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No-Nonsense Guides
No Nonsense Guide to Internationl Development
Building dams in India, planting trees in Burkina Faso, rescuing street children in Brazil - these are images of aid and international development with which we can all identify. What few people realize is that the terms 'overseas aid' and 'international development' mask confusion, contradiction, and even downright deceit. All too often what passes for development improves life for the better-off, while actively hurting the very people the venture was meant to support. In this No-Nonsense Guide Maggie Black exposes the hypocrisy and reveals a more accurate picture of what is happening in development's name, arguing for a process to be put in place that truly defends the interests of poor people.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
12 people are currently reading
193 people want to read
About the author
Maggie Black
91 books9 followersMaggie Black is the author of several publications including From Handpumps to Health: The Evolution of Water and Sanitation Programmes in Bangladesh, India and Nigeria and In the Twilight Zone: Child Workers in the Hotel, Tourism and Catering Industry. She has worked as a consultant for UNICEF, Anti-Slavery International, and WaterAid, among others, and has written for The Guardian, The Economist, and BBC World Service.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 5, 2014
In this book, Maggie Black traces how international development came into being in the 1960s and has subsequently evolved up to the present day.
The author argues that too much development work assumes that the poor are merely passive victims and that the paternal hand of some distant government is what is needed to lift them out of their distress. This assumption, both arrogant and incorrect, ironically becomes self-fulfilling, leading to policy that disempowers the poor from shaping their own destinies by denying them the opportunity to take part in the process of development.
Western politicians, of course, have virtually no understanding of the diverse situations the world's poorest people live in, and consequently donor governments have often pursued the blunt instruments of grand master plans as the primary vehicles for development.
This sort of approach has had some success in raising a country's GDP or some other measure of macro-economic performance. As development philosophy has expanded to embrace social as well as economic concepts, there have also been significant gains made, for example, in rolling out vaccination programmes.
Generally, though, the benefits have rarely been shared equitably within the countries of the South and have often failed to reach those most in need. As an example of this, it has just emerged in the British press that the CDC, the investment arm of the British aid programme, has millions of pounds invested in upmarket construction projects like luxury hotels and apartments and gated communities for the wealthy.
The situation is actually worse than this, though: many billions of dollars worth of projects have fallen far short of their goals, and the changes brought on by development have also created hundreds of millions of victims. These victims are frequently the poorest people in the South, people who previously subsisted in traditional, informal economies.
This type of economic activity often does not show up in government statistics, which means it is ignored in the grand prescriptions devised by politicians and researchers in western countries and handed down from on high - and in consequence of planners viewing a modern, Western-style economy as the be-all and end-all, these people are squeezed out of their old livelihoods into far more precarious existences. At the same time, services are privatised and handed over to corporations in the name of market efficiency, thereby driving up prices for basic needs like drinking water to unaffordable levels.
Sadly, then, much development has actually had a profoundly disabling and impoverishing effect on hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. Where previously they were poor but in control of their lives, their means of supporting themselves is now disappearing in the face of forces sometimes outside of their comprehension, let alone their control.
Maggie Black argues that a better approach is to accept that policy agreements and mega-projects can never succeed as the magic bullets donor governments seem to be seeking. Instead, development initiatives must be tightly focussed on small-scale, locally-driven actions that respect individual situations as they actually are, and provide a central role in the process for the people who are supposed to benefit from the undertaking.
This would mean organising development to assist the transition from traditional, informal economies to modern ones rather than simply obliterating the former and viewing the fallout as collateral damage. It would also mean continuing to embrace a more holistic view of what it means to develop, focusing on a wide range of social and economic indicators, as well as acknowledging that the entire process is inherently political, and there will always be obstacles to face and overcome on this front.
Early on in the book, Maggie Black writes that there is no such thing as international development, just an international development industry. The point is that whereas tens of billions of dollars per year are spent on research, consultants, big projects and all the rest, successful development initiatives have very often been small, local and idiosyncratic. Attempts at upscaling what has worked in one area have rarely produced the same results elsewhere.
Development is local; the industry is what is international. These two are not the same.
The good news is that the need for these kinds of changes is increasingly understood within the industry. Unfortunately, the fact that donor governments continue to set ambitious targets then badly fail to meet them suggests the the wisdom gained from several decades of development experience hasn't yet percolated up to the people controlling the money.
The industry therefore must work much harder on the nitty gritty of how to effect positive change rather than just continually stating and re-stating goals and hoping GDP growth will take care of the rest.
Writing in plain English without over-using terminology, this book should not require a great deal of prior knowledge to follow. Importantly, while summarising how development has grown and been re-shaped since the 1960s, the book goes beyond just criticising the ineffective areas of the industry to suggest positive alternatives to the status quo. Overall, a fascinating book that I found both enjoyable and eminently readable.
The author argues that too much development work assumes that the poor are merely passive victims and that the paternal hand of some distant government is what is needed to lift them out of their distress. This assumption, both arrogant and incorrect, ironically becomes self-fulfilling, leading to policy that disempowers the poor from shaping their own destinies by denying them the opportunity to take part in the process of development.
Western politicians, of course, have virtually no understanding of the diverse situations the world's poorest people live in, and consequently donor governments have often pursued the blunt instruments of grand master plans as the primary vehicles for development.
This sort of approach has had some success in raising a country's GDP or some other measure of macro-economic performance. As development philosophy has expanded to embrace social as well as economic concepts, there have also been significant gains made, for example, in rolling out vaccination programmes.
Generally, though, the benefits have rarely been shared equitably within the countries of the South and have often failed to reach those most in need. As an example of this, it has just emerged in the British press that the CDC, the investment arm of the British aid programme, has millions of pounds invested in upmarket construction projects like luxury hotels and apartments and gated communities for the wealthy.
The situation is actually worse than this, though: many billions of dollars worth of projects have fallen far short of their goals, and the changes brought on by development have also created hundreds of millions of victims. These victims are frequently the poorest people in the South, people who previously subsisted in traditional, informal economies.
This type of economic activity often does not show up in government statistics, which means it is ignored in the grand prescriptions devised by politicians and researchers in western countries and handed down from on high - and in consequence of planners viewing a modern, Western-style economy as the be-all and end-all, these people are squeezed out of their old livelihoods into far more precarious existences. At the same time, services are privatised and handed over to corporations in the name of market efficiency, thereby driving up prices for basic needs like drinking water to unaffordable levels.
Sadly, then, much development has actually had a profoundly disabling and impoverishing effect on hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. Where previously they were poor but in control of their lives, their means of supporting themselves is now disappearing in the face of forces sometimes outside of their comprehension, let alone their control.
Maggie Black argues that a better approach is to accept that policy agreements and mega-projects can never succeed as the magic bullets donor governments seem to be seeking. Instead, development initiatives must be tightly focussed on small-scale, locally-driven actions that respect individual situations as they actually are, and provide a central role in the process for the people who are supposed to benefit from the undertaking.
This would mean organising development to assist the transition from traditional, informal economies to modern ones rather than simply obliterating the former and viewing the fallout as collateral damage. It would also mean continuing to embrace a more holistic view of what it means to develop, focusing on a wide range of social and economic indicators, as well as acknowledging that the entire process is inherently political, and there will always be obstacles to face and overcome on this front.
Early on in the book, Maggie Black writes that there is no such thing as international development, just an international development industry. The point is that whereas tens of billions of dollars per year are spent on research, consultants, big projects and all the rest, successful development initiatives have very often been small, local and idiosyncratic. Attempts at upscaling what has worked in one area have rarely produced the same results elsewhere.
Development is local; the industry is what is international. These two are not the same.
The good news is that the need for these kinds of changes is increasingly understood within the industry. Unfortunately, the fact that donor governments continue to set ambitious targets then badly fail to meet them suggests the the wisdom gained from several decades of development experience hasn't yet percolated up to the people controlling the money.
The industry therefore must work much harder on the nitty gritty of how to effect positive change rather than just continually stating and re-stating goals and hoping GDP growth will take care of the rest.
Writing in plain English without over-using terminology, this book should not require a great deal of prior knowledge to follow. Importantly, while summarising how development has grown and been re-shaped since the 1960s, the book goes beyond just criticising the ineffective areas of the industry to suggest positive alternatives to the status quo. Overall, a fascinating book that I found both enjoyable and eminently readable.
December 6, 2007
no nonsense!
Read
October 16, 2019Clear and practices about how IFM and World Bank runs the 3th words
November 14, 2023
Great book for basic understanding
October 20, 2010
A fast read about international development's history and future. The statistics are staggering. "10 million people a year are displaced due the construction of dams and urban transportation systems. Compare to 12 million annually with wars and other 'disasters'." I enjoyed this book, read it in about a week, and recommend it as an introductory text. It discredits the historical Marshall Plan style of development, which has attempted to funnel infrastructure investment in a massive global scale. Post-WW2 Europe developed so quickly because of an educated cadre waiting to run it, eager human capital, and an abundant educated workforce. This is not present in the poorest of developing nations. Maggie Black cites an epic failure of mechanizing agriculture in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia when tractors suffered from rapid breakdowns, no spare parts, misuse for private purposes, and endless other problems. (Great life lesson: you have to meet people where they are, rather than where your biases initially lead you).
Black covers aid with its many failures, some successes such as smallpox eradication, but overall underwhelming performance in ending poverty. She summarizes aid as generally ineffective: "the machinery of official aid is not designed to address the poverty of people, but the state of nations." Next she moves to the World Bank/IMF and their program of "structural adjustments," and the "Washington consensus." Both were macroeconomic agendas pushing prudent fiscal and monetary policies, inflation control, and free markets. Seemingly wise ideas, but which often resulted in great challenges for the debtor nations: cut services and subsidized foreign commodities competition, and lost local jobs.
- Today a third of the world's population - about 2 billion people - still remain outside the modern economy or survive at the edges.
- Circa 2007, two thirds of Indians are still involved in agriculture; in China she claims it is 44%.
- In 1960 the income gap between the fifth of the world population in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to one; by 1997 it was 74 to one.
- As of 2004, 1.1 billion people were without a supply of safe water, and 2.6 billion without a proper means of sanitation. And don't think just digging wells or creating a water utility will solve this.
What is her summary? "Less effort should be put into grand international initiatives - 'Marshall Plans for Africa' and achieving the Millennium Development Goals - and more into making things work on the ground." She goes into detail of successes where local scale efforts have still been able to assist millions of people. These, she posits are the keys to future success in international development, as opposed to the "bigger picture, more western perspective" of macro-economic adjustments.
The book is interesting in the treatment of details, and in the journey it takes the reader on.
Black covers aid with its many failures, some successes such as smallpox eradication, but overall underwhelming performance in ending poverty. She summarizes aid as generally ineffective: "the machinery of official aid is not designed to address the poverty of people, but the state of nations." Next she moves to the World Bank/IMF and their program of "structural adjustments," and the "Washington consensus." Both were macroeconomic agendas pushing prudent fiscal and monetary policies, inflation control, and free markets. Seemingly wise ideas, but which often resulted in great challenges for the debtor nations: cut services and subsidized foreign commodities competition, and lost local jobs.
- Today a third of the world's population - about 2 billion people - still remain outside the modern economy or survive at the edges.
- Circa 2007, two thirds of Indians are still involved in agriculture; in China she claims it is 44%.
- In 1960 the income gap between the fifth of the world population in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to one; by 1997 it was 74 to one.
- As of 2004, 1.1 billion people were without a supply of safe water, and 2.6 billion without a proper means of sanitation. And don't think just digging wells or creating a water utility will solve this.
What is her summary? "Less effort should be put into grand international initiatives - 'Marshall Plans for Africa' and achieving the Millennium Development Goals - and more into making things work on the ground." She goes into detail of successes where local scale efforts have still been able to assist millions of people. These, she posits are the keys to future success in international development, as opposed to the "bigger picture, more western perspective" of macro-economic adjustments.
The book is interesting in the treatment of details, and in the journey it takes the reader on.
December 14, 2013
Although the book, which is part of a series of no-nonsense guides, is utterly compact and Black could write a bit more accessibly, the book gives a good overview of the state of international development and its change of concepts over the past 50 years, since the 'race' was first initiated by Harry Truman with his vision of a 'Marshall Plan for Africa'.
Over the past 50 years 'development', at least in theory, has changed its focus from macro-economic change, for example building dams or exploiting natural resources for obtaining foreign currency, to a setup where 'small is beautiful'. Still, however, many governmental organizations still only pay lip-service to this shift of focus and only NGOs, who initiated this change are moving in this direction of microeconomics.
Black proves that true development, where the position of 'the poor' is really changed for the better, requires a small scale process which focusses on the necessary changes that empower the individual. Informal and traditional economies can not be replaced by 'modern', western style economies. They need to be integrated in the global picture, with respect to people's traditional and personal views and methods.
Development is an inherently political process, since to empower the individual, political structures in developing countries need to be changed. In the past, too often, funds spent on development more more often used to suppress the poor, not support them. Some 100 million people alone have been geographically displaced due to the building of dams in the past decades. These people were chased out of their natural habitat, their own known way of survival (agriculture, hunting) taken away from them, and forced to work as laborers in an uncertain and new industrial market.
Another new aspect of development is ecological sustainability. Black points out that the country that uses 25% of the worlds yearly consumption of natural resources (with only 4% of the world's population) has signed virtually no global environmental or human rights agreement. How can poorer countries be expected to uphold these agreements if the most prominent card-holder of western civilization, the big example of western style development, doesn't care?
Black shows that although globalist thinking, rolling out western models in developing countries, has done more bad than good, the anti-globalist movement, in its current form, has no chance for survival: there is no clear leader, no common agenda, no basic manifesto that unites all splinter groups operating under the banner of anti-globalism.
Still, it does parallel the only certainty gained from the development process of the past 50 years: needed change is social, political and small scale and each problem requires a unique solution that can not be scaled up and rolled out globally.
There are no golden grand ideas in development and conventional, large scale development simply doesn't work.
Over the past 50 years 'development', at least in theory, has changed its focus from macro-economic change, for example building dams or exploiting natural resources for obtaining foreign currency, to a setup where 'small is beautiful'. Still, however, many governmental organizations still only pay lip-service to this shift of focus and only NGOs, who initiated this change are moving in this direction of microeconomics.
Black proves that true development, where the position of 'the poor' is really changed for the better, requires a small scale process which focusses on the necessary changes that empower the individual. Informal and traditional economies can not be replaced by 'modern', western style economies. They need to be integrated in the global picture, with respect to people's traditional and personal views and methods.
Development is an inherently political process, since to empower the individual, political structures in developing countries need to be changed. In the past, too often, funds spent on development more more often used to suppress the poor, not support them. Some 100 million people alone have been geographically displaced due to the building of dams in the past decades. These people were chased out of their natural habitat, their own known way of survival (agriculture, hunting) taken away from them, and forced to work as laborers in an uncertain and new industrial market.
Another new aspect of development is ecological sustainability. Black points out that the country that uses 25% of the worlds yearly consumption of natural resources (with only 4% of the world's population) has signed virtually no global environmental or human rights agreement. How can poorer countries be expected to uphold these agreements if the most prominent card-holder of western civilization, the big example of western style development, doesn't care?
Black shows that although globalist thinking, rolling out western models in developing countries, has done more bad than good, the anti-globalist movement, in its current form, has no chance for survival: there is no clear leader, no common agenda, no basic manifesto that unites all splinter groups operating under the banner of anti-globalism.
Still, it does parallel the only certainty gained from the development process of the past 50 years: needed change is social, political and small scale and each problem requires a unique solution that can not be scaled up and rolled out globally.
There are no golden grand ideas in development and conventional, large scale development simply doesn't work.
November 5, 2011
Figures that I had to move to DC before I found and read this book (and that my thesis studied a country where aid/development efforts had repeatedly failed). Maggie Black, the author, is pretty well written on the topics of international development. If I were to summarize her views throughout the book: Aid/Development have repeatedly failed. They're doing a little better, but have a long way to go. She captures this eloquently (though her fondness for passive sentences can be offputting). I'd read her other stuff.
September 11, 2013
A much more balanced discussion about international development than the introduction would lead you to believe. A rational reiteration of Easterly and others' assertion that indigenous boots on the ground develop and maintain projects better than the aid complex. A quick and interesting read, but little new for those who have been paying attention.
January 4, 2025
Somewhat dated, but balanced in general terms, although the authors introductory and closing statements would lead one to believe that the case against technocratic development efforts is more solidly one-sided.
August 20, 2011
the book takes a panoramic view of Development as witnessed from the post World War II onwards to date. A lot of events that i thought i knew fell into place
September 6, 2011
Essential reading for anyone working in the development sector or people with an interest in making our planet more liveable.
July 3, 2012
Another entry in this series that tries to explain complex international issues to high school students. Needs to be updated given the 2002 publishing date.
March 22, 2014
Easy to follow. Well written overview of a very complex topic. Definitely a good starting point if wanting to venture into the details of international development studies.
June 17, 2015
A good primer but I'd like to see an updated version.
More case studies of what worked and what has not would be good.
More case studies of what worked and what has not would be good.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews