Reviews
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Reviews from Development in Practice 15(5) - August 2005 Reviews from Development in Practice 15(2) - April 2005 Reviews from Development in Practice 14 (6) -November 2004 Reviews - Development in Practice 15(5) - August 2005 Kaufman , Robert R. and Joan M. Nelson (eds.) This book has appeared none too soon. Its predecessor, Participation: the new tyranny?, edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, and published in 2001 also by Zed Books, was more in the tradition of the negative academic who relishes finding things to criticise. These were the many actual and potential defects of practices labelled as participatory. Its question mark was overshadowed by the clever paradox of the rest of the title, which must have ensured a wide readership. Unfortunately, the style and orientation of that book were more prone to breed cynicism than to encourage action and trying to do better. It is, of course, vital to recognise and learn from the widespread bad practices perpetrated in the name of participation. But any balanced view must also include the gains that have been made, some of them extraordinary. From tyranny to transformation? takes us in that direction. It has the sharp critical edge we will always need. At the same time is better informed and more perceptive and judicious than its predecessor. While its title retains the question mark, as it should, the word ‘transformation’ points us forwards. No short review can do justice to the wealth of comment and insight presented in the book’s 18 chapters. One strength is the presentation and analysis of examples to give an empirical grounding. Quite extensive case material is drawn from Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Nepal, Peru, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. There are some useful concepts, examples of participation, and reminders of its dimensions that give pause for reflection. Among others, John Gaventa describes new forms of citizen-state engagement. Andrea Cornwall explores spaces as metaphor and reality, using the distinction between those which are ‘invited’ and those which are ‘popular’ or ‘autonomous’. Ute Kelly gives us ‘the tyranny of safety’, suggesting that making spaces ‘safe’ for people to express and change their views can discourage precisely the open, honest discussion that is sought. Glyn Williams finds participation ‘ a highly malleable discourse in political terms’ and argues that it should be re-politicised. Mark Waddington and Giles Mohan refer to ‘deep political literacy’ linked to REFLECT (originally Regenerated Freirian Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques, now more usually simply Reflect). Codes of practice and ethical considerations are central to only one chapter. In this Bill Cooke lists his rules of thumb for participatory change agents. Individually, these are salutary shocks not least to those who gain their livelihoods in consultancy and research. But they could tyrannise more than transform: don’t work for the World Bank; data belong to those from whom they were taken; work only in languages you understand as well as your first; always work for local rates, or for free – each of these invites a ‘Yes, but…’. Life and ethics are not so simple. Development professionals who practise responsibly are faced with dilemmas: and these are interwoven with personal and professional tensions and contradictions, demanding trade-offs and compromises which are sometimes stark and sometimes subtle, if they are to engage actively rather than carp and prescribe from the side lines. This applies not least to decisions and actions when engaging with process, when dealing with difference and conflict, when seeking to make spaces safe but not too safe or safe in the wrong way, and when facilitating exchanges, negotiation, and mutual understanding. Not to engage, and so to avoid having to make choices with trade-offs, is itself an ethical decision. Questions of responsibility apply to what is not done as well as to what is. Power and agency are pervasive themes in this collection. Gaventa writes on the significance of power relations in participatory spaces, Cornwall on spaces for transformation, Kelly on how shifts in power can be difficult and painful for all who are involved, and Williams on calling power to account. And other chapters pick up on these themes. While it is good and overdue that power and agency have become more central concerns and more discussed in development, there is a danger that they become top-down priorities, a point made by Frances Cleaver: in analysing the social embeddedness of agency and decision making, she adds the salutary caution that in terms of poor people’s priorities, empowerment and transformation are not just matters of spaces and voices, but entail more prosaic forms of material and social transformation of everyday life. The frontiers of participatory practices move fast; and given the delays of authors, editors, and publishers, books on participation are vulnerable to being overtaken by events by the time they are published. It is also easy for them to overlook some of the myriad innovations and applications that manifest almost every month. So it is not surprising that some strikingly original and transformative developments are not in this book, for example applications of participatory approaches and methods to violence, to guns and disarming, to sexual and reproductive health, to community sanitation, to boundary disputes and conflict resolution, and to tertiary education. As Tony Bebbington remarks ‘the frontier of what can be done around participatory development and social change has expanded enormously’[p. X]. It continues to do so. From Tyranny to Transformation does not explore the full span of potentials and applications on that frontier, but does a service in summarising much recent experience, and doing this in a manner which is variously provocative, critical and balanced. It deserves to be widely read and reflected on by those who are engaged in and concerned with participation. Robert Chambers This edited volume examines the politics of recent social-sector reforms in Latin America. Countries in the region have long aspired to ensuring health and education for all, a goal that is embedded in the Constitutions of some Latin American nations. Despite significant advances, however, reality has lagged far behind this aspiration. For large segments of the population, access to education and health remains limited, and inequalities in access and outcomes are large. Instead of ensuring opportunity for all, health and education systems in Latin America have deficits that reinforce existing inequalities and deepen poverty traps. The urgency attached to finding ways of overcoming these deficits cannot be overstated. This volume makes a welcome and timely contribution to this important area of debate and discussion in Latin America and other developing regions. There are at least three features of this book that should be especially welcome. First, it is uniquely focused on the politics of social-sector reforms. As the editors indicate, a large share of the research and literature on such reforms in Latin America has focused on the optimal design of health and education reforms. As a consequence, we know much less than we need to about how these reforms are adopted and implemented and about the significance of political processes, actors, and constraints, in shaping them. The contributors to this volume take great care in identifying the main drivers for reform, as well as opponents and ‘fence-sitters’, and in demonstrating how these agents interact in the reform process. Second, the volume combines detailed country studies of reform processes with a strong comparative analysis. There are separate chapters on health and education reforms on four core countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Additional chapters on health reforms cover Costa Rica and Peru, while attention is given to education in Nicaragua and Venezuela. The editors develop the comparative analysis to the entire volume, through a lengthy Introduction and Conclusion, as well as through introductory chapters to the sections on education and health. The combination of country studies and comparative analysis provides readers with a ‘double dividend’, as the book will serve both as a reference to reforms in the specific countries covered, and a source of tools and findings for the comparative researcher. Third, the book will be of interest to a wide audience, but it appeals directly to policy makers and researchers. The final chapter ‘Conclusion: The Political Dynamics of Reform’ offers a succinct mapping of ‘best practice’ in social-sector reform, summarising and commenting upon the key findings emerging from the careful analysis of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the reform process in the country-specific chapters. The various contributions in the book greatly advance our understanding of the role of politics in social-sector reforms. In doing so, they also highlight areas where further research is required. The focus of the contributions is on education and health reforms aimed at strengthening the supply-side, e.g. management and financial decentralisation, reform of ministries, unification of providers, etc. A case can also be made for addressing reforms aimed at strengthening the demand-side. Mexico’s PROGRESA/OPORTUNIDADES and Brazil’s BOLSA ESCOLA/FAMILIA use targeted conditional cash transfers to strengthen demand for education and health among poor households (though they also include supply-side measures). It would be enormously interesting and productive to know more about the politics of demand-side reforms, and the extent to which the analysis confirms or contradicts the findings from the analysis of supply-side reforms described in the book. Another area in which the book prompts further research is on the role of a renewal of social contracts in precipitating social-sector reforms, especially given the discussion on the impact of constitutional reforms in Brazil (1988) and Colombia (1991) on reforms in the social sector. The findings emerging from the studies compiled here are that social-sector reforms in Latin America have been led by reformers within the government, in the face of strong opposition from labour and professional organisations. Reforms are more likely to be successful if they are expected to produce few losers, do not require painful adjustments on the part of existing providers, have more immediate pay-offs, and involve a wider network of stakeholders (especially in the implementation phase). ‘Easy’ reforms embodying these qualities might be as effective as ‘hard’ reforms involving large-scale structural change. Some findings are very likely to stimulate discussion. The book suggests that, on the whole, democratisation has facilitated social-sector reforms, but its effects are indirect through pressures for decentralisation, which is perceived to improve service provision, rather than through a strengthening of the demand for education and health. Interestingly, the book concludes that attempts by international organisations to influence the reform agenda in education and health have proved ineffective in the region, which is at odds with the findings from studies on other sectors, such as pensions. The book contains a rich analysis demonstrating that politics matter in social-sector reforms. It will be required reading for researchers and policy makers interested in policy reform, education and health, Latin America, and, more broadly, for all those concerned with human development. Armando Barrientos Since the mid-point of the twentieth century, two major changes have occurred in Latin America that have had far-reaching and intertwined effects. The first is demographic and involves urbanisation and growth of the region’s capital and provincial cities, to the extent that most estimates agree that close to 70 per cent of Latin America’s citizens now live in urban areas. The second is political, and generally comes under the heading of decentralisation, a phenomenon that has many aspects: power-sharing, local-level innovation, elected (as opposed to appointed) local officials and so forth. Decentralisation means among other things that since the 1980s virtually all subnational officials (governors, mayors, city council members) are now elected as opposed to appointed by the president. Local officials now have constituencies to whom they can appeal and to whom they are answerable, meaning that local officials now have far greater responsibilities and opportunities than they have ever had previously. Tim Campbell, who directs the urban management programme at the World Bank Institute, and Harald Fuhr, a social scientist at the University of Potsdam, have collaborated on a most useful and far-ranging edited volume that focuses on decentralisation from a clear public policy perspective: ‘…the objective [of the book] is to explore the mechanisms that leads to invention at the local level and to understand better how decentralization helps to foster innovation and how, in turn, it benefits from innovation’ (p.5) As the authors note in the introduction, relatively ‘little is known about the necessary conditions for success at lower levels, and what subnational governments can do to make decentralization work’ (p. 5). The editors have brought together academics, practitioners, and experts who have produced case studies that focus on thematic issues (e.g. fiscal management, administration, citizen participation, public service provision, public-private collaboration, donors, and policy makers) as well as specific cases (drawn from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela) There are also chapters that provide background to the topic and a description of the multi-country Innovations Study carried out during the late 1990s under the auspices of the World Bank (generation of research questions, selection of countries and cases, methodologies, etc.). The cases selected all have one thing in common: they were all considered to be successes, in one form or another, which is to say that ‘…a deliberate decision was made not to study failures… [because] practitioners and professionals are relatively more familiar with many of the common impediments and pitfalls that defeat innovations…’ (p. 55, note 2). The Innovations Study thus sought to identify and analyse cases that go beyond documenting good and best practices and to come to an understanding of the contexts out of which innovation occurs and can be sustained. Given the length of the book and the constraints of space, it is not possible here to go into much detail on cases. But it can be safely said that practitioners and academics alike will find much to ponder here, either by understanding the cases as presented and/or by comparing cases here with others countries and cities not included. Overall, the book’s multiple cases suggest that successful innovation frequently emerges from the tensions that develop between rising expectations from urban constituencies and the capacity of local authorities to respond adequately to such demands and needs. Decentralisation that occurs too rapidly, or that occurs without sufficient resources being made available to increase capacity, can be of course fatal to good intentions; one constant theme from many cases has to do with ways to avoid or overcome mandates placed on local leaders by national authorities without providing them sufficient financial resources. Providing such resources often requires innovation; several cases illustrate inventive ways in which local authorities either obtain constitutional guarantees of funding and/or convince their constituencies that raising locally controlled taxes can contribute to a better life for a city’s inhabitants. Warnings and caveats occur everywhere, of course: what works in one city may not work in another city in the same country, let alone another country; developing inclusionary policies for previously marginalised groups may provoke a backlash and/or generate rapidly increasing demands that cannot be met; newly empowered local authorities may run up against entrenched local elites or power groups that oppose innovation. In addition, problems may arise if innovations succeed in one city and raise expectations and/or jealousies in another. Such imbalances may call for supra-local efforts to disperse innovations more or less evenly across cities. The book probably has practitioners as its main audience, but academics in sociology, political science, and the other social sciences will find much here to think about and an endless number of propositions and hypotheses to investigate. The editors (who also contribute several chapters), the several contributors, and the World Bank itself are to be congratulated for carrying out such a large-scale project (obviously beyond the reach of individual researchers) and for making its findings available to a wide audience. Dan Baron The twentieth century witnessed no shortage of heroic struggles for freedom or justice, nor of women, workers, or communities organising locally against oppression. Many such struggles led to what was perceived, at least for a time, as victory. However, whether following revolution or reform, the longer-term results, in terms of economic and social development, have often been bitterly disappointing. This poses a profound challenge to all who believe that development is - or should be - a social process, and an inclusive and non-exploitative one at that. How can investment in social processes lead to real, lasting development? What skills do people need, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, if they are to successfully transform their lives? Big questions, but also very immediate and practical ones. For example in Brazil, the Movimento Sem Terra (MST, or landless farmers’ movement) continues to organise new members and land occupations in the face of the continuing failure of the Brazilian government to resolve land issues or ensure the rule of law in the countryside. However, after 20 years of struggle, many thousands of its members are now legally settled and trying to run their communities on cooperative principles. It isn’t easy. The dynamics of building successful communities and medium-sized agricultural businesses are different than those of acute struggle and require different aptitudes. More fundamentally, the rhetoric of struggle can mask the damage which oppression causes - insecurity, lack of self-esteem, lack of trust - and its negative consequences for human relationships at personal and community level. Nor are communities static. As better incomes allow for infrastructure and home appliances, so the eyes of the youth stray to the excitements and opportunities of the cities. In the long run, appeals to past solidarity do not work. New ways have to be found to create the dynamics demanded by the new situation. One pre-condition of sustainable collective processes is for the individuals involved to have sufficient emotional foundations to participate fully within them. That in turn revolves around questions of experience and pain, of identity, of the possibility of interaction and of avenues of expression appropriate to the communication needs and skills of the people concerned. The process of exploring these issues and resolving them can be termed that of cultural literacy - the ‘alfabetização cultural’ of the title. The book is divided into three sections. The first offers historical and theoretical background and charts the author’s own personal journey and the evolution of his ideas as he passes from graduate studies at the University of Oxford, to cultural politics in northern England and then in republican enclaves in Northern Ireland. The second describes in some detail seven cultural literacy projects in Brazil on which the author worked with his partner and collaborator, Manoela Souza. These include projects working with school children, with an indigenous group, and with various groups - communities, youth, and school students - within the MST. Although these studies show a steady evolution of practice and understanding, each followed a basic pattern. They aimed to reanimate individuals and communities anaesthetised by the pain of recent experience; to stimulate critical but poetic creativity, leading to the production of a shared cultural object; and to develop democratic practices for collective working in the process. All involved a substantial commitment of time. It is hard not to be impressed either with the final artistic product or engaged with the considerable political controversies such products, on several occasions, generated. This is not, however, the main point of the exercise. The real interest is in the potential for this to be an empowering educational process for the individuals and communities involved - an aim towards which the book itself, with its clear description of the stages of each story and its ample illustrations, makes an important practical contribution. The third section of the book sets out the emergent pedagogical methodology with clarity and considers the implications of such practice for a pedagogy oriented towards the needs of people rather than of existing power structures. The author and the methodology he employs have a large and acknowledged debt to Paolo Freire. However, the practice described in this book goes beyond Freire in some important ways. First, it is critical of ‘concientização’ in as much as this word implies acceptance of the ‘written word and discourse - in itself part of rationalist, European and colonialist culture’ (reviewer’s translation). The word ‘sensibilização’ is preferred as part of a process which allows people to develop their own preferred languages - of dance or song or words - with which to express themselves. Second, the book traces an ever-increasing critique of the animator or educator as leader, as ‘important person’ talking from the stage, to being a participant in dialogue, a listener and a defender of a group’s right to self-determination. By such logic, the process of gaining and using critical self-awareness is not only essential for people gaining the capacity to ‘develop’ themselves but also to all professionals who aim to help them. This mirrors the argument made with reference to humanitarian work by Jane Gilbert in ‘Self-knowledge is the prerequisite of humanity: personal development and self-awareness for aid workers’ (Development in Practice 15(1):64-69). This inspiring and multi-faceted book would not claim to provide an answer an answer to all the questions it raises. It offers sufficiently detailed and illustrated examples of practical work to guide anyone interested in art-education or cultural literacy as part of a development process. Beyond this - in an era in which ‘change’ is heralded as offering hope for humanity - it offers some very interesting directions for thought on what educational processes are required if people - and agencies - are to be equipped to cope with and benefit from change in the twenty-first century. For that reason, the wider relevance of the pedagogy described in the book has already been discussed at UNESCO meetings and at the World Social Forum. Mike Powell The concept and practice of development have never been without their critics, both of the paradigm itself and, more commonly, of the development industry. The arguments that the development project as such is a contemporary form of political, economic, and cultural imperialism have frequently been voiced in this journal, principally by Southern authors; and many contributors have bemoaned the growing reliance of aid agencies on fads and techniques, all too often at the expense of more subtle readings of the socio-political environment within which these agencies operate. In their day-to-day work, however, aid workers tend to be impatient with what they view as ‘armchair criticism’, retorting that it is better to act than to pontificate, and that the humanitarian imperative does not permit the luxury of leisurely reflection. Those who are doing their level best in what they must know is a labour of Sisyphus are understandably irritated by public swipes at their professional and intellectual integrity, especially when these are made by clean-handed onlookers. Arguments that aid may do more harm than good, or that it benefits the giver more than the recipient, are therefore likely to fall on deaf ears unless the critic can offer convincing alternatives to the prevailing modus operandi. While Des Gasper does not set out to offer such alternatives, he does the development profession a great service by unravelling the ethical underpinnings and implications of terms that are the industry’s standard currency. In tackling concepts that are often taken for granted in order to reveal and interrogate their deeper meanings, Gasper offers readers a moral map upon which to chart their chosen course of action. As he says, ‘Development ethics is in large part about choices: choices about values and about strategies. Ethical discussion about development only has much point because there are real, serious choices to make. If there was only but one development path that could be taken seriously … there would not remain much to discuss; only the propounding of the one true way’ (pp. 15-16). The elucidation of a range of relevant concepts thus ‘provides a basis for more intelligent political debate and choice’ (p. 112). The Ethics of Development is intended as a teaching text, and is therefore laid out in a way that allows readers to dip into discussions of particular interest rather than assuming that they will devour it cover to cover. In addition to providing an overview of the most influential writers or arguments on a given topic, each chapter opens with a clear outline and concludes with a summary, as well as suggested discussion themes and a guide to further reading. After an introductory chapter on the rationale and scope of ‘development ethics’ as a field, and setting out competing definitions of ‘development’, Gasper goes on to clarify the differences between development and modernisation, and between descriptive concepts such as economic growth or industrialisation and a normative interpretation. Subsequent chapters probe such apparently innocuous terms such as efficiency, effectiveness, equality, and equity. By way of example (for instance, of land use in Zimbabwe or of the debt crisis) as well as political and philosophical argument, Gasper shows the dangers of ‘taking models or procedures which are valid for specific limited purposes in economic analysis and extending them to cover the analysis or evaluation of much more of life, with little or no use of other ideas’ (p.81). He also illustrates the converse dangers of denying that competing principles may indeed have validity in certain cases, or of dismissing an entire principle because of disagreeing with how it has been employed, or disliking the individuals or institutions associated with it. A chapter of particular interest concerns cultures, and whether one can criticise a cultural practice without being ethnocentric. This depends, of course, on how culture is defined, in what context, and by whom. Gasper notes that it is used as a catch-all term to capture the conglomeration of human concerns that lie outside simple market models; as the defining characteristics of a community; or as what Hofstede refers to as the ‘shared mental programming’ distinguishing one group from another (p. 197). Depending on how one defines development, culture may be viewed as an obstacle, an independent variable, a means to a positive outcome, or the sole touchstone of success. This brings us right up against issues such as gender-power or inter-ethnic relations in deciding who has the right to interpret culture or to ascribe meaning; the evolving and non-consensual nature of culture; and the fact that individual and collective identities are multiple and sometimes in conflict with each other. Which differences are relevant in making such a judgement, and which are not? Are there differential sanctions for non-compliance with cultural norms? What constitutes ‘acceptable acceptance’ of a practice that has been defined as cultural, such as the seclusion or exclusion of women or son-preference? Can one defend the rights of individuals to choose without implicitly promoting (Western) individualism, or is the satisfaction of certain universal needs a pre-requisite for the pursuit of diverse values? How does cultural relativism answer the paradox that it rests on ‘authoritarianism, poor sociology and weak logic’ (p. 219)? As the world inhabited by the development industry appears more complex, so the temptation is to fall back on simplistic ‘truths’, and to be guided more by pragmatism (or, worse, by ideological assertion) than by principled argument. Perhaps fearful that their legitimacy is under threat, some aid agencies are also given to ironing out the complications, whether by projecting their ‘derring-do’ on the humanitarian front, or through campaigns that portray issues in heroic ‘David and Goliath’ terms. Des Gasper invites us to re-engage in a more thoughtful way with the values and meanings that form the linguistic currency of international development, not as an academic exercise (though that may be valuable in its own right) but because of the critical importance of addressing ‘questions of conflicting values, priorities, unintended effects, and possible policy alternatives’ (p. 229) in an honest and rigorous fashion if the goal is indeed to build a more just and humane world for all. Deborah Eade Van Rooy, Alison Reviews - Development in Practice 15(1) - February 2005. The Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN) Rieff, David David Rieff’s book is more death knell than alarm bell. As he explains at the start, it is a book born from despair at the direction that the humanitarian response to the major conflicts of the past decade has taken. Humanitarianism, he argues, is in crisis because it has aimed to do more than provide ‘a bed for the night’. It has overreached its original ‘serious, wonderful and limited idea’ (p. 335) of partial and independent alleviation of suffering in terrible situations. NGOs have lost sight of the fact that there can be no ‘humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems’. And in both adopting a universal human rights agenda and being co-opted by Western government interests, they have sacrificed the autonomy, neutrality, and very possibility of humanitarianism. The aid business, Rieff argues, was never an innocent victim of political cooption. It has been guilty in its flawed response to particular crises and in its quest for institutional survival. In their urgent appeals for funding, agencies systematically misrepresent both the situations they work in and their capacity to address them. They are complicit with the simplistic twenty-second slot media coverage of crisis situations that ‘infantilises’ the victims, reduces complex situations to moral fables of innocence and evil, and presents easy, palatable solutions. This impedes a mature understanding of the reality of crisis situations, and also hides the true costs of finding solutions, particularly the costs of intervention. In human rights, Rieff finds an even more dangerous and more ideological misrepresentation of reality, the foundations of a tragic waste of hope. Despite the enthusiasm with which treaties from the Geneva Conventions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been signed and held aloft, Rieff notes that ‘no century has had better norms and worse realities’. He is right - for a vast number of people around the world, human rights remain a promise without prospect of fulfilment. And in a world where war is the norm, he warns that calls for better enforcement of rights are misguided. Besides the fact that conditions in the world are not going to get any better, there is no such thing as an international community to do the enforcing. But Rieff’s argument is undermined by a simplistic account of human rights. Taking Michael Ignatieff as the voice of a monolithic movement, and claiming that human rights have been uncontested, he falls back on the dated argument that universal rights are the equivalent of Western neo-imperialism in an altruistic guise, the modern white man’s burden. His conclusion is a worrying two-tier approach where human rights become a luxury for the rich: ‘it is one thing to talk about rights in societies that have the means to make them realities, and quite another to do so in the context of societies that are too poor or too convulsed by ethnic strife, to do so’. A Bed for the Night describes how Western political leaders have manipulated human rights promises and the humanitarian imperative as a ‘fig leaf’ or ‘flag of convenience’ for action and inaction in successive crises. In Bosnia and Rwanda humanitarian responses were used as a substitute for political or military action by Western governments who wanted cost-free containment of crises and the appearance of doing ‘something’. In Kosovo and Rwanda the humanitarian imperative was co-opted as a “warrant for war” and the presence of relief agencies used to underscore their altruistic intentions. The emergence of this ‘state humanitarianism’ poses another set of dilemmas for relief agencies as they position themselves between neutrality and political engagement. Rieff charts the evolving responses of NGOs, contrasting neutral ICRC with state-contracted American agencies like IRC, leftist development-rooted British agencies like Oxfam GB, and the purist continental MSF approach. Each approach, except perhaps the last one, has resulted in grave oversights and mistakes and has contributed to the current crisis, leading to the question, ‘what ought humanitarian action to be in […] these new “mean times” ? (p. 304). Frustrating as the reader may find the lack of clear answers in this impassioned ‘j’accuse’, Rieff makes no claims to provide solutions for resurrecting humanitarianism. He humbly states his hope to ‘make some small contribution to awakening conscience about the wars, famines and refugee crises that are its theme and not make people more cynical or resigned’ (p. 1). Yet it is clear from the limited pages and sparse analysis allotted to the crises themselves that this is a disingenuous claim. And it is hard to finish this book without pessimism and resignation, without echoing the MSF official who responds ‘that’s it; I’m closing MSF in the morning’ (p. 300). Rieff pre-empts criticism of his book for not being ‘constructive’ by quoting a conversation with Sergio Viera de Mello. Criticism that isn’t constructive is nihilism, said the late High Commissioner for Human Rights. But this stance, says Rieff, stifles necessary painful critique and hastens the death of humanitarianism. Despite all this, Rieff cannot resist veering towards a prescription – and a surprisingly idealistic and naïve one at that, given the book’s pessimism and emphasis on the inherent flaws of the humanitarian endeavour. ‘Let humanitarianism be humanitarianism’, he urges (p. 333). Give up attempting to address the crises and concentrate on saving a few lives, tending to a few victims, and reminding the rest of the world how lucky they are. After the litany of dilemmas and realpolitik he has described it, is hard to see how Rieff believes this could really save rather than sink humanitarianism. Dijkzeul, Dennis and Yves Beigbeder (eds.) In the spirit of the same honesty, it is important to add that the editors and contributors of this book – as well as this reviewer – happen to like international organisations and consider them a generally positive and possibly necessary motor of international development. This, for example, is quite evident not only in the chapters on financing the United Nations (Klaus Hüfner) and on diplomacy in a multilateral world (Dietrich Kappler), but also in some of the more scathing introspections in the collection, such as an insightful case study of the internal transformation of international public organisations (by Matthias Finer and Bérangère Magarinos-Ruchat). What makes the analysis presented in this book refreshing is that instead of ignoring the problems of international organisations, it chooses to focus on these dysfunctions or pathologies in an attempt to ‘identify explanations and actions that offer promise for a better functioning of these organizations’ (p. 2; introduction by Dennis Dijkzeul and Yves Beigbeder). In short, the book is honest about the limitations of international organisations with the sincerity of a good friend and without the pungency of a bitter enemy. This brings us to a second quality of this collection. Much as one would expect from a sincere friend, the book is not just honest, it is honest about the tough issues. Consider, for example, the chapter of corruption and fraud in the United Nations culture written by one of the editors (Yves Beigbeder). This chapter provides a detailed and rather disturbing look at a deep pathology that scholars of the UN system have routinely shirked from even though it is widely recognised by anyone who deals with the world body, including those who work within it. While it nowhere shies from putting the UN’s dirty laundry on public display and even as it highlights just how soiled some UN individuals and operations can be, its intent is not destructive. It is bold enough to take on an issue that many others dare not touch, but also balanced enough to recognise that the problem exists but it is not as widespread nor as deep an indictment on the entire system as smear campaigns on the UN would claim. In this sense, one might suggest that the main title of the book is a little misleading. The substance of its chapters is really more preoccupied with rethinking how international organisations can be ‘managed’ better than with reconsidering whether the idea of international organisations is a good one. Because the authors do not doubt the need for their existence, they focus instead on why the promise of such organisations is not being fulfilled. They do so by raising fundamental questions about how these organisations operate, including, for example, human resource management (Alex de Waal), corruption (Yves Beigbeder), and programme orientation (Dennis Dijkzeul). But the most important word defining the fundamental gist of the book actually appears in its sub-title: the word ‘pathology’ is used consistently in the various chapters as a concept that brings attention to those symptoms of dysfunction that belie more deeply-rooted problems in the way international organisations operate and are managed. The focus, then, is not just on what seems to be wrong but, more importantly, on the reasons why. A third quality of the book that is worth highlighting is its broad and inclusive understanding of what the world of international organisations consists of. Although this is less than consistent in individual chapters, the book as a whole paints a nuanced and comprehensive picture of how the contemporary landscape of international organisations is evolving. This includes highlighting emerging initiatives such as civilian policing (Dennis Smith), as well as a chapter by Ian Smillie and Kristie Evenson which raises critical concerns about how international efforts to ‘strengthen’ civil society and NGOs in developing and emerging economies can sometimes have the opposite effect. Insightful and thought provoking as the chapters in this collection are, there are two areas where the book leaves the reader wanting more. The first is the need for bringing together and conceptualising the lessons from the chapters at a deeper level, possibly in ways that truly move us towards a better theory of international organisations. The concluding chapter (Dennis Dijkzeul and Leon Gordenker) makes a valiant attempt at this but remains mostly a reflection on and summary of the lessons from the rest of the chapters. The second area is the need to focus more on North-South dynamics and issues of distrust. This is a problem that the editors bring up in their introduction as a key shortcoming of the research, and Jacques Fomerand’s chapter on norm-setting at the UN does highlight its critical importance. Yet, the book as a whole fails to overcome a shortcoming present in most of the literature on the subject by not giving enough integrated attention to the dynamics of perceived Southern disenfranchisement from the international system, including international organisations.
This unique analysis of the economies of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe is not, however, the only significant contribution of The SAPRI Report. The story of SAPRI itself, as documented in the report’s introduction and in its concluding pages, is a window through which the reader can gain an inside perspective of how the World Bank operates to protect the core interests of its Northern governors and clientele against the significant efforts by civil society to democratise global and national economic policymaking. The book's final chapter tells the story of the media pressure SAPRIN placed on the World Bank to bring Wolfensohn back to the table with SAPRIN and to get a commitment from the Bank, as a start, to involve civil society in policymaking in the SAPRI countries. The SAPRI findings will remain an important tool in the mobilisation for economic citizenship and global justice, but as the Report argues in its conclusion, it will be the continual mobilisation and work of civil society in each country and at the global level that will ultimately determine if and when that policymaking process is democratised.
D’Adesky is a journalist and filmmaker. Writing in the first person, she takes the reader with her as she travels the world to document the successes and difficulties of pioneering efforts to provide treatment. Her journey goes through, chapter by chapter, Brazil, India, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Uganda, Morocco, South Africa, and Russia, with each country providing her with a different lens through which to explore the issues. While these chapters make up the bulk of the book, she also provides an introductory chronology of events with regard to treatment, and, later in the book, an overview of issues relating to the medical and scientific challenges of managing HIV in settings of poverty or poor infrastructure. In her closing chapter, she presents her insights regarding the progress made so far, and the problems which remain. The narrative style of the book is, overall, a strength. D’Adesky’s descriptions of people and places and her personal reflections are present throughout, enlivening the relevant but less-engaging detail concerning trade negotiations, patents, and drug production. It is to her credit that the book contains a lot of technical detail while remaining readable and accessible. As such, it can carry someone with a general interest in the topic, providing that the reader can handle its considerable length: some 300 pages, plus 100 more of appendices and notes. However, I assume that the book’s audience will mainly comprise activists and practitioners who are already engaged in fighting for, and providing, treatment. Those who are accustomed to a crisper academic style, with less subjectivity and more structured analysis, may feel the book is overly long and too discursive – on the other hand, they might enjoy the change. This is certainly a people-centred account which contrasts with scientific papers on the subject. By presenting case studies of pilot programmes which are treating AIDS successfully, the book argues that ‘it is possible to treat the poorest people effectively with AIDS drugs, and it costs less to do than we projected. The barrier to access is not poverty, or illiteracy, or the inability of Africans to take their drugs consistently, or other indices of national development or capacity; it is a lack of political commitment, pure and simple’ (p. 319). I do not contest this, inasmuch as it is also the case for all other development problems; that with political commitment we could have clean water for all, universal access to education, an end to hunger, and so on. However, my sense from reading the book is that while it is possible to get AIDS treatment to the poorest, the humanitarian imperative to expand treatment is up against an array of problems which are far from pure and simple to address. Overall, this comprehensive book presents an important overview of the state of the art with regard to treating AIDS as of the end of 2003. I fear, however, that it may date quite quickly, as summits are held, trade deals are made or collapse, and new research findings emerge. What will not date is the way in which D’Adesky shows how treatment gaps between rich and poor countries are not historically given, but are instead actively created and reproduced by powerful individuals and groups in business and in politics. Whether the issue is treatment for AIDS or other issues of global inequity, we all have a responsibility to respond.
Many of the results are surprising and challenging, notably that ‘perfect insurance freezes inequality’ while patronage limits it. However, Fafchamps relies on mathematical proofs to advance his arguments, and so a high level of mathematical sophistication is demanded of the reader in order to understand and evaluate how his assumptions lead to the conclusions he reaches. Fortunately, there are clear, frequent, and rigorous verbal summaries of what has been shown, and these give even non-mathematical readers some idea of why. These summaries will stimulate any practitioner or policy adviser working with (say) farm credit or savings, insurance institutions, farm innovation, or migration. The challenge this book poses to the reader is to ask whether, for the relevant conditions, the assumptions about low-income rural societies are valid, or wisely chosen given the alternatives. Fafchamps here has the great strength of engaging with the findings of anthropology, and to some extent rural sociology and political economy. This lends a lot of ‘field cred’ to many sections, such as the outstanding discussions of the scope and limits of risk sharing and risk pooling, and of the conditions under which social solidarity underpins ‘commitment’ as a route to manage or anticipate risk, and with what impact on inequality and development. Perhaps less successful are risk-based theories based on strong assertions about topics where Fafchamps has not taken account of other literatures, e.g. demography and technical change. On demography, he seems to deny - without reviewing much of the evidence - that the poor tend to have more children partly to compensate in advance for the higher risk of child mortality. On technology, Fafchamps proves, given his assumptions, that risk aversion – in the absence of bankruptcy risk – cannot explain reluctance by poor farmers to adopt ‘divisible’ innovations such as improved seeds, but that it does account for partial adoption with the aim of diversification. However, he does not take into account two large bodies of counter-evidence. Work in sociology (dating back to the 1960s) shows empirically that middle farmers (not the poorest or richest) usually adopt first, and that the poor catch up, following a logistic adoption curve over time. More recent contributions from agricultural economics show that in the later, upper reaches of this curve, smaller and poorer farmers use higher levels of inputs per hectare, over a larger proportion of cropland, than big farmers, at least with labour-intensive innovations such as those of the ‘green revolution’. Both on technical change and on family size, there are theoretical arguments, based on assumptions somewhat different from Fafchamps’s, confirming these different findings. One of the things these literatures overlooked by the author do is explore issues of reciprocal causation: for example, the poor are at higher risk of child mortality and hence have more children, but this raises the hands/mouths ratio and makes escaping poverty harder. Information – or its absence – plays a large role in determining risk, responses to it, and rich-poor differences in its effects. The poor have little collateral (e.g. they are tenants rather than landowners). Hence lending, which could smooth the poor’s consumption and perhaps allow them to invest more, is impeded because potential lenders prefer not to assume the risk of lending to the poor in case they incur a loss. Peer monitoring in small groups (as in Grameen) has been shown to help, but also to have its limitations. Fafchamps touches on these issues, but does not develop them fully, probably because they are well handled elsewhere. Perhaps more worrying is the possibility that, the riskier a situation faced by a poor person, the less her information about it. Areas with lower mean annual rainfall tend also to have more rainfall variability (so information is needed even more), but lower mean income and less concentrated farmers (so information collection and diffusion are less rewarding). Fafchamps closes with a list of things that both governments in developing countries and the international community can do to accelerate development and poverty reduction in face of risk. While most of these are admirable, they do not derive all that closely from the subtle risk analysis carried out in the book. Fafchamps’ analysis does not show, for example, that ‘governments should stop trying to move rural populations to marginal zones in ill-advised “relocation schemes” ’, or that ‘developing countries [should have] free access to developed countries for their agricultural products’. This is a book that should be read, open-mindedly and critically, by scholars and practitioners seeking to improve the poverty impact, and reduce the damage from risk, in agriculture and rural development. It should also invite researchers to test Fafchamps’s conclusions (i.e. check the validity of the assumptions he makes to build his arguments) against empirical evidence. Is it true, for example, that ‘risk sharing often appears limited among the extremely poor and the destitute’ [p. ?] as compared to the moderately poor? Or that it is mainly in isolated, or inadequate, food-crop markets that poor or small farmers are less likely to grow cash crops than large farmers? This checking process, together with the integration of the book into the corpus of empirical literature on poverty, rural technology, and demography, will greatly advance our understanding of different types of rural risk, and of how policy might help the poor to escape poverty by managing them better. Reviews - Development in Practice 14(6) - November 2004 Eversole, Robyn (ed.)
The book therefore offers only qualified support for the argument, popular in most development organisations as a result of the advocacy of the World Bank, that ‘social capital’ is a sort of magic phenomenon that constitutes ‘the missing link’ in development (in the words of one Bank paper). Krishna defines social capital, conventionally enough, in terms of ‘a propensity for mutually beneficial collective action (deriving) from the quality of relationships among people within a particular group or community’ (p. ix). He actually has little to say (in his conclusion) about how this ‘propensity’ in a community comes about, though he is sceptical of the view that it is necessarily the outcome of an extended historical process and rather optimistic that it can be created by interventions aimed at social mobilisation. However, Krishna is much more concerned with testing alternative views about the effects of social capital. One hypothesis, drawn from the famous 1993 work by Robert Putnam and his co-authors on Italian democracy, is the idea that differences in outcomes in various spheres of human activity are substantially determined by social capital. In this case, social capital is taken as an independent variable explaining variations in performance. A second hypothesis, deriving from the arguments of Putnam’s critics (most notably Sidney Tarrow 1996) is that social capital, along with its supposed effects, is rather the result of the structures and incentives that are set up by institutions, including laws and political parties. Here, social capital is not an explanatory factor but rather a dependent variable. Krishna’s testing of these opposing hypotheses leads to the conclusion that there is strong evidence for neither. Instead, his analysis shows support for a third argument, which is that ‘[t]he effects of social capital are translated into performance by mediating agencies [in this case the various types of village leaders], which vary by issue area’ (p. 27). It would be possible to argue that this empirical finding is compatible with the historical argument advanced by Tarrow and others, since the kinds of mediating agencies that are present in any particular situation are the outcomes, presumably, of a political process. The strength of Krishna’s analysis lies in his measurement of social capital. He is rightly critical of the strong tendency, established by Putnam, of taking density of membership in formal associations as a proxy measure, and then of equating the proxy with the concept itself. This equation is now often made in development practice, sometimes with unfortunate results, as Sanjay Kumar and Stuart Corbridge (2002) have shown with regard to a development project in Eastern India. Apart from the logical flaw in this reasoning, it is problematic when, as in the case in the Indian villages Krishna has studied, much collective action occurs in the context of social networks that are quite fluid and not at all formally organised. Consequently, Krishna measures social capital by taking account of both social norms and social networks, constructing an index from answers given to three questions relating to structural variables and three to cognitive variables. He shows that all the variables are highly inter-correlated, which establishes the authority of the index. For many readers, however, it is likely that the most important argument they will take away from the book will be Krishna’s findings about the new generation of village leaders. It seems that, contrary to conventional anthropological wisdom and the findings of many ethnographies, hierarchical social relations are breaking down in the Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh villages that Krishna has studied: ‘The new set of younger, more educated, and non-caste based political entrepreneurs are democratizing politics at the village level, and they are helping make established socio-economic and political structures more accountable to the ordinary villager’ (p 184). Other scholars, including Roger and Patricia Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey, who have recently completed field research in other parts of northern India, have not reached such optimistic conclusions about the extent of social change that is occurring, and there is clearly a need for further research on this matter. Krishna, for example, argues that the new village leaders ‘cannot easily use connections to benefit at the expense of others’ (p 156). It would surely be surprising, however, if the social effects of their activities did not include the reproduction of social differentiation, even if not along the historical lines of caste distinction. In sum this is a fascinating account of a classic piece of positivistic social analysis, bringing out interesting questions that may be more effectively addressed by historical and ethnographic research. And, most emphatically, the book does not, in the end, show support for the ‘missing link’ thesis preferred by the World Bank, but rather supports a much more nuanced interpretation of how and when social capital can make democracy work. References Eversole, Robyn (ed.) Here to Help brings together a collection of articles which analyse the role, successes, and limitations of NGOs seeking to reduce poverty in Latin America. The book takes ‘a hard look at the social contexts, the political forces, and the cultural understandings that underlie NGO-community relationships, and how these impact NGOs’ ability to fight poverty’ (p. x); while also charting ‘the tension between NGO practice and NGO critique’ (p. xxv). The contributors include academics, particularly anthropologists from the North with experience in development work, and development professionals from Latin America. The diversity of their ideas, experience, and areas of research provides rich, textured, and at times contradictory insights into the range and complexity of development work in the region. The book is based on case studies from South America and Mexico. Given the substantial presence of NGOs and international funding in Central America (1), it is a pity that no case studies from the Central American region were included. Seven of the ten articles analyse the particularly complex challenges involved in development work with indigenous peoples, and various articles critique NGO Western gender strategies in indigenous communities. Most of the articles centre on community development, with strategies ranging from sustainable subsistence farming to engaging with the market through micro-credit and micro-enterprise, marketing of handcraft, and eco-tourism. One article (by Grugel) highlights the growing tendency among British NGOs to prioritise advocacy work in a context in which it has become increasingly difficult (if not impossible) for community development to resolve the massive extent of world poverty. However, including voices and opinions from the South in this Northern-led initiative could have been enlightening, given that advocacy strategies have a longer and more effective tradition in Northern societies. While covering a broad range of issues, dilemmas, and challenges, the book’s main contribution is toward demystifying NGOs, highlighting the fact that there are more failures than successes in NGO development work (though this too could be said, and perhaps even more so, of government and multilateral development projects). It also puts forward key issues that need to be addressed by both NGOs and communities alike to ensure greater the relevance, appropriation, and sustainability of future development initiatives. Four key roles are set out in the introduction as guidelines for NGOs to facilitate community development: NGOs as energisers or catalysts for change; as brokers to attract funding and provide technical knowledge, market contacts, and information; as coaches promoting understanding and knowledge within the communities; and as champions to communicate local community experience to outsiders and to provide communities with the tools and contacts they need to do so themselves. But the book also reveals that there are no easy answers and no set recipes for success: what may prove successful in one context may be disastrous in another. In the example cited in the case study by Simonelli and Earle, for example, the handing over of a substantial sum of money for the community to decide how best to invest it in educational work was successful in an autonomous community in Chiapas in large part as a result of the high levels of community organisation and vigilance over funds already in place. In another context, however, such a measure could well contribute to corruption, abuse of power by local leaders, and divisions within the community. In some cases, engagement with market forces through micro-credit and the making of handcrafts for export has been successful. In the case set out by NGO director Condori, her own indigenous roots and her intimate knowledge of the Aymaras she works with, and the NGO’s commitment to enable poor people to reflect on their own situations and seek their own solutions and organisational structures are all key factors attributing to that success. In other cases, such as the ceramic plant analysed by Wilson, engagement with the market proved disastrous, not only because the NGO had limited market knowledge and did not carry out feasibility studies, but also because it imposed a Western gender vision which was inappropriate for indigenous communities. As Wilson wryly points out, while this experiment proved devastating to community relations and affected women members in particular, it had little negative impact on the NGO responsible for the project, thus raising interesting questions related to the accountability of national and international NGOs. Some of the chapters in this volume are written by NGO directors who provide interesting insights into the guiding principles of their organisations and the ‘lessons learned’ (Mayta, Getu, Condori). However, some of the book’s most interesting insights have to do with the perceptions of outsiders (researchers) who bring to light the contradictions and underlying assumptions of the NGOs. Many NGOs speak about participatory and empowering methodology, but their work-styles continue to be paternalistic and top-down (Keese, Occhipinti, Wilson). Some pride themselves on their in-depth knowledge of the region, but in reality know little about actual community dynamics. The problematic power relations between those who have something to offer (be they local or international NGOs) and those in need are clearly expressed in many of the contributions in this volume. However, it is also obvious that the researchers bring to their analysis their own viewpoints, assumptions, and experience. In the three chapters mentioned above, there are isolated voices from the communities, but no clarity as to their organisational structures, group demands, and interests: it is not at all clear whether this is because these are incipient or do not exist, or because the researchers chose to focus on analysing NGO practices and discourses. In that sense, the last two articles analyse indigenous community-driven initiatives (RICANCIE in an eco-tourism project in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and an autonomous municipality in Chiapas working, among other things, in education) which are successful precisely because of the high levels of consciousness, organisation, strategy, and vision of the communities themselves. The Uñatatawi Foundation in Bolivia also works and negotiates directly with existing community economic organisations. The question then arises about what constitutes best practices and effective strategies in areas where communities are not organised. One of the key issues addressed in the book is that of vision. Vision relates to an organisation’s political, philosophical, ethical, and moral standpoint through which it promotes change. As Eversole rightly points out in her introduction, ‘[v]ision is not a luxury, it is a necessity: any decision to create change is necessarily vision-driven’ (p. xxiv). She then goes on to question who defines what ought to be, and highlights the fine line between sharing and imposing a vision. When a community is highly organised and has what Hutchins refers to as perspective -- ‘those views that are complex, consciously formed, and presented by a culture as a way of viewing the world’ -- it is better positioned to negotiate its interests, needs, views, and aspirations both with NGOs and with donors. When community consciousness and organisation are incipient, NGOs bear a great responsibility for promoting –or imposing- their own vision on communities. Many of the chapters in this book critique NGOs for taking for granted the idea that promoting their own vision of change is appropriate, viable, and expedient – a position that does little to empower communities through capacity building, decision making, and the development of grassroots strategies of growth. Just asking uninformed community members what they want and what their priorities are is not enough. As one contributor put it, this is a ‘Father knows best’ approach to development that NGOs would do well to avoid. Vision is closely tied to organisational culture, a concept that is not usually analysed by NGOs and aid agencies. Nevertheless, as Eversole points out, NGOs need to do more to understand their own culture. They need to be willing to question their own assumptions, listen, engage in discussions, and find the delicate balance between fulfilling their own mission and responding to local needs. The same holds true for organisations that fund NGOs (p. xxvii). Another thought-provoking reflection refers to different perceptions. Feliu provides an interesting insight into the different perceptions that donors, NGOs, poor people, and communities alike hold about themselves and about each other. How one sees oneself as an organisation can be very different from how others see you. Perceptions can hinder development partnerships, as is the case when local communities view NGOs and aid agencies as providers of give-aways, to mention one of the examples given in the book. Conversely, indigenous leaders are often incensed at being described as ‘poor’, as they consider this label to be an affront to their dignity. Here to Help is an accessible and interesting book aimed at a wide public; though it provides particularly relevant reading for national NGOs, aid agencies, development practitioners, and scholars. The book invites development workers to look critically at the coherence between their visions and practice, to address the issues of power in their interventions, to develop the capacity to truly listen to their intended beneficiaries, to take stock of their successes and failures, and to learn from the latter. Note Onimode, Bade et al. Given the disastrous experience of social and economic development in most African countries over the past thirty years and the urgent need for new thinking, this collection of essays on African development strategies by African scholars, policy makers and international civil servants is to be welcomed. Far too often, and much more frequently in Africa than in either Asia or Latin America, it is the views of outsiders with less experience and knowledge of the African situation than local specialists that have influenced the policies prescribed by international development institutions and bilateral donors. This book should therefore be of interest to students of development and the international development community. The essays are dedicated to Professor Adebayo Adedeji on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Adedeji, who served as Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, is one of Africa’s most distinguished economists, policy makers, and international civil servants. As Executive Secretary, his most notable achievements were the preparation and endorsement by the Organisation of African Unity and the General Assembly of the UN of two remarkable documents—the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme (AAF-SAP) in 1989 and the African Charter for Popular Participation in 1990. These documents provided an integrated people-centred development strategy as an alternative to the then-dominant stabilisation and structural adjustment policies known as the ‘Washington Consensus’, and foreshadowed subsequent shifts in thinking on African development. In a fitting tribute to Adedeji, the 16 essays in this collection examine past experiences with a view to proposing ideas for African development at the dawn of the new century. The topics covered include overall development strategies, issues of governance, regional integration and cooperation, and several more specific themes, including security and conflict resolution, corporate governance, women’s struggle for equality, regional development, refugees, the debt crisis, water and sanitation, and poverty and HIV/AIDS. On overall development strategies, several essays analyse major landmark documents such as the Lagos Plan of Action, the AAF-SAP, the African Charter for Popular Participation, and the UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s. There is also a critical assessment of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) put forward by several African heads of state as the latest effort to formulate a comprehensive development strategy for Africa. One of the central themes running through many of the essays is that, while Africans have made repeated efforts to shape development strategies and policies, these have been largely ignored or marginalised by more powerful global actors such as the Bretton Woods institutions and the G8. Because of their dependence on outside sources for debt servicing, aid, and investment, the African governments have been constrained to follow the policies dictated to them by these institutions, often with disastrous results. Contributors argue that African-devised development strategies such as the ones mentioned above have stressed the long over the short term and have put emphasis on regional integration and greater domestic production of goods and services for low-income groups as the basis for industrialisation and economic transformation. These initiatives have also put emphasis on the universal provision of basic health and education, the strengthening of the role of the state in planning, people’s participation, and the promotion of transparency and accountability. It is interesting to note that at least in terms of objectives and principles of development policy, these do not differ significantly from the poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) that the Bretton Woods institutions are now requiring African governments to prepare as a basis for discussion on debt relief. However, as several commentators have pointed out, in practice the PRSPs tend to vary a great deal, in many cases representing little more than the old stabilisation and structural adjustment policies in a new garb. There are two particularly interesting papers in this volume. An essay by Mbayo Kankwenda draws a striking analogy between the global development effort and what he calls a ‘development merchant system’ (DMS). The DMS has its own ‘institutions, structures, operational mechanisms for opening up markets, development of customer loyalty and business expansion’ (p. 3). The DMS also has its own suppliers and entrepreneurs who sell their products and services. The development merchants come dressed as ‘gurus, marabouts or prophets of development’ (p. 3) to put out economic and political reform policies as their latest offerings. This colourful comparison between international development agencies and the merchandise system contains more than a grain of truth—one that the development community has been reluctant to acknowledge. To me, the most original piece in the collection is the insightful essay by the historian A. I. Asiwaju on the unexploited potential for development offered by what he terms ‘transfrontier regionalism’. These are cross-border regions scattered across Africa linked together by ties of history, language, ethnicity, and shared institutions and ways of working together. Largely ignored by colonial authorities and the new African states, such regions have often developed flourishing commerce, infrastructure, and grassroots initiatives. Such areas offer an ideal location for spearheading regional political, strategic, economic, social, and cultural cooperation, and could well constitute the building blocs of continental unity. Drawing upon similar experiences in the European Union, Asiwaju draws attention to a potentially rewarding path toward a people-led development strategy. A collection of this nature inevitably contains essays of varying quality and specificity. For instance, the essay by Olu Akakalye on planning, the chapter by Hassan Sunmonu on the implementation of Africa’s development paradigm, and the second essay by Kankwenda on the AAF-SAP are all fairly general and vague. In contrast, those by Ejeviome Otobo on corporate governance, Mike Obadan on the debt crisis, and Julia Duany on the refugee problem are more substantive and specific in their analysis and policy recommendations. On the whole, however, while the essays do a good job of pointing limitations and failures of past policies, they are less convincing in showing how to implement their recommended strategies in the current global situation. There is also a tendency in some, though by no means in all the essays, to blame the African predicament on external forces and actors, to the neglect of such important domestic factors as internal mismanagement, inefficiencies, and corruption. Kelkar, Govind, Dev Nathan, and Pierre Walter (eds.) Behind this rather dry sounding title lies a series of fascinating glimpses into the beliefs, lifestyles, and changing priorities of some unique communities of people who for many centuries had remained untouched by mainstream society. The book is concerned with the way the lives of forest dwelling communities, from India to China, have changed since coming into contact with the mainstream: how ‘development’ has affected the way in which women and men share power, knowledge, and status, and the impact that this interaction - and the loss of other traditional belief systems - has had on their environment. The goal of the book is to ‘find[…] ways of linking improved livelihoods with improved community management of forests; and [to find] … ways of enhancing the social, economic and political inclusion of women in the communities… in which they live’ (page 9). What contributors have to say about improving forest management is pretty much common sense—that the people who live closest to the forests and have a sense of ownership of and dependence upon them are likely to take the best care of them. Over-dependence on forests, or their exploitation by more remote interests (e.g. mining or timber) are likely to destroy them. What is more interesting is what the book reveals about the diverse and often unusual belief systems of these indigenous Asian forest communities, and how these systems compare - usually favourably and to the detriment of the forests - with those of mainstream society. Poverty in Asia has been shown to be concentrated geographically in unproductive areas such as arid lands and remote mountains, and socially among women, indigenous peoples, and marginalised populations. A book that focuses on the intersection of these dimensions, women in the indigenous societies of remote Asian forests, thus delves into the deepest pockets of poverty. Where such societies are powerless to participate in making the decisions that affect their lives, are deprived of the means to a sustainable livelihood, or have limited access to education, the women in them have even less political power, less earning power, and are even less likely to go to school. Interestingly, this book reveals that women in many indigenous forest communities were, until contact with the mainstream, respected members of the community with the resources to sustain their independent livelihoods. Their understanding of the forest and their knowledge about plants used in sacred rites, for medicinal purposes, or in brewing were highly valued by the community, whose survival depended on such understanding and knowledge. In some communities, knowledge of plants was passed by the new bride onto her husband’s family (p.130) -- a stark contrast to the powerlessness of many young Asian women who are nowadays expected to succumb completely to their mother-in-laws’ authority. All of this explains why, contrary to development norms, economic power in these communities was not necessarily linked to asset or land ownership. In fact, what these forest-dwelling women possessed was what one might describe as the original intellectual property rights. Yet being an indigenous woman in a forest society has now come to mean being the embodiment of poverty and powerlessness themselves… Why? This book suggests that as these often nomadic, matriarchal, hunter-gatherer communities gradually settle, take up agriculture, and become patriarchal, the relationship between Human and Nature changes from being one of symbiosis to one of subjugation. And the relationship between men (who usually assume control of agricultural production) and women (traditionally associated with nature) undergoes a corresponding transformation. The benefits of matrilineal societies or those in which women hold equal status with men are not enjoyed by women alone. Life in such societies is, apparently, harmonious and free of both domestic and community violence (p14). Furthermore, such societies tend to be more successful at managing the natural resources of the forests. Matrilineal systems keep families together, thus reducing demand for house-building timber, and women’s attitude towards forests tends to be nurturing and protective - for example, women gather firewood in a sustainable way, collecting fallen twigs, while researchers observed men cutting down young trees (p171). Agriculture devalued the spiritual power and knowledge of the women, who as a result became feared and despised for challenging the exclusive power of men. Just as in medieval Europe and the Americas, forest women in Asia who possessed such knowledge were accused of controlling evil powers or spirits - in other words, they were accused of being witches. In some Indian languages, just as in English, the word for ‘witch’ derives from a word in an older language associated with ‘wisdom‘. Witch hunting in the areas studied in this book appeared to exist only in communities that had been exposed to the mainstream. More evidence that contact with the more ‘developed’ world was not always positive is the fact that during the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’, villagers whose traditional beliefs and taboos made protection of forests a sacred duty were forced to chop down ancient trees in the name of ‘doing away with superstition’ (p 160). Decades later, the state has had to move in again to close off denuded forest areas for reforestation, imposing laws to enforce practices that - before state intervention – used to be completely natural to the people of the forest. Patriarchy at Odds contains a wealth of observations and analysis for the serious student of anthropology, sociology, and environmental issues - but it is written in a style which is also accessible to lay readers like myself. In addition to learning about many aspects of forest community life, I was delighted to discover such rare gems as an Indian witch song, the traditional Thai saying that ‘women have buffalo-like labour, men have only chicken-like labour’, and the 80-year old Chinese woman who, as a forest guard, forced armed men to hand over their weapons and apologise to the community. Hunt, Constance Elizabeth Constance Elizabeth Hunt’ new book Thirsty Planet leaves no doubt about its objective. It rides the prolific wave of literature recently devoted to exploring the intricacies of the ‘creeping’, ‘looming’, or ‘impending’ water crisis. Its subtitle –‘strategies for sustainable water management’- suggests that the focus will be on the responses that are required if our environment is to be safeguarded. The first chapter takes us through a well-articulated lesson on the water cycle, its bio-physical subtleties, and the services provided by freshwater ecosystems. The second chapter reflects on growing water shortages and warns of a ‘spiralling trajectory towards crisis’. The following four chapters in turn review the control and use of water for food production, domestic supply and sanitation, flood protection, and inland navigation. Chapters 7 and 8 look at the implications of global warming and at the potential for restoration of the water cycle, while the concluding chapter contemplates issues of governance, albeit limited to global treaties and initiatives. At first sight, the book’s contents promise a comprehensive exploration of global water issues. A more detailed reading, however, reveals that the core message revolves around the central hypothesis that ‘nature is the source of, rather than a competitor for, the world’s water’ (p. 33). The book’s essential message is that the continued functioning of the water cycle and freshwater ecosystems is the ‘mainstay’ of humanity’s most basic biological needs (p. 23), which naturally leads to a call for maintaining the water cycle and restoring ecosystems where these have been severely degraded. The two questions I wish to examine here are, first, whether the case for ecological recovery is convincing, and, second, whether this message is consistent with a wider analysis of the water crisis, its causes, and remedies. At an emotional level, the description of environmental degradation, with its long list of depleted aquifers, wiped-out species, dried-up wetlands, and polluted waters, is likely to encounter a sympathetic audience: no-one, after all, likes to see a river turned into a sewer, dead fish floating belly-up, or freshwaters contaminated by agricultural pesticides, domestic sludge, or industrial effluents. The book provides a convincing illustration of the threats that besiege the ecosystems and of the ways in which their degradation impacts humankind. Capitalising on the support elicited by these gloomy descriptions, Hunt then makes a sweeping move for a full-fledged ‘restoration of freshwater systems to a previous state of equilibrium’, with a ‘reinstatement of natural flow regimes’ (p. 245). In her view, humans must modify their behaviour instead of trying to alter the natural environment. Or as she puts it, ‘it is the species Homo sapiens that needs to adapt; not Mother Nature’. (p. ??). Yet, the author herself provides a description of ecological processes that does not seem fully consistent with these objectives. Ecosystems are shown to be essentially dynamic, prone to phenomena of ecological succession as well as to more violent events such as fires and floods. ‘Nature is resilient and often adjusts to change in the watershed’ (p. 254), she writes. ‘Evolution is built upon the fundamental tenet of adaptation’, she continues, and species may adapt and are selected based on changing conditions of flow regime and habitat. This seems to allow for some room for human intervention and the modification of ecosystems. Of course, everything is eventually a matter of degree, and defining what is the acceptable range of alteration is a crucial issue that Hunt seems to evade. Nothing is said about possible tradeoffs, distribution of costs and benefits, or minimum environmental flows, a subject that is currently receiving much attention. Yet, it is obvious to water professionals that if the current state of affairs is far from optimal and largely unsustainable, underlying economic realities make ecological ‘essentialism’ unrealistic if not utopian. Along the same lines, the description of harmful and destructive consequences of water resource development ought to be balanced by a recognition of its achievements. Flood control, for example, might have an impact on ecosystems, affect sediment dynamics, and increase the risk of more dramatic events, but its success in accommodating large populations and food production in plains or deltas such as those of the Yellow, Pearl, Red, Mekong, Chao Phraya, or Brahmaputra rivers in Asia deserves some consideration. This takes us to the second point, the articulation between environmental degradation and the wider water crisis. While the ambition of the book is to outline strategies to overcome the global water crisis, its causes are dealt with in four short pages (p. 48-51) that start with largely misleading –if popular- indicators of water scarcity. More puzzling is the fact that irrigation, which is at the core of the debate both because of the magnitude of the share of water it diverts and because of its importance in the world’s food production, is addressed in two pages. The author relies on the same device she used in the case of the environment in her discussion of agriculture. The stigmatisation of food production as increasingly artificial and relying on technologies harmful to the environment will find many readers in agreement. However, that might not suffice to convince them that ‘feeding tomorrow’s children will require a return to native products and ecology, and indigenous and, in some cases, ancient techniques updated with modern information and agro-ecological understanding’ (p. ??). To be sure, sustainable agro-ecology, sound crop rotations or inter-cropping, soil and water conservation, ecologically based pest management, micro-irrigation, and alternative sanitation systems are all widely desirable and are the object of efforts by many professionals committed to finding alternatives to the current deadlock. But whether these alternatives, which have made relatively modest contributions to date, will suffice to ‘rock the boat’ and revert the situation remains a matter of faith. Similar eco-friendly alternatives are presented for water supply, flood-plain management, and inland navigation. Together, these initiatives form the backbone of the sustainable water management strategies proposed by the author. None of them will appear to be original per se, but all are characterised by the swapping of currently harmful practices by their idealised opposites. Indeed, the last chapter of the book opens with an optimistic stance and reckons that ‘the global community already has the tools it needs to provide for virtually universal access to critical water supplies and services without breaking down the water cycle’ (p. 258). ‘The alternative approaches… are with us already’, she writes (p. 125). The question which begs to be asked, however, is why there is such ‘tremendous resistance to the adoption of environmentally gentle technologies’. At this point, while the reader might expect a renewed probing into the roots of the crisis, critical insights from the field of political ecology, or an examination of governance issues at several levels, the discussion instead focuses on international agreements, treaties, and other global initiatives. While of great interest, this concluding section does not square the circle and eventually leaves us without real answers, beyond the ubiquitous and rather unhelpful ‘weakness of political will’ (p. 288). On balance, if the strength of the book resides in its fluid language and its account of the multi-faceted environmental dimensions of the current water crisis, its prescriptions, centred on the restoration of the water cycle, will probably fall short of expectations. The weakness of the book comes from its attempt to (over)stretch its objective toward a more ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the ‘planet’s thirst’, rather than confining itself to its core ecological focus. While this ambitious objective is largely unmet, Thirsty Planet may find its place on the shelf of general books on water, next to volumes by Sandra Postel or Peter Gleick.(1) Like those books, this one has the merit of sounding the alarm and providing graphic examples of current trends that help to raise public awareness. By the same token, it also shares their limitations with regard to the oversimplified presentation of both problems and solutions, leaving more specialised audiences unsatiated. Note Huber, Evelyne (ed.) Examining how countries have dealt with the basic developmental challenges of the past fifty years, Models of Capitalism stands out in the large body of literature on economic policymaking for its clarity and focus. Its case studies are guided by a well-specified set of research questions regarding the relationship between growth-oriented and social equity-oriented policies, giving the book a degree of cohesion not always found in studies involving the work of so many authors. It will be of interest to researchers, policymakers, and activists who are concerned with achieving greater social integration for disadvantaged groups. Comparatively, the volume not only looks at Latin America and South East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand), but also includes the developed countries of North America, North East Asia (Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea), and Western Europe. The case studies are rich in historical detail and provide in-depth analyses of political processes that complement the extensive empirical data. Most importantly, the volume challenges mainstream thinking about development. Despite the emphasis the economic policymaking literature seems to place on policy convergence, there are viable alternatives to the prescriptions emanating from Washington, Wall Street, the World Bank, and the IMF. These alternatives are not only compatible with greater reliance on markets, but are also more effective in producing growth with equity. Unfortunately, Latin America appears to be locked into policies that are among the least effective. As economist John Sheahan noted in his well-known 1987 book on Patterns of Development in Latin America: Poverty, Repression, and Economic Strategy, economic liberalism in the region was bound to increase economic inequality, given its unequal access to education, a large informal sector, and weak democratic institutions, among other factors. As the Latin America chapters in this volume demonstrate, the effectiveness of growth-oriented policies (with the important exception of price stabilisation in most countries) has been ambiguous at best, while equity-promotion has failed as the region experienced what Carlos H. Filgueira and Fernando Filgueira describe as a ‘generalized movement toward a higher level of income concentration’ (p. 131). Ha-Joon Chang’s study of North East Asia and Bridget Welsh’s study of South East Asia make Latin America’s shortcomings even more apparent. Both authors demonstrate how interventionist states, investment in human capital, and favourable international factors combined to achieve economic growth with equity. Their arguments contrast sharply with conventional developmental practice and Latin America’s experience. Chang, for example, emphasises the important role played by controls on luxury consumption, which created a sense of national community and diverted resources to productive investment. He also demonstrates how state controls on competition were guided by a developmentalist ideology, so that recipients of state rents were ‘disciplined’ by performance monitoring to ensure increased economic productivity and competitiveness. Moreover, Chang emphasises that political elites made a conscious decision to reform state bureaucracies and train people to staff them, challenging other developing countries to follow Asia’s lead. In South East Asia, Welsh argues that the state’s developmentalist ideology emerged from elite efforts to contain ethnic conflict and protect internal security. While in Latin America internal security threats were used to justify much higher levels of repression, South East Asian countries experienced dramatic improvements in poverty reduction that dwarfed the achievements made by even the most successful Latin American governments and improved equity. Paradoxically, however, successes in dealing with ethnic conflict lessened incentives for continued poverty reduction in the 1990s, at the same time that growing levels of corruption were leading to political crises. These changes suggest that South East Asia now resembles Latin America more closely than it does its Northern benefactors. T.J. Pempel provocatively suggests that North East Asia’s success was also dependent on the political marginalisation of labour, accepting the justifications of Asian elites, but without explaining why. While such marginalisation is understandable (but never justifiable) in Latin America, given the region’s much higher levels of inequality and the politicisation of workers, it is harder to grasp in Asia. Not only were labour movements weaker and largely not politicised, but inequalities were much lower and workers’ standards of living were rising. Moreover, given investments in human capital and gradual technological advancement in industry, competitiveness was not based exclusively on low wages. It is therefore not at all clear why workers’ demands would have been threatening to elites, other than because of the loss of a monopoly of political control. Turning to the advanced industrial economies, the book’s contributors suggest that achieving growth with equity was largely attributable to strong, well-organised labour movements working in collaboration with the state and employers. Japan and the USA are outliers, given the marginalisation of labour in the former and its relative weakness in the latter. The US’ weak performance on equity and productive employment creation is worth highlighting, particularly the shortcomings of its labour market policies since those policies inspired labour market deregulation in Latin America. The sharp contrast in social policies between Canada and the USA, two countries with similar economies but very different levels of social equity, is also a vivid indication of the scope for social policy variation within a free market framework. Evelyne Huber returns to the problems facing Latin America in her concluding chapter and draws important lessons from successful policies found elsewhere. In particular, the need to recover ‘the best of the developmentalist tradition in Latin America’ (p. 475) by strengthening the capacity of the state to guide development and the need to strengthen organised labour stand out. Wilensky, Harold L. Wilensky has written an extremely ambitious and highly successful book that attempts to explain how institutions and their societal arrangements influence the creation and implementation of social welfare policy in wealthy and democratic countries. Additionally, the author is particularly concerned with the social welfare policy direction of the USA in recent years, as it shifts from a country that was at one point more favourably inclined toward providing generous, ‘Great Society’-style social welfare programmes, to one that is more chary in that regard. Thus, Wilensky also seeks to test the hypothesis of whether ‘the U.S. because of its unique culture, society, or polity is simply so different from other highly industrialized societies that it cannot borrow politics or patterns of behavior, however benign, from abroad’ (p. 675) in order to return to a social welfare-disbursing level that once again approaches that of its peers in the industrialised world. To answer these questions, Wilensky analyses data from 19 mainly OECD countries in the post-Second World War period with a population above three million and with a gross national product per capita in the upper sixth [sixth what?] in the 1960s. These countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Israel (the only non-OECD country included), Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany. Wilensky’s research mainly runs through the early 1990s, with some updates. His house burned down during the 1991 firestorms in the San Francisco Bay area and his research notes were lost. Simply writing this massive book under those circumstances is an action of great fortitude; and this brief review can only touch upon a few of its highlights. The 19-country sample accounts for a rather substantial amount of all global economic transactions and is thus worth studying in order to better appreciate how those countries achieved such an exalted economic status. Toward that end, Wilensky employs three theoretical perspectives. First, convergence theory suggests that institutions in different countries become similar over time in order to address common issues and concerns. Next, democratic corporatism hypothesises a structure that allows for government, trade unions, and interest groups to settle on institutional structure and policy. Finally, mass society theory proposes that in the face of democratic or general societal breakdown, society witnesses the rise of mass political movements that ‘are increasingly susceptible to demagogues and extremist movements, the carriers of fanatical faiths of race, religion, nation, and class’ (p. 131). These are major theoretical frameworks for analysis that Wilensky has brought to fruition through a half-century of academic research. Out of the three theoretical perspectives, Wilensky clearly believes that convergence theory has particular application and relevance in his 19-country sample. There are many obvious ways in which convergence takes place: an urbanised geography, an industrialised economy, a standardised bureaucracy, accommodation of ethnic and racial minorities, higher divorce rates, smaller families, and aging of the population. ‘If there is convergence, it is toward the American multicultural model’, Wilensky notes (p. 33). This is not to imply that the author avoids appropriate criticism of U.S. race relations. As he points out, ‘the pattern of structural assimilation over several generations experienced by many white ethnics—in jobs, residences, and intermarriage—has been replicated for black Americans in only small measure’ (p. 18). Convergence theory is not a new theoretical point of view, and has demonstrated problems in transferring to developing countries’ economies, a point that limits the ability of Development in Practice readers to generalise the results of this work comparatively to developing countries keen on enhancing their social welfare policies. Yet, it is unfair to hold Wilensky exclusively to this standard, as he is forthright in declaring his sample and his analytical mission. Wilensky then introduces the concept of democratic corporatism (consensual bargaining, public-private organisational melding, wide sweep of policy being considered, social policy being subsumed by economic policy) to differentiate among the 19 countries in terms of economic performance. Besides democratic corporatism, the countries are further categorised in term of the strength of leftist political dominance, Catholic party dominance, and labour party dominance. The U.S.A. ranks as the least democratic corporatist country in the 19-country sample, and is a low-ranking economic performer as well. Yet Wilensky rejects the notion that the U.S.A. is too different to adapt formulae from other countries that can enhance social welfare delivery. Interestingly, Wilensky also rejects possibly the ultimate facilitator of convergence at the international systemic level, globalisation, as a plausible explanation for cross-national social welfare policy performance. The nation-state is ‘alive and well’ (p. 637), he argues, and rich democracies have been able to maintain their strong economic performance in part because of mobile labour forces, and not despite them: immigrants contribute far more to a country’s good economic performance than not. Globalisation is thus neutralised as a negative effect on social welfare, and domestic factors such as those found in the democratic corporatist framework become key variables in explaining diverging outcomes. While this book has many academic strengths in its main lines of argumentation, it also has an enormous amount of data on sundry topics that allows the reader to dip into it as though it were an encyclopedia and get happily lost in a forest of information. As a brief example, a full section of text comparing the US and Japanese schooling systems yields a functional tabular summary of the two systems (p. 470). Also, the appendices of data are a nice touch for those who wish to replicate some of the many reported results. Finally, intriguing explanatory indices like the ‘mayhem index’ of homicide, fire, unemployment, and divorce take their place in Wilensky’s fertile analysis. Leipziger, Deborah Niezen, Ronald This book is an excellent contribution to the relatively new body of literature dealing with the international movement of indigenous peoples. With insight and pertinent analysis, Niezen provides a clear understanding of how and why this movement has, within a few decades, become a global political entity that is widely accepted. Represented by the Permanent UN Forum on Indigenous Issues, indigenous peoples are on an equal footing with states and have the same voting powers. Niezen combines his observations of global phenomena with illustrations of their effect at the local level, drawing on his fieldwork in two indigenous communities – the Cree of Cross Lake, Canada, and, to a lesser degree, the Touareg in Mali. This dual perspective makes the book both relevant and a good read. Niezen dates the origins and rise of the international movement of indigenous peoples to the post-Second World War era and its more humanitarian approach to international politics. But he sees the Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1973-83) as the first really significant opportunity for indigenous peoples to get international attention. However, earlier developments should not be forgotten. The months between 1968-1969 saw the establishment of the first indigenous support organisations - the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Survival International - whose advocacy work came to play an important role in the advancement of the indigenous cause. In 1971, the right to self-determination was mentioned for the first time, in the Barbados Declaration, as the outcome of an international Symposium on Indigenous Rights in South America. At about the same time, George Manuel, President of the National Indian Brotherhood (Canada), took the first initiative to hold a series of international indigenous meetings that eventually resulted in the creation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) in 1975. Prior to that, in 1973, Inuit of Greenland and Canada, Dene Indians from Canada, and Saamí from northern Scandinavia convened for the first time a conference of their own - the Arctic Peoples Conference. It was during these meetings that indigenous representatives began to value the importance of sharing internationally what Niezen calls the ‘sources of global indigenous identity’: the common experiences of grievances, assimilative state education, loss of subsistence, ethnocide, and sometimes even ethnic cleansing, which all indigenous peoples share to varying degrees despite their greatly disparate cultural and political histories (pp. 54-89). In the last three (and quite dense) chapters, Niezen addresses some of the major dilemmas and conflicts of interest that the international indigenous movement is attempting to tackle: cultural relativism and human rights; self-determination and the nation-state; and indigenous nationalism and civil societies. One example is the apparent contradiction faced by the indigenous movement in seeking ‘shelter’ in universal and individualistic human rights while at the same time claiming collective rights. Are indigenous populations not ‘unintentionally invoking a form of universalism poised to bring about as much, or more, cultural change as protection?’ (p. 143). Niezen’s argument is that ‘human rights are not closed to change… there remains room for [legal and institutional] reform’ e.g. through human rights standard setting (p. 143). As for the contradiction that arises from the use of formal legal strategies, Niezen stresses that only by controlling the power of bureaucracy and law will indigenous peoples be able to avoid becoming subject to them (p. 144). This is precisely why their survival depends on self-determination, for self-determination represents control. Niezen also sees the indigenous movement as an emerging form of political resistance to the centralising tendencies of the state. As long as states refuse to acknowledge the grievances done to indigenous populations and fail to recognise their collective right, the latter will have no other option than to organise and position themselves internationally, using the human rights forums of the United Nations as their platform, challenging the individualistic approach to human rights, and strategically using the new spaces opened to them as launch pads for what Niezen calls the ‘politics of shame’ (p. 179). Self-determination and its implications are another major issue. While rejecting the idea that self-determination is necessarily synonymous with secession, Niezen acknowledges that the increasing use of symbols of nationhood and nationalism at the community level is a challenge to the hegemonic nation-state. But it also challenges civil society: as Niezen points out, ‘there is nothing about indigenous nationalism that makes it inherently more virtuous, peaceable or rights abiding than other foundations for group identity’ (p. 214). He therefore stresses the importance of building a baseline of individual rights into the claims for self-determination in order to avoid what could become ‘an innovative form of oppression within liberation’ (p. 221). By addressing these important and thought-provoking issues, The Origins of Indigenism deserves to be read by all those who take the indigenous cause to heart. Leipziger, Deborah One of the enduring complaints from companies that are challenged on their corporate responsibility (CR) profile is the excessive abundance of standards, codes, and guidelines on the topic. The Corporate Responsibility Code Book – the latest offering from Deborah Leipziger – is intended to cut through the ‘CR code crap’ by providing a detailed summary and assessment of each of the major codes relating to different aspects of this agenda. Given the vast array of codes, guidelines, standards, and principles that are currently in existence, the book focuses on an abbreviated list of 32 that the author considers to be the most important. These are subdivided into initiatives that vary according to scope (e.g. human rights versus environment), focus (e.g. different geographical and/or sectoral frameworks), or purpose (e.g. performance or process standards). For the most part this treatment is helpful in enabling the reader to use the book as a reference tool, but it also eliminates any prospect of successfully reading the book cover to cover. This is emphatically a reference document, and one that represents an invaluable resource for companies, NGOs, students, and CR practitioners who need to understand not just what the basic codes and guidelines are, but also the specific details that differentiate them. The book is structured around separate chapters for each different initiative. While this might not make for exciting chapter headings, it does make the book easily navigable, with each chapter providing an overview of the relevant initiative, specific insights into the initiative’s particular strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions on the initiative’s future prospects. While much of the book consists of providing the basic texts of the different codes, the book’s most valuable contribution lies in the insights these sections offer. However, this is also the book’s principal weakness. CR is clearly not a static landscape, and while the book undoubtedly fills a gap by providing a ‘one-stop-shop’, the field is changing so rapidly that I fear much of the analysis will be outdated by the time this review has been read. For example, the chapter on the UN Global Compact discusses the possible emergence of a tenth principle on transparency – something that now seems likely to be agreed upon at the forthcoming ‘CEO Summit’ at the end of June 2004. Similarly, while strongly supported by the NGO community, the ‘Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations’ are now encountering significant resistance from business groups. This is an important development that is not reflected in the book, since it happened after the book’s publication. In its final chapter, entitled ‘An Emerging Consensus’, the book does address (albeit briefly) this situation of rapid change. Here Leipziger posits likely scenarios for the further evolution of CR standards, focusing on the prospect of ‘convergence’ between standards and highlighting the work of the ISEAL Alliance in this regard (1). But if this is a likely development, is there an emerging framework that suggests which ones among the 32 standards are likely to be part of this ‘super-standard’? Furthermore, is it not possible to apply the insights provided in Chapter 1 (‘The DNA of an outstanding code of conduct or standard’) to help make that selection? While these are clearly important questions for the future of this agenda, they are not specifically addressed in the book. Furthermore given the relative novelty of this landscape and the prospects of significant shifts within it, the decision to produce this information in book form may prove to be ill-advised. Surely a more suitable format would have been a website that can constantly be updated? In fact, a website giving updates on the standards as they develop is provided in the publisher’s webpage (www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/crcbpdt.htm). Ultimately, while this book represents a welcome contribution to the field in its attempt to provide a one-stop-shop for the source materials on leading CR standards and guidelines, the website may well prove to be the more valuable resource in making the latest information on the future of standards and guidelines for the CR agenda available to interested parties. Notes Torild Skard has written a remarkable book detailing her four-year experience as UNICEF’s regional director for West and Central Africa. This book is her account of what Africa really is like from an expatriate’s point of view. However, Skard is more than just an expatriate selling her expertise; she has also been an educationalist, a member of parliament, and the first woman president of the Norwegian Upper House. In addition, she has worked for the Norwegian Ministry of Development Cooperation, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and UNESCO. Using an uncomplicated style and fairly simple language, this book contains eyewitness accounts and first-hand descriptions of the social, economic, and political realities of everyday life in Africa that are so vivid the reader feels transported. When I closed my eyes as I read Skard’s words, I could almost picture myself in a hot and dusty village in any of the countries she describes. The first part of the book covers an impressive range of issues. Conflict, guns, sex workers, child labour, education, health, HIV/AIDS, etc as they relate to West and Central Africa, and in particular to women and children, are given fair representation, including the author’s view on what ought to be done to address all these problems. Although there is too much information on UNICEF (the why, how, when, and where, which overall is not very interesting), the book has eye-opening descriptions of how the field operations of large UN agencies work in practice, how decisions are made, and what difficulties (and peculiarities) they have to deal with. As an African myself, I have also had the suspicion that organisations that send experts (expatriates) to work in Africa do not invest enough time or resources in training their staff on local customs and traditions, and they therefore lack an understanding of the people they purport to work with. As Skard writes, It is clear from the book that although the author found her experiences in West and Central Africa gruelling and challenging, and at times even impenetrable, one feels that she genuinely loves the continent and its peoples. Faced with the despair she frequently feels during her tenure there, she is desperate to find something redeeming. For example, at one point she visits the long-gone splendour of Timbuktu in search of a manifestation of Africa’s past greatness: In the beginning of the second part of the book, which covers historical and social aspects of Africa, Skard paints an accurate—and absorbing—picture of the incongruity that exists between the lives of expatriates and the locals. This is illustrated when she describes her luxurious home in Abdijan, which included a swimming pool and other household amenities, and compares it to those of her nearest neighbours – who essentially live in a slum area. In this vein, Skard goes on to explain how difficult it is to really get to know the locals due to this imposed separation. This is perhaps why Skard makes statements like ‘…Africans today rarely pride themselves on their past and their identity’ (p. 122). As an East African, I have always held up West and Central Africans as examples of people who pride themselves on who they are and where they come from. Expressions of such pride can be found in their customs, traditions, dress, and music, also extolled by Skard herself in later chapters of the book. Development agencies interested in ensuring their projects have taken the needs of African women into account will find this book particularly rewarding. Skard comes into her own when she passionately describes the lives of African women in relation to issues such as discrimination, female genital mutilation, polygamy, economic independence, and education. Also included are examples of the astounding achievements and important contributions made by African women. Here again, Skard seeks to find Africa’s ancient greatness and has included a section (see Chapter 14) on Africa’s departed heroines, including Queen Amina, Mammy Yoko, Yaa Asentewa, the Amazones, etc. Skard further emphasises that, while the role that aid agencies have played in fighting discrimination against African women is important, African women are their own true liberators. ‘Women must play a central role’, she writes, ‘if African countries are to reduce poverty and social disparities and achieve democracy and human rights’ (p. 227). This, in my mind, is the most important statement of the book, as it is where Africa’s hope for the future lies. Globalization, Democracy and Development in Africa explores issues relating to post-Cold War Africa. But first, a word about the introduction. It neither summarises the individual essays nor furnishes a framework for blending them together in the volume. Moreover, although it does raise useful questions for globalisation research in Africa itself, it does not bother to provide an analytical amplification of the significance of the essays in the book. Given that globalisation was in part responsible for making obsolete the great ideological conflicts between socialism and capitalism that wrecked Africa's prospects for democratic and economic development, its influence (whether positive or negative) on the rebirth of democracy and development in Africa is a proper way to whet a reader's appetite. In this regard, the chapter by M.A. Mohammed Salih should have been the first in the book, for it is a focused explication of the concept of globalisation and a cogent analysis of its connection to Africa's multiple predicaments. While his conclusion that the net effect of globalisation (especially its neo-liberal variant) on the continent is negative is debatable, his chapter is in general quite persuasive. This is true of many of the essays in this multi-disciplinary volume, which I believe is essential reading to the continuing discussions on the impact of globalisation on Africa. Most of the contributors, from disciplinary backgrounds ranging from economics to linguistics, successfully combine a solid grasp of secondary materials on the subject of globalisation with excellent methodological techniques. This, in fact, is one strength of the book as well as a source of a major problem. The volume’s diversity is the reason why the essays in the book seem disjointed and incompatible. The contributors seem to have limited awareness of the work of others in the volume. For example, the thematically related chapters by John Akokpari (on the economic and other wedges against the consolidation of democracy), Munayae Mulinge and Margaret Munayae (on the impact of globalisation on development), and Cranmer Rutihinda (on Africa's competitiveness in a globalising world) reveal little communication between the writers. The same is true for the otherwise excellent chapters by William Rugumamu, Raban Chanda, H.M. Mushala, and Workinneh Kelbessa on the impact of globalisation on the environment. While this may not be terribly important to some readers, it underscores the point that the editors did not do a good job of putting this volume together. Still, collectively the authors manage to bring to light several new concepts and analyses that add to our understanding of the impact of globalisation on weak states, especially in terms of the quality of life of those still struggling for political space and economic survival in a post-Cold War context. Indeed, the continuing plight of African people in this apparently inhospitable new world order appears to have informed the eight sub-themes or thrusts of the book that are clustered under three sections: political and socio-economic, environmental, and gender issues. However, a few of the essays in the book are, at best, only indirectly related to the central issue of globalisation. In particular, the attempt to fit Faustina Kalbamu's piece on the role of women in the house construction industry in Botswana as an issue of globalisation is a big stretch. A relatively more successful weaving of the issue of gender into the globalisation discourse is Idris El Hassan's account of women's struggle with higher education in Sudan, although in places he inexplicably sounds as if the education of women was a curse rather than a blessing. Another essay which, though important, simply does not belong in this volume is Josephat Rugemalira's chapter on private education and self-reliance in Tanzania. Nowhere does the author pretend that his discussion has anything to do with globalisation. For its part, Ibrahim Elbadawi's quantitative analysis on the relationship between democracy and ethnic fractionalisation, between ethnic heterogeneity and economic growth, and, finally, between geography, economic growth, and ethnic fractionalisation, manages not to incorporate globalisation even on the set of independent variables tested as predictors of economic growth. To make up for this glaring omission, the author finds a way to insert the word ‘globalisation’ at the end of the chapter: ‘…Africa is likely to have less chances of achieving sustained economic growth in the impending era of globalization’ (p.58). The book’s first ten essays explore the political and economic dynamics of globalisation. Of these, the chapters by Salih, Muninge and Munyae, Alois Mlambo, and Evelyn Pangeti see globalisation as detrimental to the development of Africa. The criticism of globalisation in this volume is refreshingly non-polemical, measured, specific, concrete, and compelling, despite the occasional evangelical tone in Muninge and Munyae's chapter. However, what that criticism generally ignores is that peripheral African countries have very little choice on the matter. Few countries in the continent are strong enough to take unilateral measures to sway the movement of globalisation. Witness, for example, the debilitating effects of debt on the continent, as argued by Bornwell C. Chikulo. Also, Inyani Simila clearly speaks to an aspect of globalisation that reflects unequal power relations between states. For this reason, not many of the weak states in Africa can effectively erect barriers to free trade without discouraging much needed foreign investment and aid. It may be the case that the initial necessary costs of globalisation can be offset in the future by its predicted gains. This is why a more prudent assessment of the impact of globalisation on Africa would caution against throwing the baby out with the bath water. Still, it is possible for Africa to pick and choose from the bag of global products in order to avoid the kind of fruitless uniformity that Simala warns about (p. 313). This kind of pragmatism informs the chapters by Akpokari, Cranmer Rutihinda, Peter Little, and El-Khider Musa, all relatively more positive on their assessment of the impact of trade and globalisation on Africa. Although focused only on countries of Eastern and Southern Africa, Globalization, Democracy and Development in Africa deserves reading by students of international relations and the political economy of development. Memmi, Albert, introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre and with a new introduction by Nadine Gordimer Scaffolding The re-issue of Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized almost fifty years after it was first published in 1957 (originally in French) reminds us that this memorable book has had a double life. The first is that reflected in the dialogue between the author and his adopted country, France. Here, Sartre’s original Preface is a useful pointer to the context within which the book first appeared. The book’s second life consists of what countless others have made of this extraordinarily perceptive essay on the nature of colonialism. And here, Nadine Gordimer’s new Introduction helps us understand the extent to which present interpretations of the book are firmly conditioned by current perceptions of racism, underdevelopment, and globalisation. Although Memmi is revered for having shown that colonial rule contains within itself the seeds of the nationalist (often violent) revolt, the book’s greater insight lies in the exposition of how colonialism denies humanity both to those who inflict and those who suffer it. Indeed, the force of the writing is revealed in the account of the impossible dilemma in which the author found himself. A Jew in colonial Tunisia, Memmi realised that he could not exist as the person he himself wanted to be: an anti-colonial Frenchman living in Tunisia. The very colonial situation made it impossible for him to be what he felt he was. For Memmi, this denial of the possibility of a chosen type of humanity condemns the colonial enterprise to ultimate failure. It also makes it inevitable that the colonised will reject the anti-colonial (or enlightened) ‘other’ – be he a French, Jewish, or Italian settler. It is this most painful understanding of the personal hopelessness engendered by the colonial situation that drove Memmi to an analysis of the seemingly unbridgeable gap between coloniser and colonised. Hence, his book should be read first and foremost as a documentary expression of the human catastrophe which colonialism truly was. Juxtaposing the author’s Preface in the book’s first English edition in 1965 and Sartre’s 1957 Introduction, it is immediately apparent that the French philosopher not only failed to engage with the ‘human’ aspect of Memmi’s predicament but also re-appropriated the book for his own political ends. The author, somewhat baffled by the impact of his book, explains that he merely sought to understand himself better. Sartre, however, sees in The Colonizer and the Colonized the intimation that the role of the colonised in the anti-colonial struggle is akin to that of the proletariat in the anti-capitalist battle. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, Memmi’s cry of incomprehension still rings true today, despite the momentous changes that have occurred in the last half century. Sartre’s polished manifesto, on the other hand, appears singularly dated. Gordimer, who readily acknowledges that she approached the book from a southern African perspective, illustrates the extent to which The Colonizer and the Colonized continues to puzzle those who remove the work from its appropriate historical and geographical context. The Nobel Prize winner takes exception with two of Memmi’s assertions. She contends that colonial rule was driven above all by racism, and she cannot accept that there is no place in the post-colonial nation for the anti-colonial settler. Much as one understands why she feels as she does, it is striking that she, like Sartre, has also re-appropriated the book for her own very particularly South African purposes. Memmi never claimed that his writing had relevance to other settings, though he acknowledged that many believed it did. Though written in generalising, vaguely philosophical terms, the book is clearly a disquisition on the very peculiar situation of the French Maghreb in the fifties. This cannot be compared with the South Africa or the Rhodesia of the nineties in any meaningful manner. Ironically, for this was not Memmi’s intention, his diagnosis will probably turn out to be more accurate than Gordimer’s in the long term. True, as she would point out, the white population will continue to have its own place in South Africa, even if its political clout is bound to be further diminished. However, such will most likely not be the case in other settler colonies like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, or Angola – for the very reasons adduced by Memmi in the cases of Tunisia and Algeria. Already, the Europeans in these three countries are being marginalised economically and politically. This is not to say that there will be no place for whites in Africa south of the Sahara. It is simply to point out, as Memmi did with respect to the Maghreb, that they will become marginal to the life of nations whose sense of national identity has no place for them. It would be good if those who read The Colonizer and the Colonized for the first time were to draw from it a sense of the existential pain felt by those anti-colonial ‘settlers’ who discovered that they did not belong to the country in which they were born. I suspect, however, that present generations of readers will continue to see in it a political tract – in the late fifties it was a call for the colonised to revolt, and today, by extension, it is an injunction to fight capitalist globalisation. This would be to devalue the book, for its powerful appeal lies in the subtle way in which it manages to make sense of the human suffering experienced by those who lived in a very specific colonial situation – and not, as most readers assume, in the justification it may appear to give to the politically militant. Unlike Fanon, Memmi never sought either to generalise or to proselytise. Like José Craveirinha in the poem cited above, he wanted above all to bear witness to the pain he had experienced. That, ultimately, is the reason we should welcome the re-publication of this book today. Note
A chapter by Michael Ross of the University of California at Los Angeles sets the stage by explaining what is often referred to as the ‘resource curse’. He presents evidence that resource-dependent economies typically grow more slowly than others, tend to create atypically high rates of poverty, and are characterised by socio-economic and political conditions—corruption and weak, unaccountable forms of governance—that make the outbreak of violent conflict more likely. (Oddly, though, the book does not examine how these conditions might be overcome by, for instance, assisting developing countries in diversifying their economies and reducing their dependence on primary commodities.) Philip Swanson, Mai Oldgard, and Leiv Lunde examine ways to make the reporting of revenue flows derived from natural resource extraction—taxes, royalties, and concession fees paid by companies to host governments—more transparent. The authors argue, correctly, that better and more reliable reporting will help discourage the use of such revenues for illicit and violent purposes. But the standards and procedures in most developing countries are sufficiently opaque (or even non-existent) to render outside monitoring almost impossible. And oil and mining companies operating in the developing world argue that they cannot disclose financial information because of confidentiality clauses. The authors discuss the relative merits and weaknesses of a number of broadly applicable initiatives. Among them are the IMF’s fiscal transparency code, the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the Global Reporting Initiative (which seeks to standardise corporate performance reports), and the Publish What You Pay campaign (which demands that, as a condition for being listed on major stock exchanges, companies be mandated to reveal their payments to host governments). Corene Crossin, Gavin Hayman, and Simon Taylor explore what it takes to set up an effective commodity-tracking regime to guard against resources being used in the service of violent conflict. They conclude that the following elements are critical: common definitions and harmonised reporting standards; reliable forms of information exchange; accurate commodity labeling and chain-of-custody arrangements (including independent monitoring); effective compliance and enforcement measures; and capacity building in poorer nations. But the authors caution that any measures undertaken need to be based on a sophisticated understanding of the intricacies of commodity chains, the dynamics of market supply and demand, and the broader political and institutional context. Belligerents need access to banking and other financial services to translate commodities pillaged in war zones into cash or fungible financial instruments. Denying such access is a critical part of the effort to clamp down on resource-related violence. Jonathan Winer and Trifin Roule assess an array of initiatives aimed at increasing international financial transparency. These include embargoes, certification programmes, disclosure regimes, corporate codes of conduct, and an array of norms and standards designed to counter corruption, money laundering, drug-trafficking, and terrorism. The authors highlight a central challenge: there is a patchwork of initiatives involving numerous institutions, but none of them ‘has broad jurisdiction over the tracking of natural resource commodities and the proceeds of their exploration’ (p. 190). Reviewing opportunities for ‘Getting It Done: Instruments of Enforcement’, Philippe Le Billon argues that while states remain the most important actors, inter-governmental organisations, corporations, and civil society groups ‘have played an increasing role in shaping a new generation of instruments and policies defining ethical norms and mixing voluntary compliance, market-based incentives, and independent monitoring’ (p. 220). The author scrutinises the experience with regional and UN sanction regimes, examines a variety of judicial instruments relating to terrorism, organised crime, and war crimes, and reviews certification regimes and corporate codes of conduct. He concludes that current international enforcement tools are largely ineffective and insufficient. In Le Billon’s view, NGOs have a crucial role to play—through public information campaigns, direct action, consumer boycotts, shareholder activism, and litigation, but also by engaging in high-level negotiations with industry and governments. Still, there are drawbacks: campaigns have tended to focus on Western multinationals (even as Asian companies are playing an increasingly important role), and most initiatives are still dominated by Western groups. This is part of a larger problem. Most developing countries lack the monitoring, law enforcement, and customs control capacities needed to carry out the agenda advocated in this book. To the extent that such policies are seen as imposed by the West (through reliance on extra-territorial measures, for instance), it is likely that the prospects for stepped-up international cooperation will be undermined. Natural Resources and Violent Conflict exhaustively documents the rich array of tools and initiatives potentially available in the struggle against resource conflicts. In demonstrating the current limits to these tools, the book makes a powerful case for improved policy coordination among governments and other actors, a better mix between voluntary and mandatory actions, and stepped-up enforcement. What gets lost in the detail, however, is a sense of just where the priorities for future action should lie. The book would have benefited from some streamlining, as there is considerable overlap among several chapters. It might have been useful to explain the major features of key treaties and initiatives in an appendix to avoid repetitive descriptions in individual chapters. The book also gives scant attention to the role of greater public involvement. Empowering local communities in the developing world to be strong guardians of the natural resource base would dampen the likelihood of violent conflict. In addition, consumer societies will remain far more interested in securing an uninterrupted resource supply than in asking under what conditions commodities have been extracted until consumers become more discriminating in their buying habits. Natural Resources and Violent Conflict is essential reading for those concerned with conflict and development issues. It is written more for a specialist audience than a general readership. Webster, Neil and Lars Engberg-Pedersen (eds.) The concept of political space, which constitutes the theoretical backbone of the volume, is understood as ‘the types and range of possibilities present for pursuing poverty reduction by the poor or on behalf of the poor by local organizations’. It includes ‘institutional channels … political discourses … and social and political practices of the poor which may be a basis for influencing decision-making, agendas, policy and programme implementation, etc.’ (p. 8). Poverty reduction will happen only if institutional change favouring the poor takes place: political agency from below ‘appears to be a necessary factor to effect such change and to consolidate it’ (p. 13). The book claims to be innovative in terms of its theoretical proposal. This, however, is questionable. As the editors recognise, the reader could view it as (yet) another contribution to a well established literature on democratisation, social capital, and empowerment. The editors’ attempts to distinguish their framework from that literature are not fully convincing, as the concept of political space seems to be more of a blend of all of the above approaches than a genuinely new perspective. This is not helped by the fact that some of the case studies presented in the book are not clearly linked to the ‘new’ theoretical framework: if the reader were to focus only on the case studies, s/he would immediately think of social capital, democratisation, or empowerment as the theoretical framework(s) through which to understand the phenomena under consideration. Turning to the substance of political space, it conceives of poverty as structural and claims that the agency of the poor is key in overcoming it. While this is the most valuable contribution of the book, it renders political space an incomplete analytical tool because poverty is structural but not only at the local and national levels; there are international institutions that need to be reformed as well. Besides, as the editors themselves admit, poverty reduction requires much more than agency by the poor: the state and the market are also key factors. Am I being state-centric? In relation to the role of the state, the editors of In the name of the poor remark: ‘this role is not peripheral, but rather crucial in providing the conditions under which poor groups may also take up political action to improve their livelihoods’ (p. 259). Then they add: ‘If rights are to be implemented and secured, if the interests of migrant workers and land evictees are to be considered, if gender equality in the case of poor women is to be upheld, the poor must increase their influence over questions of resource distribution and policymaking’ (p. 269). The editors thus clearly acknowledge the relevance of the state—but they say nothing about the fact that, in most of the developing world, there are no properly-working states. If such a state is lacking in the first place, how are the poor to influence ‘questions of resource distribution and policymaking’? An important factor to reduce poverty is access to markets. This is acknowledged in the book early on, but then all the emphasis is placed on the relevance of the agency of the poor. I do not intend to deny the importance of the latter, but it is important to keep in mind that if people have no products/services to sell and/or they do not have market access for those goods, they will not generate the wealth they need to leave poverty behind even if they are good at organising themselves or they are very clever. This, along with the usefulness of a properly-functioning state, is well exemplified by the case study presented in chapter 10, which is the only one in which the reader encounters a successful case of poor people managing to do something significant to reduce their poverty. The chapter concerns a group of women in West Bengal who managed to come up with cooperatives to produce and commercialise silkworm cocoons. They were successful because their state-level government is pro-poor, they managed to find a product that is demanded in the market, and they are linked to that market. They did not succeed only because they deployed agency. The point is clear: poor people are always ready to seize opportunities; the problem is that they have no links to the market and that they cannot count on a strong, committed, democratic state. Furthermore, the treatment of agency in the book is ambiguous. It is not clear whether the agency displayed by the poor is to be celebrated because it is a demonstration of how they can reshape their world, or if it is to be taken as proof of how little agency the poor can deploy, in which case the argument should not be that the poor can change their situation through their own actions but rather that they manage to adapt and survive. This is acknowledged in the conclusion when the editors talk about ‘potential agency’ from the side of the poor rather than ‘agency’. However, the point should be taken further: obviously the poor have agency but the question is how much of it they can deploy given the constraints (of state and market) they face. Because they are poor and oppressed they cannot deploy much and, when they do, it mostly consists of adapting to adverse conditions rather than improving their situation. One must thus be careful not to confuse survival/adaptation strategies by the poor with actual steps conducing to poverty reduction. Booth, Anne and Paul Mosley (eds.) The introduction focuses on the World Bank’s leading role in promoting a new poverty agenda and outlining strategies to combat poverty. The 1990 World Development Report pioneered this agenda with a three-pronged strategy emphasising labour-intensive growth, after it was realised that structural adjustment either failed to address poverty or, in many cases, actually deepened it. Many other actors, however, came to take part in the discourse that evolved, including most notably the UNDP, with its human development reports, and progressive bilateral donors and NGOs, to say nothing of the vast number of critical researchers (some of whom contribute to this volume) who also began to focus on these issues. The introduction illuminates the shift in Bank thinking and strategy that was epitomised in the second World Development Report on poverty, published in 2000/01. In that report, the Bank advocates participation and empowerment with the associated concept of social capital. However, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) that were first introduced in 1999 retain many of the elements of old (and outdated?) structural adjustment policies. Moreover, according to many critics, the case for selectivity, which grew out of the Bank’s ‘Assessing Aid’ and allied papers, may in fact undermine efforts to target those who are most in need of support. Anne Booth and Paul Mosley give a balanced yet critical treatment of the Bank’s transformation and the new poverty strategies. Since the book was conceived in 1999, it is obvious that the remaining parts of the anthology deal with the pre-PRSP strategies and their effects. In the introduction, the achievements of the ‘new poverty strategies’ are summed up in a way which in the eyes of this reviewer is not entirely adequate. The fact that global poverty did fall from 1990 to 1996 and that this fall did spread to a range of countries is implicitly taken as evidence of the success of the new strategies (p.14). But here is the usual problem of attribution. Reduction of poverty is brought about by a multitude of factors, among which poor people’s own efforts are likely to carry most weight. And the accompanying table (p.15, based on Alison Evans’ oral presentation at the DSA workshop) only underlines the subjective and uncertain impressions about the links between different types of anti-poverty interventions and their effectiveness. A section on ‘donor perspectives’ contains a competent and comprehensive overview by Aidan Cox and John Healey of the European donors’ effort (or lack thereof) to address poverty. The section entitled ‘Poverty, Crises and Agricultural Development’ comprises four very different contributions. In an analysis of 20 World Bank poverty assessments from Sub-Saharan Africa, Graham Pyatt finds that ‘there was surprisingly little to be learned’ (p. 92). The reason for this he finds in the Bank’s over-standardised and one-dimensional money-metric approach to poverty. As an alternative he advocates for a structuralist approach that focuses on well defined socio-economic groups and takes into account regional specificities. Other articles analyse the 1997-1999 crisis in Indonesia and its differential impact and the poverty-reducing impact of the ‘green revolution’ (however feeble) in some parts of Africa. An article on poverty trends in Ethiopia based on village studies concludes that ‘the entire decline (in poverty) between 1989 and 1994-5 can be accounted for by those villages in the vicinity of urban areas’ (p. 195). A final section on ‘Social Protection, Governance and Poverty Targets’ comprises three articles. In the book’s most interesting article (according to this reviewer), Anuradha Joshi and Mick Moore use the case of the much celebrated Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme in India to highlight the importance of institutions and rights in poverty-focused interventions. This scheme has successfully contributed to poverty reduction for more than 25 years, and according to the authors the key to its success lies in the predictability of the scheme plus the fact that poor men and women have a legal right to work if they act together. The mobilisation around this scheme in terms of collective action is compared to the more typical NGO interventions as well as the World Bank’s Social Funds, which are neither predictable nor rights-based. The conclusion, that creating an enabling institutional environment is more effective than intervening directly through conscientisation or organisational preference, is well argued and merits further discussion. Ann Whitehead and Matthew Lockwood give a well substantiated critique of the World Bank’s poverty assessments from a gender perspective. The Bank’s ‘weak commitment to WID/gender issues’ (p. 225) is seen as one of the reasons for the lack of proper gender analysis in a number of poverty assessments from African countries. The final article, by Lucia Hammer and Felix Naschold, discusses by way of four scenarios and some regression analysis whether the International Development Targets will be met by 2015. This is by necessity somewhat speculative. As a whole, the book contains a number of interesting, if somewhat disjointed, articles. Most are written by economists, and some of them can only be fully grasped by readers who understand a bit of economics (including mathematical equations). The regression analyses raise the usual questions about the relationship between observed correlation and causality. Most of the book, however, can be read without much difficulty by researchers, graduate students, and concerned donors (and recipients). As such, it is a useful contribution to the ongoing debate about poverty and poverty reduction. Tembo, Fletcher A review cannot do justice to the wealth of empirical detail or to the depth of analysis in the book, so what follows is a partial account of what I found particularly striking. Tembo begins by setting out the questions he intends to address. The first issue he focuses on refers to the extent to which NGOs engaged in social transformation processes arrive on the development scene with options for their action constrained by their mission, commitments to donors and other stakeholders, and the particular modes of organisation/action they employ. Not least among the latter is ‘the project’. The genuineness of any participatory engagement is obviously open to question if options are heavily constrained. Second, Tembo recognises that when NGOs ‘do participation’ in communities – which, as he points out, are far from homogeneous – they do not do so with participants who up until that moment had been devoid of ideas, assumptions, and expectations about NGO interventions. Rather, they possess understandings which may be the product of previous experiences of such interventions and shared stories and accounts of the work of NGOs. They also have hopes that derive from and are filtered through individual and shared constructions of what might be economically and socially desirable. Tembo then sets out his research methodology. This section will be of interest to future researchers in this area. Practitioners, however may be tempted to skip over these parts. The book makes no bones about being a version of a PhD thesis, and there may be more than the average practitioner needs to know about, for example, packages for the statistical analysis of verbatim data. But I would urge those who would prefer to skip this section to give it a second thought. To use a term from schoolroom examinations, Tembo is making visible the process of his working out. Before he presents his interpretation of the information he has collected from the various groups in the communities with which he has been working in Malawi, he has had the integrity to be transparent about his methodology. In so doing, he provides a benchmark with which others, claiming to represent the voices of communities in an age characterised by rapid intervention, can be compared. Here he also employs a rare reflexivity, acknowledging the extent to which his own work is itself a form of intervention conditioned by mutual pre-understandings. Tembo’s findings are multiple – but they might be summarised as indicating that NGO desires for action were constrained by the factors outlined above and, importantly, also by dominant development orthodoxies around what is required for sustainable livelihoods and the elimination of poverty. He thus provides the example of the NGO which provided enterprise development loans for women, but not if they wanted to start a beer brewing business. However, this is not to imply that NGO actions weren’t conditioned or negotiated; indeed, they were shaped by people within the communities concerned, sometimes in unanticipated ways. But what Tembo also makes clear is that pre-existing images of what NGOs should do, and how they might and should engage with a community, constrain that engagement. Particularly telling, and rich material for use in the teaching and the training of development practitioners (although this raises a further question of how many such practitioners do have formal training) is the verbatim data he uses, in which people make clear their assumptions about what NGOs will NOT provide. Also salutary is Tembo’s identification of how poor people enrol or are enrolled in development projects because of an assumption that NGO assistance is for ‘the good of the community’, without recognising the impact, often seriously negative, that such dependency may have on their ability to sustain their own personal livelihoods. Tembo might have finished his book with this thought; but instead he concludes by suggesting modes of practice which may from the get-go more clearly specify what NGO interventions can and should achieve. My own suspicion is that his hopes for this improved practice are too optimistic. In my experience, published work seems to be one of the least effective means of changing what practitioners do, even if the recommendations are sound. This is particularly the case in a field whose practitioners are often proudly anti-intellectual (readers of this journal being exceptions). Looming questions about participatory development also remain unanswered: if participation does not work on its own terms, or does so only partially, why does it remain nonetheless so prevalent, and why is research like Tembo’s—which recovers the voices of those who have participation done to them and evaluates participatory interventions with appropriate rigor—so uncommon? The answer, I would suggest, is that regardless of their practical consequences, participatory discourses serve an antecedent purpose of legitimising development interventions. But then that reveals my own particular perspective; and Tembo does more than justify the case on his own. This book is a very useful addition to the field, and it and its author are commended. Reviews - Development in Practice 14(3) - April 2004 Barnett, Tony and Alan Whiteside In the first part of the book, the authors examine the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, framing their analysis within the context of global inequalities, and the political and economic processes that drive them. Nested within this framework are case studies of the UK, Philippines, India, Senegal, Uganda, the Ukraine, South Africa, and Botswana. Barnett and Whiteside argue that varying combinations of social cohesion and wealth have shaped the very different trajectories the epidemic has taken in various contexts. Over time they predict that the scale and consequences of the epidemic will have been worst in Africa, the poorest continent, both financially and in terms of human resources. They trace the way in which the sustained disruption and dislocation that characterised the European encounter with Africa engendered the social contexts within which the epidemic would come to flourish. Long periods of adverse terms of trade, combined with the lack of legitimacy of many post-colonial governments, economic collapse, and corruption, have exacerbated the conditions of disorder and inequality in which the epidemic has thrived. In line with its disease and globalisation focus, this book traces how risk environments in countries in Africa may be determined by decisions taken in boardrooms in Zurich, London, or Tokyo. The chains of infection from one individual to the next are an intrinsic part of a wider set of relations of production associated with globalisation. The authors interweave this broad economic analysis with anthropological insights which highlight, for example, the way in which a historically rooted African emphasis on lineage and descent undermines safe sex messages. These imperatives intertwine with symbolic factors such as the global marketing of desire - leading to disrupted codes of regulation in societies undergoing rapid social, political, and economic change. In the second half of the book, Barnett and Whiteside move from origins to impact, a topic on which virtually no original research exists. Lack of empirical data and poor conceptual and methodological development in this area combine to undermine the possibility of effective planning and policy development to manage impacts. Thus, for example, unresolved problems around defining orphan-hood and estimating orphan numbers undermine the development of adequate plans to support orphans, even in contexts where resources are available. Within this context, the book is a valuable resource – both in terms of discussing those data that do exist, and in terms of providing useful frameworks and methods for those seeking to fill this gap. Different chapters deal with the impact of HIV/AIDS on individuals, households, and communities; on orphans and the elderly; on subsistence agriculture and rural livelihoods; on large ‘for profit’ enterprises in commerce and industry; on development and economic growth; and on government and governance. The impacts of the epidemic are felt most harshly by individuals, their families, and their immediate communities, often too small and diverse to benefit from sweeping large-scale programmes. But community-level programmes which fail to address wider social inequalities are also not likely to succeed. The book emphasises how strategies centring on concepts such as ‘stake-holding’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘civil society’ cannot be expected to eliminate health risks fuelled by poverty and social exclusion. Who then should drive HIV/AIDS management efforts? The NGO sector is dismissed as too fickle and tied to shifting donor inclinations to play a key role. The private sector is not likely to take the lead, given that there is no profit to be made in many HIV-prevention activities and HIV-affected countries. A key responsibility falls on governments (with their imperfections and limitations) and the global community to tackle the epidemic and its macro economic causes and impacts. Barnett and Whiteside issue a clarion call to the international community to ‘wake up to the emergency of global public health’, and to see primary health care and public health provision as international public goods that need to be managed within multilateral systems. They speak of the need for a sustained campaign to get businesses and governments to sign up to ethical policies and legal provisions in relation to workers’ rights, and to stop businesses from contributing to the development of risk environments that make people more susceptible to HIV and shift the costs of the epidemic onto the most marginalised, and often the most vulnerable, social groups. Barnett and Whiteside’s in-depth analysis of the historical and geographical factors explaining the origins and evolution of the epidemic make depressing reading for those concerned with interventions and social change. It highlights the unrealistic optimism of those who seek to fight HIV/AIDS in communities or even in countries in the absence of widespread global action. Yet the reader is left wondering what the motivation for such global action could be. The authors make an impassioned appeal to the conscience of the international community, on the basis of a sense of common humanity with those who suffer so deeply, and in the interest of working towards a global community driven by values rather than simply by profits. However, it is not clear where the impetus for such profound change in global relations would come from. The course of globalisation in the twentieth century has created many more risks than opportunities to the sexual health of millions of people. Whether or not the political will exists to alter this situation in the twenty-first century remains to be seen. In this book, water rights are defined as complex arrangements involving rights and obligations in relation to the use of water and water infrastructure, and sanctioned by a certain authority invested with legitimacy and power of enforcement (Beccar, Boelens, and Hoogendam, p. 3). Water rights can be individual or collective, depending on the right holder, and consist of bundles of rights that can be divided into two main categories: a) ‘operational rights’, such as the right to use part of the water flow or to use irrigation infrastructure; and b) ‘collective decision-making rights’, such as the right to participate in decisions about water allocation, system membership, investments, etc. (id., p. 5). However, Beccar, Boelens, and Hoogendam warn that there is also a need to distinguish between ‘formal’ and ‘in action’ water rights, as there is a gap between the formal bestowing of rights and the actual exercise of these rights by individuals and communities. In the final analysis, ‘water rights reflect existing social relationships’, and therefore their actual exercise is the outcome of particular power configurations involving, among other things, issues of class, gender, and ethnic inequalities. In turn, as power configurations are altered over time as a result of changing social, economic, and even climatic factors, so too are water rights (Beccar, Boelens, and Hoogendam, pp. 8-9; Boelens and Doornbos, p. 217). Contributors adopt a critical stance towards prevailing policy orthodoxies and frameworks in the field, such as decentralisation and the transfer of irrigation management to the local level. In particular, they argue that a key factor contributing to the failure of many policy interventions in this field has been a lack of understanding of the fact that physical irrigation infrastructures are often the embodiment of existing systems of water rights, which in turn reflect existing power configurations. For instance, interventions involving the modification of irrigation infrastructure often fail to realise that, within the cultural framework of Andean irrigators, users’ participation in the construction work or related tasks brings with it the expectation that existing water rights will be reallocated or that new ones will be created as a result of infrastructure improvements. However, more often than not irrigation interventions are based on an instrumental understanding of ‘user participation’ which does not take into account the need to involve the users from the start in the decision making process for allocating water rights and obligations. In turn, as the examples provided by the contributors show, this often leads to the alienation of the users, followed by institutional chaos and disintegration. By contrast, there are some examples, albeit rare, of successful policy interventions where users have been involved from the start in the decision making process. Among other lessons learnt from these successful experiences, the contributors point out that irrigation interventions must pay attention to: a) who will be benefited by water rights; b) what the local definition and contents of water rights are; c) what the legitimate mechanisms for water rights allocation operating locally are; d) who will have the right to participate in the decisions about membership of the system; and e) what the mechanisms empowering water rights holders to exercise their rights in practice are. In connection to this, the lessons extracted from the case studies also apply to the crucial issue of institution building in relation to the development and strenghtening of user-managed irrigation systems. Contributors argue that ‘organisation-building’ initiatives must take into account both practical aspects such as users’ knowledge, skills, and resources that may enable them to successfully manage their systems, and broader issues such as underlying power structures. This is crucial, because democratic organisation building involves changing unequal power relationships to empower users so that they can acquire more control over the system’s management and future development. In turn, the two dimensions addressed in the book, water rights and organisation building, must be integrated into the wider package of irrigation system development, which also encompasses the physical infrastructure and the existence of a productive and economic structure that provides the foundation for the existence, maintainance, and development of the irrigation systems. Perhaps the volume could have benefited from a more elaborate introduction and conclusion, in which the links between the processes analysed in the chapters and the established literature could have been better explored. For instance, the rich material provided in the book would warrant a reference, among other issues, to the theoretical debates about environmental justice, ecological distribution conflicts, environmental governance, or even the well-established literature on the history of water rights in Spanish America. Likewise, the introduction of some concepts like ‘hydraulic property’ (Gerbrandy and Hoogendam, p. 36) or ‘hydraulic identity’ (Boelens and Doornbos, p. 237), among others, could have been further explained and justified by reference to already existing conceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, the book will be a very useful reference to development academics and practitioners, policy makers, students, and activists working in the field of small irrigation systems management. Water rights are often conflictive in arid parts of the world, and may even be more so than rights to the ownership of land. In Peru, however, land distribution has tended to predominate in the literature over water distribution. The 1969 agrarian reform—one of Latin America's more radical attempts at land redistribution—failed conspicuously to deal with the problem of access to water. Much of Peru's commercial agricultural production comes from the irrigated valleys that break up the narrow coastal plain that divides the Andes from the Pacific Ocean. These are relatively close to the country's main urban centres. However, this is an area of almost zero rainfall, so agriculture depends critically on water being channelled in from elsewhere. Here, literally, water from irrigation is life, and nothing grows without it. The ways in which water is distributed is also key to social cohesion and/or differentiation. Mining ventures like Tambo Grande threaten to alter that distribution and to contaminate the water that is available for agriculture. Understanding how water is distributed in different social contexts and at different times in history is the theme of Paul Trawick's book on the struggle for water in Peru. This is an important book, not just for students of Peruvian history and agrarian politics but also for policy makers and development practitioners interested in the impact of globalisation on rural livelihoods. Trawick's study is focused on three communities in southern Peru in the valley of Cotohuasi, on the western slopes of the Andes in the department of Arequipa. Each has a different story to tell about how water is distributed and to what social effect. The three communities reflect different degrees of integration into the global economy and different ethnic backgrounds, and they involve different degrees of survival of pre-Columbian irrigation methods and systems for distribution between users of this scarce resource. They also reflect different traditions of agriculture and landholding, as well as different degrees of intervention on the part of the Peruvian state. The book explores how control over water affects economic and political power. As such, its relevance goes far beyond the predicament of three highly specific Peruvian villages. Using archaeological, historical, and ethnographic tools, Trawick draws some far-reaching conclusions about how different societies at different times are organised either in the interests of the collectivity or along much more individualistic lines. The story begins with the Huari culture (AD 700-900), and then traces conditions in these communities through the Inca period, the colonial period, and the post-independence Peruvian Republic to illustrate how the quest by outsiders for strategic raw materials (obsidian, then gold, and, more recently, wool) has influenced the systems for sharing water, generally to the detriment of indigenous communities. Both the Huari and the Incas developed equitable systems of water distribution based on people's needs. With the coming of the Spaniards, water was appropriated increasingly for private purposes as colonist families occupied the best land and used it for new purposes. In Cotohuasi, this involved growing alfalfa to feed the mules and horses used to carry minerals for eventual shipment to Spain. The full impact of water shortages in the valley were disguised because of the huge fall in population that occurred in the years after the Conquest, but when population pressures began to build up again in the nineteenth century, conflict over water became increasingly bitter. In this tale over the distribution of water, the state is by no means a disinterested or necessarily benevolent actor. Although it broke up the haciendas, the 1969 agrarian reform did not transfer the land wholesale to peasants or indigenous communities. In the Cotohuasi valley, the land stayed in the hands of a younger generation of commercial farmers of mixed blood (mestizos). Nor did the state resolve the conflict between mestizos and the indigenous communities over the control of water. The structure of asset holding (and therefore power) was not radically altered. Elsewhere in the highlands too, the agrarian reform failed to resolve problems of distribution. Moreover, the 1969 General Water Law (which has received much less scholarly attention than the Agrarian Reform itself) effectively 'nationalised' water, placing its distribution in the hands of petty state officials at the local level. Unsurprisingly, the decisions that these made were highly influenced by local power relations. Fifteen years on, the incompetence and corruption of the APRA government's attempts to spearhead development in the valley played into the hands of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency by further alienating the poorest communities. Water distribution is, and will probably continue to be, a highly sensitive issue in the more arid parts of Peru, dividing local people along social and ethnic lines, and creating frictions with state institutions. Policies to privatise water in the Andes seem likely to have highly divisive effects that will certainly not work to the benefit of the poorest. Trawick's book—which is sympathetically written and easy to read—helps provide some very useful clues as to why this inoffensive substance can be so politically contentious. John Crabtree Mani’s argument criticises what she perceives as a gap between the concept and the practice of justice. She suggests that practitioners have failed to conceptualise justice in a sufficiently rigorous way and that this failure has contributed to the limited effectiveness of peace building efforts across the globe. Thus, she begins her book with a detailed exploration of justice as a philosophical concept. She identifies and provides an overview of what she calls the three dimensions of justice: legal justice, or the rule of law; rectificatory justice, which seeks to respond to war crimes, human rights abuses, and other physical violence; and distributive justice, which emphasises the need to address the economic inequalities that, according to Mani, are a primary cause of war. Although she acknowledges that peace building efforts must address each dimension of justice and, indeed, that the three dimensions of justice are intertwined, her argument clearly prioritises distributive justice. Indeed, the main strength of Mani’s work is that it highlights a dimension of justice—equity—that is too often neglected by scholars and practitioners. She makes a compelling case that economic inequality is often, though not always, an important cause of war. As a result, meaningful efforts to rebuild peace and restore justice in war-torn societies quite simply need to address entrenched economic inequalities if they are to succeed. Mani’s prioritisation of distributive justice is principled as well as pragmatic: she makes the case that distributive justice is necessary not only as a means of diminishing economic inequality, which is a major cause of war, but also because equity is an important normative goal in its own right. While Mani’s focus on distributive justice is a basic strength of the book, it also contributes to one of the book’s weaknesses. In prioritising distributive justice over other forms of justice, the author often treats the other dimensions of justice in a superficial manner. For example, in her discussion of what she refers to as ‘rectificatory justice’, she amalgamates all efforts to ‘rectify’ the direct physical violence suffered by victims of war, including war crimes and human rights abuses, within a single, broad category. Thus, she groups together such diverse responses to war crimes and human rights abuses as ‘… truth commissions, trials and prosecutions, non-judicial sanctions such as purges, “lustration” or removal from office, compensation, and symbolic gestures such as commemorations and memorials’ (p. 7). The lumping together of such a wide range of approaches to justice in war-torn societies glosses over important differences among these processes both in terms of objectives and in terms of the philosophical arguments used to justify the various approaches. In fact, much of the scholarship on justice in war-torn societies has focused on the philosophical and practical differences among these approaches. In a similar vein, it is surprising that Mani, in a book on justice in war-torn societies, deals with the concept of restorative justice only in passing. Under the general category of rectificatory justice, she lists utilitarian punishment, retributive justice, and informal justice as three ‘sub-categories’. She places restorative justice and efforts to promote reconciliation under the category of ‘informal’ rectificatory justice and gives the topic very little attention. This categorisation is problematic because restorative justice is not an informal form of justice. For instance, truth commissions, probably the most common method for fostering restorative justice, are formal institutions with specific objectives. Proponents of truth commissions and restorative justice in general hold them up as a mechanism for pursuing justice that is preferable to other processes. Of course, not all scholars of peace building and justice accept this perspective. Nevertheless, Mani’s failure to treat restorative justice seriously represents a weakness of the book. Another weakness in Mani’s work is her failure to draw attention to the importance of gender and sexual equality. This is too bad given her obvious concern with inequality and the stark reality that discriminatory gender norms exacerbate existing economic inequalities. International peace building efforts increasingly have called attention to the need to pay attention to gender and sexual equality in efforts to rebuild peace in war-torn societies. Mani’s analysis, appropriately focused on the importance of issues of equality, would have been strengthened by a consideration of the ways in which damaging gender norms and sexual inequality have contributed to destruction, violence, and inequality in war-torn societies. This book is at its best when it deals with distributive justice—the topic that is clearly at the heart of Mani’s work. It is not as strong when discussing other dimensions of justice or processes for pursuing justice in war-torn societies. Mani’s aim was to clarify the conceptual interdependence of the three dimensions of justice, with the ultimate objective of encouraging practitioners to treat each dimension as part of an interlinked and integrated approach to pursuing justice and peace in war-torn societies. In the end, while she is effective at demonstrating the importance of distributive justice in its own right, she is less successful in explicating the connections among the different dimensions of and approaches to justice in practice. Nevertheless, scholars and practitioners of peace building and post-conflict justice will find the book, aimed at a specialist audience, of interest. But despite the many volumes of development research published each year, only the exceptional few truly break new ground. Most aim more modestly to add another building block to how an issue is understood, or to chip away at received wisdoms. A depressingly large amount of academic development research probably does more to secure the author’s career than to make a significant contribution to development policy or practice. Whether this may sometimes be the underlying purpose is open to question; and in any case researchers may not be well equipped to translate their findings into user-friendly forms. But it is certainly true that most development research is about development rather than being designed to effect real change; and that its validation is often something of a closed circuit, with each discipline tending to reinforce its own methods of enquiry and presentation rather than engaging in ‘reality checks’ of impact on the ground. Research for development, as the title of this latest practical guide from Save the Children puts it, is ‘one approach to making social change’ and so may take various forms and draw on diverse disciplines depending on the specific purpose. ‘It may set out to explore an issue in order to plan a programme; it may, more broadly, ask people in an area about their own needs; or it may aim to collect in-depth information about a specific issue, to make a case for change’ (p.3). Such plain English could not be further removed from the scholarly discourse of footnotes and references; but the fact that it is written in a relaxed and accessible style does not mean that the ideas being communicated are simple, or that the analysis and advice are in any way superficial. The aim of the authors, themselves professional researchers, is to demystify (they could have said ‘deconstruct’, but it is clear why they didn’t!) research and its various agendas, both explicit and hidden; and to give development practitioners a sufficient grasp of the issues involved to be confident in knowing what kind of research and techniques are appropriate for the purpose in hand, and either managing a process or undertaking the research themselves. The book is divided into two parts, each comprising about ten chapters. Part I looks at Managing Research for Development. Many of the chapters here ask the why, the what, and the who questions. The first, for instance, looks at why research might be used in development work, the second at how it is used, and the third at participatory research (participation by whom?). Further chapters address the issues of quality, what a research brief should comprise, who should conduct the research (in-house or external consultants?), supervising research (including timeframes, budgets, and dealings with funders), promoting its findings (going ‘Beyond “The Report”’), and finally evaluation. Part II is all about the how, with chapters on how to make the most of existing information, how to ensure quality in data-gathering, how to select a particular method or set of methods, how to choose a sample, and how to write an effective research report – the latter covering everything from content, to style, to graphics. There are two chapters on specific techniques for gathering information (such as observation, cluster samples, or focus groups), and on methodological ‘packages’ such as baseline studies, stakeholder analysis, or action research. A particularly welcome chapter covers research ethics, such as the rights of respondents to give their informed consent to participate and not to be intruded upon, their rights to confidentiality and anonymity, their rights in data and publications, and to a fair return for their assistance. Every chapter is illustrated with real-life examples of things that have gone well, as well as cases of processes that have gone wrong; with simple definitions of technical terms; with activities intended to provoke the individual reader to think an issue through, or to stimulate group discussion; guidelines, checklists, tips, and pitfalls; and a clear summary of the key points made in the chapter, with signposts to further reading. Content-wise, though the authors integrate gender considerations into the text, it might also have been useful to pull out (and index) the main issues in relation to each topic: the fact that an agency has ‘mainstreamed’ gender is far from meaning that all its staff are on top of all the issues or really make them a priority. But it is the way in which the potentially helpful devices - textboxes, charts, diagrams, and so on – are presented which is most disappointing. The authors state that the guide is intended for practical use, not to be read at one sitting or cover to cover. Even so, paragraphs and whole arguments are too often interrupted by a table or textbox sprawling across two or more pages, or by a series of examples and activities piled one after another. Form conflicts with function, sometimes to the point of impeding comprehension – a real pity because the writing style is clear and attractive throughout. One wonders why this was produced as a conventional book rather than as a large-format and easily photocopied manual, especially since the reader-user is invited to dip into and use whatever chapters or sections s/he needs. Perhaps a future edition - for this is sure to become a best-seller – could be re-organised in this way. With this caveat, Research for Development deserves a place in every development agency, from the smallest local organisation to the largest international one—and on the bookshelves of all those development researchers and consultants who genuinely want their work to make a difference on the ground. Farmer advances several loosely-bound theses among which the following are worth highlighting: On Power: The asymmetry of power generates many forms of quiet brutality. It is inequities of power that prevent the poor from accessing the opportunities they need to move out of poverty. So underlying power structures (and not merely individuals) must be fundamentally altered if the world is to change for the better. On Inequity: It is social and economic inequalities that deny services to the poor. The promotion of equity is the central ingredient for respecting human rights in health. While the prevailing dogma of our time calls for projects to be ‘self-sustaining’ and ‘cost-effective’, cost-effectiveness does not in itself reduce inequity. On the poor: Poverty is not a condition that befalls human beings naturally, but is rather the result of the actions of other human beings. On Poverty: Poverty is the world’s greatest killer. It is not enough to improve the situation of the poor within existing social relationships. The eradication of poverty requires that we build a different, more just international social order. On Public Health: The right to health is perhaps the least contested of social rights—and yet health advocacy has failed miserably. Poverty not only exposes people to higher risk but also bars them from access to effective treatment, because denial of care to those who cannot pay is legitimised in the free market system. We are at a crossroads: Health care can either be a commodity to be sold, or it can be considered a basic social right; but it cannot be both. Equity is thus (once again) the central challenge for the future of public health. On Ethics: While relaxed ethical practices are unacceptable, without a social justice component, medical ethics risks becoming yet another strategy for managing inequality. Social and economic rights are therefore at the heart of what must become the new medical ethics; we need an ethics of distributive justice. On Solutions Attempted: It is totally unacceptable to attempt a differential valuation of human life. Only by including social and economic rights in the struggle for human rights can we protect those most exposed to structural violence. Ultimately, however, the real energy to find workable solutions can only come from the oppressed themselves. At the end of the book, Farmer makes the following six suggestions: While I want to imagine a world where Farmer’s six suggestions are implemented, even then I fail to see how the human rights problems he so aptly describes will be solved. Moreover, although he complains that human rights discussions have been excessively legalistic and theoretical, I think this was needed to bring the human rights cause the legitimacy and recognition it enjoys today. Farmer claims that the current human rights discourse is at times divorced from reality, but this no longer seems to be the case. There is a growing human rights movement (including organisations like UNICEF and CARE, to name just a few) that is speaking of claim holders and duty bearers and has become heavily involved in Human Rights and Capacity Analysis work in progressively practical ways. So the paradigm is no longer using human rights as a language of moral imperialism, as the author claims. In addition, while Farmer says that his ideas do not demand loyalty to any specific ideology, the full scope of his theses in the book betrays this stance. Where, I ask myself, is the shame in openly declaring that one has an anti-neoliberal ideology? In the end, to Farmer, tackling the health angle of human rights proves more pragmatic than approaching the problem in more holistic terms, which would require drastic reforms in the patterns of justice within a given society. But the advancement of human rights calls for work on all fronts simultaneously. Although channelling resources to those in need may be the ‘human rights thing’ to do, this is by far not enough. Sooner or later (and clearly sooner better than later), we must embark on a process that roots out the structural causes of widespread human rights violations (e.g., gross maldistribution of wealth). As Farmer himself has put it, the real underlying war cannot remain undeclared. And Amartya Sen rightly points out that progress will ultimately be more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent. Farmer concedes his book is principled, but is it not unduly harsh: the realities it describes and the crimes it unveils cannot be ignored. What his protagonists share is an unwillingness to knuckle under just because they are poor. The book is a source of innumerable pearls of wisdom, although the writing at times can get dense and repetitive. In closing, Farmer tells us that if we lack the ambition to do what is needed, we should expect the next 50 years to yield a harvest of shame. In the Afterword, he asks, ‘why we should give a damn?’ The answer is loud and clear: It is not useless to complain! You’ve got to read the book to see if you agree. Reviews - Development in Practice 14(1&2) - February 2004 John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that ‘ethical judgements have a strong tendency to conform to what citizens of influence find it agreeable to believe’ (1). It serves us well to be reminded of this when we scan the growing influence of the field of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) on how we manage corporate behaviour within the global economy. If one is to believe the hype around CSR, then voluntary codes of conduct, as a representation of the ‘Third Way’, are not only the most desirable means to manage corporate behaviour, but also the only legitimate way forward. The recent proliferation of an estimated 500-odd codes of conduct on labour standards must therefore be the most progressive development in corporate accountability in the last decade, as governments seem increasingly wary of strengthening their hand in the regulation of this provocative arena. Instead, they prefer to promote the rather more innocuous approach that business can ‘do well’ and ‘do good’ using voluntary codes, making government intervention unnecessary. And there seems to be no let-up in the seductive pull of this carrot/stick approach. This summer, the UN has proposed yet another set of new guidelines on human rights, entitled ‘The norms on the responsibilities of transnational corporations’, that would apply to companies operating in more than one country, as an extension to the Universal Declaration of Human rights. Which makes the book Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights, edited by Rhys Jenkins, Ruth Pearson, and Gill Seyfang, a timely examination of the effectiveness of voluntary codes of conduct as a way of managing some of the negative impacts of globalisation. The analysis provided by the comprehensive set of case studies is somewhat less than optimistic about the opportunities that this form of self-regulation has to offer. Repeated examples are brought to bear whereby codes of conduct have done little to serve the needs of workers who are most vulnerable to the vagaries of a globalised economic system. In a telling assessment of competing codes in the US apparel industry, Jenkins writes that codes are more about advancing stakeholder interests than about embracing corporate responsibility. She points out, for example, that Southern suppliers tend to prefer weaker codes over stronger ones, as this gives them a competitive advantage in the Northern supply chain, while corporate interests still hold captive organisations that would like to further labour rights. When, for example, a group of US universities wanted to bring forward a code that would hold Nike to stronger labour rights than Nike's own code of conduct, Nike held back a large sponsorship deal worth millions. Most worrying is the continued lack of representation of those whom codes are meant to protect. In a review of codes of conduct in China, Alice Kwan and Stephen Frost discover that workers have little influence over the development, implementation, or monitoring of codes, while the chapter by Lucy Brill finds that a vast majority of codes make no mention of home-based workers, especially women. The chapter by Linda Shaw and Angela Hale also concludes that a definition of rights by no means guarantees access to those rights. Examples of workers being audited having been coached for the audit are resonant of the shady world of financial auditing brought down by both the Enron and the Worldcom scandals. One of the main themes that emerges throughout the book is the lack of strong enforcement of voluntary codes, a trend that the latest UN code does little to right. The sanctions for non-compliance in the proposed code are far from risky, threatening only to exclude companies from bidding on UN contracts, or to name and shame non-compliers. Companies like Codes of Conduct: they offer the opportunity to assert company ‘values’ to their customers while keeping the regulators at bay. In his contribution, Dwight Justice from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) writes that ‘privatisation of labour law means avoiding regulation’ (p. 92). Yet the complexity of implementing codes and managing competing interests is reviewed by a number of the contributors in this volume, which forces one to ask whether regulators would do a better job than the voluntary approach. But as Kelly Dent notes in her chapter on monitoring codes in Sri Lanka, ‘it may be more productive to ensure that regulation is effective and applies to everyone’. (p. 144) It seems more likely that a combination of forces will actually make voluntary codes work. The case studies show that successful code implementation can be achieved when workers are more involved in establishing and enforcing codes, and when these are reinforced by commensurate rights defined by the State. We continue to live in a world in which individual states are the main source of power to regulate corporate behaviour; and in which firms avoid any perceived costly measures to uphold labour standards and the like unless they have to, given that the market rewards such behaviour. It is thus not adequate for companies to say ‘we operate within the laws of the countries in which we work’ when the laws of the host country fall short of provisions like the ILO Core Labour standards. Perhaps the only gap in this book is its almost exclusive focus on the garment industry. Thus, lessons from the agricultural sector or even the latest experiences in moving call centres to developing countries have yet to be explored in any great detail. But one could surmise that the findings will be similar. The book is a must-read for those working on either the civil society or corporate side of the equation who don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past when implementing codes of conduct. More importantly, however, the book should be required reading for those in government who are trying to abdicate their responsibility to protect workers’ rights. This book serves as a sobering reminder that leaving business to sort itself out falls far short of achieving higher labour standards and better protection for workers—especially if business continues to hold the primary levers of influence over the operation of the global economy. Notes Tomasevski, Katarina In a field dominated by safe, stolid, and intellectually unchallenging literature, this book sets out to provoke, annoy, and challenge its readers. In her tenure as Special Rapporteur to the UN on the right to education, Tomasevski has allowed few to rest easy – taking on everyone from the World Bank to the United States. The Right to Education Denied will not disappoint those who enjoy Tomasevski’s ability to demolish conventional wisdom. A lawyer by training, she likes nothing more than deploying her forensic skills on the flabby assumptions and pompous clichés of development: from the rhetoric of ‘partnership’ (‘partnership does not accurately reflect the relations between a creditor holding the chequebook and a government which desperately needs that cheque’) to the rituals of UN development diplomacy (‘if you cannot commit yourself you committee yourself’) to the widely-repeated truism that investing in primary education is the best weapon against poverty (‘all available evidence indicates that the key to reducing poverty is secondary rather the primary education’). Tomasevski covers the legal and budgetary implications of the right to education but is equally interested in its qualitative dimensions. In this respect, human rights principles face an interesting challenge. On the one hand, states are required not only to allow private individuals to establish schools, but also to adjust public schools to parents’ preferences and values. Yet on the other hand, states must ensure that schools practise and uphold fundamental principles of equality, non-discrimination, and tolerance. In Sri Lanka, Tamil objections to the attempts of the Sinhala-led government to impose a ‘Sinhala-only’ policy in schools led to the establishment of students’ right to be educated in either of the two languages. Not surprisingly, given the long-running conflict between the two groups, Sinhala textbooks are full of antagonism and prejudice against the Tamils, and vice-versa. Is this a victory for minority rights – or segregated education in the service of ethnic nationalism? Consistent with her view that human rights law must be understood as ‘work in progress’ rather than a timeless canon, Tomasevski gives an interesting analysis of many other issues which, like the Sri Lankan dilemma, pose as yet unresolved problems for human rights law. One of the most challenging of these is how to hold the international community accountable for creating an ‘enabling environment’ in which all countries can and do fulfil their obligations to provide education. In a world where 115 million children are out of school and poor countries slip further behind every year in average educational attainment, this is a problem of some urgency. Tomasevski is particularly trenchant on the dismal track record of international leadership over the past two decades of global development summits, including the 1990 and 2000 EFA conferences at Jomtien and Dakar. The Dakar conference did at least make the attainment of free and compulsory primary education an explicit goal, but, she argues, without any corresponding financial commitment from either rich or poor countries, this was an essentially hollow victory. In fact, as Tomasevski points out, aid for education has steadily declined since the 1990s, despite the promise at Dakar that no country seriously committed to the EFA Goals would be left without funding. Tomasevski’s diagnosis of the problems is on target, but she is less clear on how human rights instruments could help to solve them. Leaving aside problems of weak monitoring and widespread non-compliance, the more fundamental limitation is that human rights conventions primarily define the obligations of a state towards its people and not the duties of states towards other states. The UN human rights conventions do not enjoin any specific financial responsibility on rich countries, nor do they define other positive steps that the international community is obliged to take. Yet, as Tomasevski herself states, rich countries must assume some responsibility if heavily indebted, poor countries are to achieve free and compulsory education for all. One illustration she gives is the case of Tanzania, which saw enrolments soar after abolishing user fees in 2001 but has been struggling since to find the funds to build enough new classrooms and train enough teachers. Tomasevski quite rightly concludes that whether the Tanzanian government will succeed in expanding education to all children ‘depends on the dynamics of debt relief and the priority given to education in all multilateral and bilateral policies towards Tanzania, as well as the domestic priority for translating education into a right’. But is there no way to make the future of Tanzania’s children – and that of the 115 million children out of school worldwide - less arbitrary? One way forward might be to create a new global compact on education, which if not legally binding on all nations would at least apply strong rules of transparency and accountability to all who choose to join it. Such a compact would involve a guarantee from rich countries that poor countries which are committed to making education (at least through primary level) free and universal and allocate adequate domestic resources to the task would receive additional aid and debt relief. Similar initiatives have already been agreed in fields such as health (the Global Health Fund and GAVI) and the environment (the World Environmental Facility). For the past three years, NGOs, teachers’ unions, and child labour activists who support the Global Campaign for Education in more than 100 countries have been advocating a Global Initiative to achieve free, good quality primary education for all. Last year the World Bank and UNESCO launched a Fast Track Initiative that represents a limited pilot of some aspects of the Global Initiative. Tomasevski’s lack of attention to such proposals makes it somewhat incomplete as a critique of the EFA movement. With such a wide-ranging table of contents, the discussion of each topic is sometimes too brief, but is always lucid, and vividly illustrated with examples from an impressively rich array of sources. The book will be of equal interest to general readers wanting a critical perspective on recent education debates and to development studies lecturers looking for an intelligent dissenting voice to introduce alongside more conventional sources. For those interested in the so-called ‘rights-based approach to development’, it is also a thought-provoking introduction to basic human rights concepts and instruments and their practical implications in a field such as education. VeneKlasen, Lisa with Valerie Miller The practical, hands-on nature of the guide is demonstrated in the three-page ‘Navigating the Action Guide’ and summaries of key concepts previewing each section. (2) It includes 40 exercises to facilitate the advocacy process and provides examples from dozens of countries. The handbook deftly draws upon the authors’ 50 years of combined experience from advocacy throughout the world. This is a necessary addition to any reading list for staff working on advocacy in field offices, policy departments, and partner organisations. The first section of the guide provides an overview of the concepts of politics and advocacy, democracy and citizenship, power and empowerment, and the construction of empowering strategies. While a specific section on gender is included in power analysis, examples and analysis of gender issues are present throughout the book, woven into the content as an integral part of advocacy. The authors draw on the writings of an international range of advocacy thinkers and practitioners that includes Hope Chigudu from Zimbabwe, John Samuel from the National Centre of Advocacy Studies in India, Margaret Schuler from OEF International, and John Gaventa from the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex. Section two is especially helpful for development practitioners, providing examples of tools for planning advocacy campaigns that build on an organisation’s political vision and strengths and weaknesses for advocacy. I found the checklists for political credibility and constituent credibility particularly useful. The guide uses ‘structural analysis’ to explore the impact of outside ideological, political, and economic factors. Thus, exercises include ‘Naming the Powerful’ and developing a ‘Historical Analysis of the Political Landscape’. In my work with both Northern and Southern organisations I have found that clear, delimited problem definition is essential for successful advocacy. VeneKlasen and Miller address this issue, emphasising that ‘...many advocacy strategies have difficulty in achieving their goals because the problem they seek to address: Analysing and selecting priority issues involves ‘… looking at the causes and impact of problems as well as analyzing solutions. You need to decide which strategy is feasible for your group and which offers the most political gain’ (p. 147). As advocates, we tend to focus on specific policy decisions to the detriment of broader issues. VeneKlasen and Miller stress the holistic nature of advocacy, reminding us that policy is only one, albeit important, dimension of rights-based advocacy. Their Advocacy Impact Chart (p. 181) helps us examine impact on issues such as political space, culture, civil society, and the individual. Exercises analyse the needs and potential of marginalised groups, assist with problem identification and prioritisation, and examine causes, consequences, and solutions. The authors examine different political systems and their entry points, for example national policy making, courts, bureaucracy, and political parties. Stages of policymaking include agenda setting, formulation and enactment, implementation, and monitoring and enforcement. An overview of budget analysis, international policymaking advocacy, and women’s human rights advocacy are presented. Veneklasen and Miller point out that ‘[a]lthough a key advocacy goal is to create opportunities for citizen’s groups to be directly engaged in policy processes, engagement does not always impact policy decisions in the end. It is easy to believe that access to policymakers will translate into influence, but in practice this is rarely true’ (p 208). In fact, many NGOs make this very mistake in dialogue with the World Bank and other international agencies. Therefore the concept of claimed space vs. invited space is particularly timely. An organisation forcing its way to the decision making table (claimed space) is more likely to have influence than an organisation that has been invited by policymakers to a dialogue. Such invitations rarely provide the opportunity for effective advocacy, since policymakers remain in control. The guide’s final section, titled ‘Doing Advocacy, Building Clout: Message, Tactics and Organization’, covers the media, lobbying and negotiations, advocacy leadership development, and alliance building. The overview of the media provides recommendations for framing your message, message delivery, choosing the right medium, and mass media advocacy with examples from the Philippines and Croatia. Basic information is provided for news conferences, letters to the editor, TV and radio interviews, and alternative media. A New Weave is one of the few books that provide an overview of the advocacy process as well as concrete recommendations for implementation. If I could convince an NGO colleague to read a single book on advocacy, this would be the one. Notes John Clark (ed.) John Clark Globalizing Civic Engagement is an excellent collection of case studies of civil society working globally. The studies range from well established formal organisations such as Consumers International and the global trade union movement, to looser networks such as the Jubilee 2000 campaign, to even more diverse ‘dot–causes’ and the World Social Forum. Campaigns to increase access to HIV/AIDS drugs by South African and Brazilian NGOs, and the campaign for a Tobin-type tax led by the French NGO ATTAC, are also featured. The book pays a great deal of attention to the organisational forms and governance of these global campaigns – which vary widely. Clark refers to three types of civil society organisations (CSOs): unitary international CSOs, international CSO networks, and social movements. His case studies favour the first two types. He then analyses these three major forms of civil society global organisation, identifying their key characteristics as falling along two axes – their degree of centralisation or local autonomy, and the locus of decision-making. This framework is a useful analytical tool. As the case studies show, the struggle within global civil society organisations and networks to identify appropriate modes of decision making that enables them to move swiftly and flexibly for maximum impact while at the same time enabling members in the North and South to have equitable decision-making roles is a real one – and remains elusive for some. Policy-oriented NGOs tend to be more centralised in their decision-making, and therefore less hampered by internal democracy – while other NGOs committed to greater internal democracy necessarily move more slowly and may have considerable difficulties achieving agreed policy positions. The study of the World Social Forum illustrates these tensions most sharply. This book presents very up-to-date analysis of the organisations and movements included, and provides valuable insights into them. It is well written and accessible for anyone with a general interest in efforts of citizens to come together to make global organisations, governments, and corporations more responsive to the world’s most marginalised people. Worlds Apart clearly draws on much of the research which informed Clark’s other book. However, this one is both more personal and more policy-oriented, driven by Clark’s experience of the ‘divide’ between proponents of globalisation in governments and international institutions, and activists from civil society challenging the current world order. While Clark freely admits he personally feels closer to the critics of globalisation, he claims to try to view the debate through the lens of the world’s poor. The book is divided in three sections. The first examines the impact of globalisation on poor people. Clark favours a globalisation which is based on fairer rules, noting that the current system isn’t a ‘free-for-all’, but a ‘free-for-some’ (p. 15). He challenges civil society to expose the true winners from current globalisation and to more actively address the ‘Northern- or elite- bias of the institutions driving change – governments, inter-governmental organisations and corporations’, and the policies which ‘are either unfair or progressive but not implemented’ (p. 16). He explores how uneven the playing field is in areas such as foreign direct investment, the currency market, the markets in bonds, equities and derivatives, and the markets for manufactured goods, services, primary commodities, intellectual property, and labour. His particular focus is on the global trade regime, and the costs of Northern protectionism for developing countries, and is highly critical of US, and to a lesser extent European, CSOs for their failure to call their own governments to account for perpetuating inequalities. Clark takes issue with the orthodox view that there is a correlation between open trade policies, growth, and poverty reduction, arguing instead that smaller countries without strong domestic markets need trade to grow, while large countries, such as China, have such big domestic markets that they do not need to trade aggressively to achieve growth and reduce poverty. He suggests that much depends on the order and timing of export-orientation. While he accepts that growth is necessary for poverty reduction, he illustrates well the significance of redistributive policies if growth is to lead to poverty reduction. Finally, Clark explores the way globalisation has led to a ‘democracy deficit’ which CSO campaigns are responding to – giving citizens an alternative channel to voice their concerns about global and national institutions. The second section explores how globalisation has affected civil society, with Clark observing that civil society could become more openly hostile to current injustices, could take the new opportunities to participate and shape globalisation for the better, or, indeed, could split and do both. This section draws on some of the research from Globalizing Civic Engagement, but in Worlds Apart Clark develops some strong opinions about the future of civil society. For example, he asks why the focus of so many CSO campaigns has been on inter-governmental organisations rather than on the key governments that exert the real power within them. In particular, he criticises US CSOs for using inter-governmental organisations as ‘scapegoats’. He also believes that international development NGOs could be far more strategic in their influence if they were less averse to generating controversy at home about how policies promoting the ‘national interest’ impact people in poorer countries. Clark also suggests some key areas in which NGOs need to ensure their house is in order to retain their integrity. He is concerned that the somewhat anarchic anti-globalisation protest movement that emerged in Seattle may just remain negative and uncoordinated, rather than transform its energy into a strong positive movement with a clear social justice agenda. The third section of the book turns to that agenda and how civil society might bring about a more ethical globalisation. The penultimate chapter makes suggestions for a civil society agenda towards governments, inter-governmental organisations, and corporations. This agenda emphasises inclusive governance – with greater transparency, accountability, and greater efforts to achieve equity and participation. His final chapter brings him to four key principles for a more ethical globalisation: participation, empowerment, equity, and security for the most vulnerable people. The challenge for civil society, he suggests, is to reform current global processes and policies to reflect them. I found the first section of the book the strongest, the second section a little close to parts of Globalizing Civic Engagement, and the final section less sharp than I would have liked. Not that I disagree with Clark’s agenda, or his concern that NGOs should focus more on individual governments and the trade policies of Northern countries in particular. But the fact that he has not really considered the new ‘security’ environment post 9/11 or the fundamentalist movements which, albeit violent and undemocratic, are real civil society players themselves is a glaring omission. The other weakness in both books is their lack of attention to the global women’s movement – which has been quite a force within civil society for equity and inclusion. However, both these books would make a valuable contribution to the libraries of anyone interested in making the world a fairer place through citizen action, as well as to students of global development and advocacy.
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