Give and Take: What's the Matter with Foreign Aid

by David Sogge

Overview

Foreign aid is a global endeavour with a huge turnover. But it is a troubled industry with few successes to its name, yet expected to respond to new and very complex problems. Can it do so? Supposed to be benign and selfless, it often harms more than it helps, and benefits givers more than receivers. Can it stop doing so? Can we create a system of genuine help -- democratic in its execution, effective in its impact, adequate in scale, just in its consequences? Give and Take grasps these questions.

Foreign aid is an issue that concerns us all, financially and morally. This thoughtful book argues that aid must be made less of a problem, more of a solution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781842770696
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/01/2002
Series:	Global Issues
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

David Sogge is a fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam. He has spent much of his professional life working for non-governmental aid agencies and in development cooperation programmes in Africa. He has written articles on aid, notably 'Misgivings: Aid to Africa' and 'Foreign Influence and Domestic Collusion in Policy Making: Have we seen the Future? Does it Work?', both published in South African journals. He is the author of two edited volumes on aid: Compassion and Calculation: The Business of Private Foreign Aid (1996) and Mozambique: Perspectives on Aid and the Civil Sector (1997).
David Sogge is a fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam. He has spent much of his professional life working for non-governmental aid agencies and in development cooperation programmes in Africa. He has written articles on aid, notably 'Misgivings: Aid to Africa' and 'Foreign Influence and Domestic Collusion in Policy Making: Have we seen the Future? Does it Work?', both published in South African journals. He is the author of two edited volumes on aid: Compassion and Calculation: The Business of Private Foreign Aid (1996) and Mozambique: Perspectives on Aid and the Civil Sector (1997).

Table of Contents

Forward & Acknowledgements
Prologue: Tale of Two Foreign Aid Initiatives
1. Foreign Aid: A Problem Posing as a Solution?
2. Who Aids Whom?
3. The Aid Regime
4. Aid Chains
5. Toward the Receiving End
6. Democratic Deficits
7. Money Talks
8. Outcomes
9. End of the Beginning, or Beginning of the End?
Appendices:
A. Major Donors' Top Five Recipients
B. Five Decades of Foreign Aid: Political & Economic Highlights
C. Intensity of ODA over Three Decades
D. The Debt
E. Sources of Information and Debate

Editorial Reviews

"David Sogge takes us up and down the "aid chain" and through the chequered history of foreign assistance. Impressively researched and reasoned, "Give and Take" leaves no doubt that calls for greater aid are pure folly until today's "market fundamentalism" and other donor agendas are rejected and systems of accountability to the poor we claim to assist are established." --Doug Hellinger, executive director, The Development Group for Alternative Policies

"Give and Take should be the primer on the aid industry. David Sogge makes clear why aid, in its present incarnation, will never help the poor." --Joe Hanlon, writer

"Highly critical of the way foreign aid has worked in practice, this ambitious book also outlines some core principles which could lead to aid making a positive difference for poor people." --Roger Riddell, Christian Aid

"Little has been written on aid other than the usual uncritical reports of donor agencies. In this important book David Sogge suggests the principles that should govern a very different pattern of globalization, one based on democracy and equal relations between Third World and donor countries - a far cry indeed from the present situation." --Samir Amin

From the Publisher

The author brings many years of experience in the aid industry to this biting critique of foreign aid today. He systematically reviews the stated and unstated aims of aid, the donor institutions and agencies that occupy its commanding heights, the aid policy process, and the multiple impacts of aid on recipient countries, particularly in Africa. He disaggregates the "aid chains" that transform policies into realities on the ground and deconstructs the often-deceptive discourse of "aid speak." Posed against the current U.S. administration's hostility toward any talk of global public goods is the Nordic-Dutch aid perspective derived from social democratic principles of mutual responsibility. Harmful Western aid policies based on market fundamentalism can be changed, Sogge believes, but only if policy makers are "shamed, prodded and cajoled into doing so" by well-informed insiders and political activists who recognize that there are better alternatives to the present system. This short but copiously referenced book provides a solid and provocative introduction to the topic.

Foreign Affairs

A self-employed analyst in the aid industry introduces general readers to some issues of foreign aid. He points out that most of his contracts with aid agencies forbid disclosing information about them, so the contributions from his own professional work must be general, and augmented heavily by corroborating testimony published by others. Distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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