NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa

NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa PDF Author: Melina C. Kalfelis
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800731116
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. In Africa, NGOs are not remote, but familiar players, situated in the midst of cities and communities. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans. Its contributions are immersed in the pasts, presents and futures of personal encounters, memories, decision-making and politics.

NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa

NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa PDF Author: Melina C. Kalfelis
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800731116
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. In Africa, NGOs are not remote, but familiar players, situated in the midst of cities and communities. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans. Its contributions are immersed in the pasts, presents and futures of personal encounters, memories, decision-making and politics.

Rethinking International Organizations

Rethinking International Organizations PDF Author: Dennis Dijkzeul
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571816566
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The management of international organizations is attracting growing attention. Most of this attention is highly critical of both the UN system and International NGOs. Sometimes, this criticism lacks depth or reflects insufficient understanding of these organizations, or is based on narrow, and sometimes biased, internal political concerns of a particular country. International relations theory has insufficiently studied the type of linkages that these organizations provide between international decision-making and Northern fundraising on the one hand, and practical action in the South on the other. As a result, current theory too rarely focuses on the inner functioning of these organizations and is unable to explain the deficiencies and negative outcomes of their work. While the authors identify and describe the pathologies of international organizations in, for example, international diplomacy, fundraising, and implementation, they also stress positive elements, such as their intermediary role. The latter, in particular, could form the basis of more efficient and effective policies, in addition to other recent trends, also described in this volume, that hold hope for a stronger functioning of these organizations in the future. This book presents a long overdue empirical and theoretical overview of criticism on and cures for these organizations. It provides a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to the management of international organizations.

European Civil Society and International Development Aid

European Civil Society and International Development Aid PDF Author: Balázs Szent-Iványi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000773027
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book explains how and why European non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) engage in advocacy towards the European Union (EU). It analyses the heterogenous structure of the sector, with examples ranging from large multinational networks to essentially single person NGDOs. The book provides a detailed map of the topics which have featured in NGDO advocacy since 2006, arguing that NGDOs have generally been reactive in their advocacy towards the EU. The author explains how they have contested a number of policy issues on the agendas of the EU institutions, especially around the diversion of aid to manage migration and leverage private sector investments. Furthermore, some NGDOs have used the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to re-package their pre-existing policy demands. Based on an analytical framework focused around three variables, namely moral vision, funding concerns, and the need to build/maintain a ‘good’ reputation, the book explains these advocacy choices, and argues that much of NGDO advocacy seems to be consistent with funding motivations. The author highlights the importance of moral vision and reputational concerns in moderating how far NGDOs will go with funding-driven advocacy, arguing that motivations need to be looked at in their complexity, and within the specific policy context. Drawing on a range of quantitative and qualitative data sets to provide a rich and varied picture of the advocacy work of European development NGOs, European Civil Society and International Development Aid is a key reference for researchers and practitioners working in the field.

University and Academics’ Societal Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa

University and Academics’ Societal Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa PDF Author: Nelson Casimiro Zavale
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040091814
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive account of the patterns of university and academics’ societal engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), considering knowledge production and the resulting outputs, outcomes, and benefits that are yielded from such engagement for society. Responding to the call for increased visibility of otherwise marginalised voices in SSA’s extant global literature on knowledge production, chapters in the book explore questions around Knowledge-based Economies and forms of knowledge, and suggest an alternative framework to overcome conventional bias and limits present in prominent concepts, such as National Systems of Innovation, Triple Helix, and Mode 2. Further, the authors examine the main drivers, constraints, and barriers to this engagement, and the typology of those with a vested interest in its development. Ultimately exploring how higher education institutions in SSA engage with, and transfer knowledge to, different external stakeholders, this book will be of value to academics involved with the study of higher education and science, innovation studies, the sociology of education, and education and development more broadly. In addition, politicians, administrators, and practitioners related to higher education, science, and innovation will also find the book of use.

Foreign Aid in the Middle East

Foreign Aid in the Middle East PDF Author: Beáta Paragi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786735806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
What do we mean by 'gifts' in International Relations? Can foreign aid be conceptualized as a gift? Most foreign aid transactions are unilateral and financially unreciprocated, yet donors expect to benefit from them.Previous research dealing with foreign aid has analyzed the main donor motives and interests in providing financial support. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the invisible political or social 'exchange' taking place between recipient countries and donors when a grant agreement is signed. Focusing on Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel - the main beneficiaries of Western foreign aid – the book uses gift theories and theories of social exchange to show how international social bonds are shaped by foreign aid and in what ways recipient countries are obliged to return the 'gift' they receive. Foreign aid is a means of buying 'stability' or 'democracy' in the region but Beata Paragi is interested here to understand the actual feasibility of Western assistance. Looking at the context of the Arab Spring, the book examines how aid impacts on a recipient country's domestic political events such as war, the quest for self-determination, the struggle against occupation and the fight for dignity. An original contribution to Middle East Studies and International Relations, the research presents an alternative interpretation of foreign aid and show how external funds interact with local developments and realities.

Gender, Power, and Non-Governance

Gender, Power, and Non-Governance PDF Author: Andria D. Timmer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800734611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Using Sherry Ortner’s analogy of Female/Nature, Male/Culture, this volume interrogates the gendered aspects of governance by exploring the NGO/State relationship. By examining how NGOs/States perform gendered roles and actions and the gendered divisions of labor involved in different types of institutional engagement, this volume attends to the ways in which gender and governance constitute flexible, relational, and contingent systems of power. The chapters in this volume present diverse analyses of the ways in which projects of governance both reproduce and challenge binaries.

Nigerian Cultural History and Challenges of Postcolonial Development

Nigerian Cultural History and Challenges of Postcolonial Development PDF Author: Aderemi Suleiman Ajala
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527502279
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
An inspiring editorial analysis and interpretation of aspects of Nigerian history, culture, and politics, from mankind’s archaeological past to ethnographic present, this book contextualises cultural history as instrument of sustainable development in postcolonial Nigeria. Nigeria’s rich cultural history defines its physical environment, cultural diversities, early industrial technology and even its various challenges of development. Yet, little is achieved in engaging cultural history as cultural experience for the country’s development. The gains of cultural history as a mirror of the past and inspiration for development is ignored. This difficulty in harnessing the potential for development in Nigeria found in the country’s cultural history leaves us vulnerable to repeating past mistakes. The book is accessible, and aimed at giving the readers a unique and expansive understanding of history, cultural knowledge, and their applications in Nigerian postcolonial development agendas. This makes the book essential for scholars of anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, sociology, political science, and geography, as well as policy makers.

The Twilight of Cutting

The Twilight of Cutting PDF Author: Saida Hodzic
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291999
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum. What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a moment? The Twilight of Cutting examines these and other questions from the vantage point of Ghanaian feminist and reproductive health NGOs that have organized campaigns against cutting for over thirty years. The book looks at these NGOs not as solutions but as sites of “problematization.” The purpose of understanding these Ghanaian campaigns, their transnational and regional encounters, and the forms of governmentality they produce is not to charge them with providing answers to the question, how do we end cutting? Instead, it is to account for their work, their historicity, the life worlds and subjectivities they engender, and the modes of reflection, imminent critique, and opposition they set in motion.

Everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia

Everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia PDF Author: Anne-Meike Fechter
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526172097
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Faced with the scale of global challenges such as poverty and inequality, one question is where to start. Humanitarian efforts can only ever have limited reach. Among all of human suffering, whom should we support? And what shapes our choices? Such questions are at the core of this book. Through an ethnographic account of moralities, it traces how everyday humanitarian practitioners challenge entrenched values of what matters, upending the notion that the large-scale is inherently important, and even questioning what ‘large’ means in the first place. Instead, these practitioners typically aim to create a difference in the life of a particular person, situating their limited actions within pervasive poverty.

Cultures of Doing Good

Cultures of Doing Good PDF Author: Amanda Lashaw
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319689
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained. The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: “Changing Landscapes of Power,” “Doing Good Work,” and “Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology.” Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field. In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women’s legal arbitration, and environmental conservation. The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.