Articles

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. The reconstruction of the health system in Afghanistan is in its early stages, and donors have proposed Performance-based Partnership Agreements (PPA) through which to subcontract the delivery of health services to private organisations, both for-profit and non-profit. Beyond ideological debates, this article sets out to explain the model underlying the PPA initiative and shed light on empirical data concerning the assumed benefits of such an approach.

Advocates and activists for human rights are currently facing a paradox: the coexistence of profound challenges in familiar territory (civil liberties) alongside expansion into new areas. Rights-based approaches (RBAs) are a part of this latter expansionary stream. This article argues that four kinds of potential value-added can be claimed. First, value-added can be sought through direct, indirect, and strategic uses of the law.

This article argues that the practice of poverty alleviation is greatly limited by a vision of poverty that fails to capture the locally specific causes of and solutions to the challenges that threaten human well-being. This problematic vision of poverty takes real-world form in such initiatives as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. It is a key reason why this and other contemporary poverty-alleviation efforts do not show greatly improved results compared with previous efforts.

Starting from an analysis of social and environmental injustice, the author argues that the concept of environmental racism is integral to the hegemonic model of capitalist development. She reveals how the financial mega-conglomerates, helped by the media, exploit such prejudices, and highlights the relevance of environmental racism in the struggle to overcome inequalities, to value the importance of diversity, and to build full citizenship for all.

Partnership has become a key word in the jargon of international development. This article presents the results of research into the perspectives of Cambodian and Filipino NGO workers on their funding relationships. Largely confirming the negative literature about partnership, practitioners generally expressed a view that their relationships with funders are not consistent with the rhetoric of power sharing and collaboration that often accompanies discussions of the subject.

Development research has responded to a number of charges over the past few decades. For example, when traditional research was accused of being 'top-down', the response was participatory research, linking the 'receptors' to the generators of research. As participatory processes were recognised as producing limited outcomes, the demand-led agenda was born. In response to the alleged failure of research to deliver its products, the 'joined-up' model, which links research with the private sector, has become popular.

Co-operation between researchers in the global North and South is critical to the production of new knowledge to inform development policies. However, the agenda-setting process is a formidable obstacle in many development research partnerships. The first section of this article examines how bilateral donor strategies affect collaborative agenda-setting processes.

The authors examine the role of international faith-based NGOs in foreign aid and development assistance for Africa, with special reference to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). The MCC is successful in its contribution to development and empowerment in the 20 African countries in which it works because of its philosophical and programmatic focus on accountability, its holistic approach to basic rights, and a `listen and learn' approach which embraces empowerment and social justice.

Children under the age of 18 years represent the largest group of the poor in Uganda (62 per cent). Their perspective has not, to date, been incorporated in the many poverty analyses which have been conducted. The survey reported in this paper asked children between the ages of 10-14 years about their perceptions of poverty, and also about the effectiveness of local government in addressing issues of concern to them.

The role of Northern-based civil society organisations has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. In particular, their principal role as `redistributive' agencies working in the South has come under criticism, leading them to seek new ways of defining their part in eradicating poverty. One widely adopted strategy has been an increasing emphasis on advocacy for social justice, while another is the creation of partnerships with non-state and state actors, including the private sector.