Here’s a question for all you development research types (especially the randomistas). A lot of community-level capital development projects these days seem to involve a requirement that the beneficiary community make a contribution towards the development. Sometimes this is in the form of free labour, other times it is financial. So, for example, a new [...]
Archive for the ‘Incentives’ Category
19 Jul
The Charges against Big Aid
Terence, the Waylaid Dialectic, tears a couple of fair sized strips off Jonathan Starr’s self-righteous polemic about Big Aid. Terence’s points are well made, but I think not the whole story. For a start, stripping away the pomposity, Starr is surely right when he says Big Aid has an accountability problem. As I and many [...]
30 May
Blame it on the speculators, why don’t you?
Catching up on what’s been on the Guardian’s Development Matters blog, I’m surprised that no-one else has yet chimed in on the dodgy economics on show by Christian Aid’s Alex Cobham when he points the finger at pension funds for helping drive up world food prices. Now I’m not an expert economist, so I will [...]
22 Mar
Bad news brings in the wonga
We’re all familiar with the unfortunate fact of life that bad news tends to be much more newsworthy than good news, e.g. this recent example. This is doubly true for NGOs, as Karen Rothmeyer points out. (H/T: Tom Murphy) We depend upon bad news to bring in the money. So, although we do like to [...]
1 Mar
When not to feed a starving child
A while ago I blogged about how I conceived of a certain Logic of Compassion which linked immediate humanitarian assistance, to which – I implied – no-one could object, and the much longer term focused work in which I am involved. But now Linda Polman, in her polemic War Games (The Crisis Caravan in North [...]
12 Jul
Getting Paid to Help Yourself
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we regularly pay community representatives small per diems to turn up to meetings about the project. This is not just for meetings for which they may need to leave the comfort of their homes and travel to, but also for meetings actually in the villages where they [...]
28 Jun
What’s wrong with ICDPs? (Part One)
In my introduction to this blog I criticise Integrated Conservation & Development Projects (ICDPs) without going into much detail, but recently I have been queried on the subject, so here’s the fuller explanation. ICDPs first started appearing about 20 years ago and were a response to the criticism that traditional conservation projects did not take [...]
26 Jun
Ethical Publishing for Dummies
“A book is a window on to the world.” So said a poster I had on my bedroom wall as a kid. However, as all quantum physicists know, observing the world perforce changes the world. And not always for the better, according to this report by the Rainforest Action Network on paper sources used by [...]
24 Jun
Great Green Wall: old thinking, new ambition
I cannot help but be somewhat skeptical about African leaders’ plans for a Great Green Wall of trees to hold back the Sahara desert. Twenty years ago tree planting was all the rage in forestry hereabouts, and twenty years ago all the seedlings were eaten by goats. Soil erosion and desertification are serious problems, and [...]
21 May
UK to ban illegal timber
The funky new coalition government in the UK appears ready to follow the US in criminalising the import of illegal timber. In the same way that many commentators see trade policies as more important to development than aid, so I think these kind of initiatives can have greater impacts on conservation than many on-the-ground projects. [...]
