Non-governmental development organizations are expected to focus on countries with poor governance. New evidence shows that they do not. While they do tend to focus more than bilateral donors on poor countries, they make some curious geographical choices. It seems that they too have their ‘donor darlings’.
Go to the beginning of the discussion by clicking on Link and skipping the first 8:40 minutes of the radio programme. "De 27-jarige Dirk Jan Koch deed onlangs hulporganisaties op hun grondvesten trillen. De steun die non-gouvernementele organ...
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Go to the beginning of the discussion by clicking on Link and skipping the first 8 minutes of the radio programme. Sylvia Borren (Algemeen Directeur, Oxfam Novib), Harry Derksen (Deputy Director for Research & Development, ICCO) discussed wit...
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"Steun aan arme landen wordt ongelijk verdeeld. De hulp volgt vooral gebaande paden". An interview of Dirk-Jan Koch by Sara De Sloover. De Volkskrant - 21 Augustus 2007.
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Voorbraak and Ndegwa confirm that understanding how ‘politics tick’ is essential for better development outcomes. Koonings’ arguments in this respect are valid not only for bilateral cooperation. The World Bank’s main framework to address this fie...
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Jean-Luc Dubois welcomes Koonings’ pragmatic reintroduction of the political dimension to questions of development. Adding politics implies that key issues of inequity, social exclusion and human insecurity must be dealt with. Appropriate policy d...
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Poverty has a political dimension - that is our starting point, says Nils Boesen. What we are short on is not an awareness of this, but the practical tools and approaches that could help deal with the messy political realities.Yes, indeed, poverty...
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Juhani Koponen doubts that politics has ever been absent from poverty alleviation. The real task is to recognise its pervasiveness and to understand the many ways in which politics impact on poverty. He fears that too much concentration on poverty...
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Agreeing that politics are an intrinsic part of poverty issues, Nadia Molenaers takes the analysis by Koonings a step further. She asks: what are the opportunities the new aid approach offers in terms of bringing politics back in, and what are the...
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Marco Zupi shares much of Koonings’ criticism on current concepts of poverty that fail to include ‘the political’. In adding to the discussion, he highlights the ongoing interaction between different poverty approaches as well as the shortcomings...
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Brian Pratt agrees that politics have been largely omitted from the international poverty agenda. But he suggests that Koonings could have been even more critical. For instance on the impact of PRSP and on the inevitable resistance against pro-poo...
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Codes of conduct are supposed to regulate working conditions in garment and sport shoe factories all over the world. Efforts to coordinate these voluntary initiatives have so far not been effective. Stronger and more binding initiatives are needed.
Following the civil war in Lebanon (1975–1989) various multilateral donors initiated an ambitious programme of administrative reform. But they made a mess of it, concludes Nisrine El Ghaziri.
Non-governmental development organizations are expected to focus on countries with poor governance. New evidence shows that they do not. While they do tend to focus more than bilateral donors on poor countries, they make some curious geographical...
In the previous issue of The Broker we described the knowledge policy of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We invited Rob de Vos, who has been responsible for knowledge management at the ministry since 2003, and Louk Box, rector of the...
On 20 June 2007 Bart Tromp died, at the age of 62. Just two weeks earlier, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I had been sitting with him under a luminous sky at a terrace at the Nieuwmarkt, in the oldest part of Amsterdam. We spoke for two hours. We...
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As instruments of peacemaking, global institutions like the United Nations are not really popular. In the stiff ‘new-speak’ of the modern policy sciences we should evaluate these institutions in terms of their accountability, policy targets accomp...
In solving complex problems involving many different stakeholders, interdisciplinary research is indispensable. But cooperation between disciplines is not always easy. Since 2000 Wageningen University has funded a series of interdisciplinary resea...
It was with growing amazement that I read the article ‘Lessons not learned’ ( The Broker 2, p.8) on the evaluation of the Dutch research policy in the 1990s undertaken by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB).
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