Interesting post, as usual – even though I sometimes disagree – from Owen Barder about transparency. I’ve stuck my oar in – again again – making the point that – CATCHPHRASE ALERT – “transparency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for securing effective accountability”.
Browsing Posts in Development assistance
There are lots of problems with development assistance. One of them is that people like me don’t really know what we’re doing, but pretend that we do. Or more specifically, that we rarely make explicit why we think that what we are doing will lead to the results that are hoped for. My thinking on [...]
I’m not going to comment on the recent stories about the possible diversion of aid to Ethiopia in the 1980s to buy arms, but readers might want to have a listen to three recent pieces about the country, and the UK’s aid relationship with the country, on the BBC’s World Tonight over the last couple [...]
People who work in development sometimes say things that are bleeding obvious and pass them off as profound without really exploring what they mean or what the implications are. I may not be immune to this practice. Saying that “context matters” is one that particularly gets my goat, perhaps in part because as a sometime-geographer [...]
Unfortunately not a commentary on the quality of governance in Ethiopia, or on the effectiveness of DFID’s efforts to promote “good governance” here, but a link to a reasonably straightforward description of the sort of thing I’m up to and a longer description – a report – for any keenies out there.
Imagine the scene: A meeting with senior British civil servants in Whitehall and an audience of 40 people. Thirty-five of them have English as their first language, but are able to speak a different language – let’s call it Amharic (a language with a totally different script) - to varying degrees of proficiency. Five of the audience [...]
