Bøger i Development in Practice Reader serien

This volume outlines many of the tensions NGOs face in claiming to speak for the poor while also remaining accountable to national and international actors. Together the authors provide an excellent overview of these important issues.

Students of humanitarian action - academics and practitioners alike - will find this volume a rich repository of data and insights. Larry Minear, Former Director, Humanitarianism and War Project.

This collection examines the meaning of gender relations in the contexts of development practice and of development institutions: in relation to refugee programmes and in diagnosing the needs of rural communities, the needs of elderly people, and the challenges of working with street children and adolescents

Humanitarian relief has always focused on meeting the needs of people affected by war and armed conflict. Today, the same is increasingly true of development programmes. The challenge for aid agencies is not only to apply development principles to their emergency work, but also to address the issues arising from the reality of military conflict and destruction. Working for change brings aid agencies face to face with violence: powerlessness on the one hand, and abuse of power on the other.

'Aid thus becomes a means by which unequal relationships of power are maintained and patronage is fostered.' This reader examines these issues, which are currently being debated in development circles, through a selection of articles by contributors from North and South.

As development NGOs and official aid agencies embrace the idea of "becoming a learning organisation", they are increasingly concerned with some form of knowledge generation and organizational learning. To date, the literature on these issues tended to come out of the private sector and reflect a Western worldview. This book presents contributions from development scholars and practitioners from a range of institutional backgrounds around the world, some introducing new approaches and models, others offering critical case studies of individual and group learning practice across cultures, and organizational efforts to put theory into practice. Among the lessons to emerge from this work are that learning is hard to do, that we often learn the wrong things and that huge gaps often remain between our learning and our behaviour or practice. There are clearly no simple recipes for success, but when learning breakthroughs do occur, the organizational whole can truly become more than the sum of its parts.

This selection of essays presents an overview of different feminist approaches to peace building and conflict resolution and puts forward concrete policy measures to achieve these ends.