse Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme, the Yemen Social Fund for Development, public financial management reform in Sierra Leone, Finn Church Aid’s assistance in Somalia, Liberia’s gender-sensitive police reform, the judicial facilitators programme in Nicaragua, UNICEF’s education projects in Somalia, and World Bank health projects in Timor-Leste. Analysis illustrates the significance of three broad factors in understanding why some aid interventions work better than others: the area of intervention and related degree of engagement with state institutions; local contextual factors such as windows of opportunity and the degree of local support; and programme design and management. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal International Peacekeeping. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351624572, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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Fragile states pose major development and security challenges. Considerable international resources are therefore devoted to state-building and institutional strengthening in fragile states, with generally mixed results. This volume explores how unpacking the concept of fragility and studying its dimensions and forms can help to build policy-relevant understandings of how states become more resilient and the role of aid therein. It highlights the particular challenges for donors in dealing with ‘chronically’ (as opposed to ‘temporarily’) fragile states and those with weak legitimacy, as well as how unpacking fragility can provide traction on how to take ‘local context’ into account. Three chapters present new analysis from innovative initiatives to study fragility and fragile state transitions in cross-national perspective. Four chapters offer new focused analysis of selected countries, drawing on comparative methods and spotlighting the role of aid versus historical, institutional and other factors. It has become a truism that one-size-fits-all policies do not work in development, whether in fragile or non-fragile states. This is should not be confused with a broader rejection of ‘off-the-rack’ policy models that can then be further adjusted in particular situations. Systematic thinking about varieties of fragility helps us to develop this range, drawing lessons – appropriately – from past experience. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly, and is available online as an Open Access monograph at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351630337.

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During Nigeria’s decolonization, Swiss traders and diplomats, aware of the exceptional potential for growth, attentively observed this new market for possible business opportunities. This book focuses on multinational companies, diplomats, development cooperation actors and public opinion: it analyses underlying motivations and means, as well as the implications of their activities.

Analyser les rapports économiques et diplomatiques entre le Nigeria et la Suisse revient à se pencher sur des mécanismes peu connus de la globalisation: ceux d’une relation Nord-Sud entre deux puissances moyennes et non coloniales. Pays le plus peuplé d’Afrique, le Nigeria semblait en passe de devenir, à l’aube de son indépendance, une puissance économique continentale. La Suisse, comme d’autres pays, espérait profiter de ce vaste marché promis à une expansion rapide. Entreprises multinationales, diplomates et coopérants au développement sont au centre de cet ouvrage, qui s’interroge sur les motivations, les moyens mis en œuvre et les impacts des activités de chacun. S’y ajoutent des citoyens suisses de tous âges et de tous milieux qui, bouleversés par les images télévisées d’enfants squelettiques durant la « Guerre du Biafra » en 1968, entreprirent des collectes de fonds et firent pression sur leur gouvernement pour qu’il intervienne. Ce livre donne une profondeur éclairante aux relations Suisse – Nigeria, récemment médiatisées sur leurs aspects migratoires, ou sur les pratiques opaques de négociants en pétrole établis en Suisse.

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The current Special Issue brought out the newest trends in Econophysics that have made use of the most recent available tools, such as Big Data. The emphasis of the reprint is on deciphering the effects of current world events, such as the repercussions of the recent war conflicts, the oil and gas crises, the abrupt rise of the prices of commodities, the new findings in environmental issues, etc. The focus is on understanding how these events affect the economy, and this is achieved by casting the parameters in multiplex networks, thus bringing out their interactions in an effort to understand how to better cope with them.

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In 2013, the government abolished the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which had been Canada's flagship foreign aid agency for decades, and transferred its functions to the newly renamed Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD). As the government is rethinking Canadian aid and its relationship with other foreign policy and commercial objectives, the time is ripe to rethink Canadian aid more broadly. Edited by Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black, this revised edition not only analyzes Canada's past development assistance, it also highlights important new opportunities in the context of the recent change in government. Designed to reach a variety of audiences, contributions by twenty scholars and experts in the field offer an incisive examination of Canada's record and initiatives in Canadian foreign aid, including its relatively recent emphasis on maternal and child health and on the extractive sector, as well as the longer-term engagement with state fragility. The portrait that emerges is a sobering one. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Canada's changing role in the world.

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This book examines the economic and social impacts of switching diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China, and vice versa, and investigates how China achieves its foreign policy objective of dissuading Taiwan’s diplomatic partners and other third parties from engaging with Taiwan. Highlighting the critical regions of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania, where the diplomatic competition between Taiwan and China is fierce, the contributions to this book analyze China’s promises of economic benefits, threats of economic coercion and the perils of its foreign aid to the countries in these regions in pursuit of its anti-Taiwan policy. In addition to the competition of formal diplomatic ties, it also examines how existing informal relations have influenced Taiwan’s increasing interactions with Central and Eastern European countries. Finally, the book explores how Taiwan’s advantage in technology sectors has successfully been translated into economic leverage for Taiwan’s international diplomacy. Built upon the interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative efforts of 14 international scholars, this book will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of Taiwan studies, China studies and international relations.

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Why do aid agencies from wealthy donor countries with diverse domestic political and economic contexts arrive at very similar positions on a wide array of aid policies and priorities? This book suggests that this homogenization of policy represents the effects of common processes of globalization manifest in the aid sector. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analysis of policy adoption, the book argues that we need to examine macro-level globalizing influences at the same time as understanding the micro-level social processes at work within aid agencies, in order to adequately explain the so-called ‘emerging global consensus’ that constitutes the globalization of aid. The book explores how global influences on aid agencies in Canada, Sweden, and the United States are mediated through micro-level processes. Using a mixed-methods approach, the book combines cross-national statistical analysis at the global level with two comparative case studies which look at the adoption of common policy priorities in the fields of gender and security. The Globalization of Foreign Aid will be useful to researchers of foreign aid, development, international relations and globalization, as well as to the aid policy community. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

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What if the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan was fought not by the military but by educating the Afghan youth, and what if the trillion dollars had been spent instead on economic development in Afghanistan rather than on bombs and fighter jets? The Trillion Dollar War helps explain the United States’ efforts to rebuild Afghanistan during the last 20 years. The book outlines the successes and failures of both Afghans and Americans in this endeavor. In addition, it provides an in-depth analysis of the cost of America’s longest war, and it asks whether spending more on education and infrastructure than on weapons of war would have resulted in a different outcome.

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Across parts of Africa, states have been restricting the operations, funding and speech of NGOs. Many have therefore expressed their concern that the cornerstones of a free civil society—the rights to free association and free speech—are under attack. However, another concern that warrants greater attention is whether such restrictive measures might also threaten the social rights of NGOs’ beneficiaries. The ICESCR obliges states to take steps progressively towards the full realisation of social rights. How, then, should a state’s social rights obligations be understood when NGOs enter the picture? How might those obligations affect a state’s freedom to regulate NGOs? This book offers a systematic examination of the ways in which the social rights obligations of states towards beneficiaries can reorganise and refine our understanding of the regulatory relationship between states and NGOs.Einige afrikanische Staaten haben die Handlungsbefugnisse, Finanzierung und die Meinungsäußerung von NGOs eingeschränkt. Viele haben ihre Besorgnis darüber geäußert, dass die Eckpfeiler einer freien Zivilgesellschaft - das Recht auf Versammlungs- und Redefreiheit - angegriffen werden. Ein bislang eher weniger untersuchtes Problem ist jedoch, ob solche restriktiven Maßnahmen auch die sozialen Rechte der Begünstigten von NGOs gefährden könnten. Der UN-Sozialpakt verpflichtet die Staaten, Schritt für Schritt auf eine vollständige Verwirklichung der sozialen Rechte zuzugehen. Wie sollten also die Verpflichtungen eines Staates in Bezug auf soziale Rechte verstanden werden, wenn NGOs ins Spiel kommen? Wie könnten sich diese Verpflichtungen auf die Freiheit eines Staates auswirken, NGOs zu regulieren?Dieses Buch bietet eine systematische Untersuchung wie die sozialrechtlichen Verpflichtungen von Staaten gegenüber den Begünstigten unser Verständnis der Regulierungsbeziehungen zwischen Staaten und NGOs neu definieren und weiterentwickeln können.

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