The aid effect : giving and governing in international development / edited by David Mosse and David Lewis.

Originates from a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London between 26 and 28 September 2003.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Global governance and the ethnography of international aid / David Mosse -- Good governance as technology: towards an ethnography of the Bretton Woods Institutions / Gerhard Anders -- Timning, scale and style: capacity as governmentality in Tanzania / Jeremy Gould -- The genealogy of the 'good governance' and 'ownership' agenda at the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation / Jilles van Gastel and Monique Nuijten -- Whose aid? the case of the Bolivian elections project / Rosalind Eyben with Rosario Leon -- Interconnected and inter-infected: DOTS and the stibilisation of the Tuberculosis Control Programme in Nepal / Ian Harper -- The worshippers of rules? Defining right and wrong in local participatory project applications in South-Eastern Estonia / Aet Annist -- Unstating 'the Public': an ethnography of reform in an urban water utility in South India / Karen Coelho -- Disjuncture and marginality -- towards a new Approach to development practice / Rob van den Berg and Philip Quarles van Ufford.

Today international development policy is converging around ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction. What does this mean for the local and international dimensions of aid relationships? The Aid Effect demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. The contributors provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official aid policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the working of power inequalities built through the standardisations of a neoliberal framework. The contributors take on new challenges to anthropology presented by a {u2018}global aid architecture{u2019} which no longer operates through discrete projects but has moved on to sector wide approaches, budgetary support and other macro-level instruments of development; but they remain faithful to the fieldwork methodology that is anthropology{u2019}s strength and the source of rare insight.