North America

In many development projects, individuals from one organisation are assigned and relocated to another organisation. For these guests to be effective in the provision of technical assistance requires them to learn about and adapt to the local milieu. Using a Navajo case study, this paper analyses how practices called acts allow guests to make effective contributions through learning and adaptation. It is shown that two categories of acts, calibrating and progressing, are crucial in this regard.

In the emerging ‘post-Washington Consensus’ era, neo-liberalism is searching for alternatives that once again emphasise the state. Yet neither Latin American dependencia nor East Asian developmentalism – two development models actually practised ‘on the ground’ – shares the basic assumptions of the liberal, rationalist state. First, there persists a significant ontological divide over the purpose of the state. Developmentalists and dependentists advocate deep, dynamic state agency rather than the hands-off, liberal, night-watchman state.

This paper introduces the major concepts of Outcome Mapping and discusses the International Development Research Centres experience in developing and implementing Outcome Mapping with Northern and Southern research organisations. It explores how the fundamental principles of Outcome Mapping relate to organisational learning principles and the challenges associated with applying theory to practice.

Based on a two-year, multi-method study of ‘development’ in one small community in rural Manitoba, Canada, the article examines how the community and people’s reasons for living there have both changed and remained consistent since the beginning of the area’s settlement by Ukrainian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The community has much in common with marginalised areas of the global South, in terms of its treatment at the hands of those in the centre and those who promote ‘development’.

This paper describes the Participatory Change Process (PCP), a model that promotes the formation and action of sustainable grassroots organisations in poor and marginalised communities, using participatory learning and action methods to provide people with the capacities, self-confidence, and organisational structures needed to plan and implement development projects and influence policy formation. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections

We suggest that PhD and post-doctoral researchers are a strong, untapped resource with the potential to make a real contribution to global health research (GHR). However, we raise some ethical, institutional, and funding issues that either discourage new researchers from entering the field or diminish their capacity to contribute. We offer a number of recommendations to Canadian academic and non-academic institutions and funders, and aim to generate discussion among them about how to overcome these constraints.

Collaboration has become a watchword for development practitioners and theorists. Yet collaboration or partnerships between academics and community-based researchers and activists have often proved difficult. This is particularly true for partnerships with smaller, grassroots community researchers, who are generally less resourced than their academic partners.

Reviewed by Luz María de la Mora, Trade Representative of the Mexican Ministry of Economy at the EU, Brussels

The authors explore the deleterious effects of economic globalisation on people in the USA, and explain the rise of poor people's organisations as a response to these conditions. They look at the impact of economic changes in terms of public policy and argue that the global economy is preventing a growing number of people from being able to meet their basic needs, by limiting or eliminating living-wage jobs as well as welfare programmes. However, poor people in the USA are organising to end poverty, and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union is given as a case study.

This article examines the role of free-trade agreements that integrate profoundly asymmetrical economies in simultaneously benefiting the more powerful nation and exacerbating inequalities within and between the countries involved. The latest in a series of such agreements in the Americas, the Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) opens up the economies of these small nations to US investment and exports, as multinational companies are able take advantage of lower production costs and weak labour legislation.