Latin America and the Caribbean

As natural-resource issues become more complex, particularly in developing-world contexts, there is a growing need for adaptive management solutions. However, the skills necessary to deal with these increasingly complex situations are not always present in many low-income countries. There is also a growing recognition that many capacity-building activities are limited in their effectiveness. This article suggests a problem-based learning (PBL) approach to capacity building.

Since 1996, CTA-ZM, a local Brazilian NGO, has been developing better ways to understand its work on pro-poor institutional transformation in Minas Gerais. It operates within a ‘messy partnership’ which includes farmer trade unions, associations, social movements, and academic institutions. The combined challenge of institutional transformation and messy partnerships has made it clear that mainstream monitoring is inadequate to trigger the diversity and depth of learning required within concerted action.

This work evaluates regulatory impacts on the Brazilian cashew industry through the pilot use of CIBER, a value-chain-based approach, to identify and measure regulatory constraints and to enact regulatory reforms in donor-funded development projects. Drawing from secondary sources complemented by primary field research, all the CIBER-suggested steps are followed.

Since the 1980s, the USA has fought cocaine in the Andes with carrots and sticks: interdiction and crop eradication wield the sticks, while Alternative Development (AD), which offers economic assistance to farmers who voluntarily abandon illicit cultivation, provides the carrots. Yet cocaine continues to permeate US streets, and rural Andean communities remain isolated from the legitimate economy. Many critics blame US belligerence for compounding the Andean drug war.

Governments in Latin America and elsewhere have implemented conditional cash-transfer programmes to improve standards of living in populations defined as vulnerable and excluded from the benefits of development, in order to improve access to education and health services, and to improve human capital. Qualitative research conducted among three indigenous groups in Panama provides lessons for assessing these programmes on the basis of the perceptions and culturally informed beliefs and practices of potential beneficiaries.

From United Nations emergency responses involving tent camps, to the reconstruction approach of FUNDASAL in El Salvador and the post-disaster provision of housing by Caritas in Asia, it is clear that a giant step has been taken in thinking about emergency shelter, as well as about how prevention and reconstruction are managed. This article evaluates some current good practices in Asia and Latin America in post-disaster emergency shelter that use local skills, materials, and tools, and participatory processes.

This article places the experiences of the Active Citizenship in Central America project, led by Dublin City University, within wider discussions on the role of civil society in building democracy and furthering development. The article examines project development and content and assesses its effectiveness, using a framework derived from Nancy Fraser’s (1993) concept of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ publics.

Certain contexts render particularly challenging the disjunctures and discontinuities between international NGO (INGO) headquarters and in-country operations, as this Christian Aid case demonstrates. Torn loyalties result when seeking to discern how best to work with partners in a human-rights crisis in a middle-income country. Navigating these challenges requires a critical interrogation and radical practice of partnership.

Northern NGOs have come under critical scrutiny since the 1990s, often with negative conclusions as organisations which had supported radical social change in the 1970s and 1980s have since turned themselves into a professionalised and bureaucratic aid sector. The article focuses on the Northern NGOs that purport to fund progressive social change and which encourage beneficiaries to question market and political power, and on the NGOs to which they channel funds in Latin America.

Popular-education programmes conducted by social movements are reshaping politics and education in Latin America. Negotiating with governments, they promote social justice while educationally challenging 'neo-liberal' educational standardisation. Moving from a defensive towards an offensive strategy, some movements support themselves economically while developing new educational strategies. They encounter both support and opposition from the social democratic governments in the region.