Anthropology

Product Description

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 ‘global aid architecture’ 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’s strength and the source of rare insight.

About The Author

David Mosse is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is author of The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Collective Action in South India (Oxford University Press, 2003).

David Lewis is Professor of Social Policy and Development in the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. He is the author of Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (2012) and co-editor of The Aid Effect (Pluto, 2005).

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