This is a book aimed at readers who work in the “aid business”. These include officials of bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, and the non-government organizations and consultancies working on contract for or independent of the official agencies. Its fundamental premise is that aid works best if it helps its ultimate beneficiaries realize their own goals. Much of the book provides an analysis of how the purveyors of aid can go about achieving this objective.
Hira and Parfitt make an important contribution to the way we should think about the complex relationships between aid donors and recipients. Conceptually their approach owes a lot to postmodernist thinkers, particularly Michel Foucault, as well as to Antonio Gramsci. From these thinkers the authors adapt concepts of deconstruction, cultural hegemony, power relations and legitimation to the challenge of providing effective aid. Although this might at first seem like a heroic conceptual leap, their analysis leads them in directions pioneered by Rondinelli (1983) twenty years ago, or much more recently, by Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, New York: Random House, 1999) and William Easterly (The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
Essentially Hira and Parfitt are challenging the top-down culture of the aid industry that imposes a number of constraints and conditions on aid recipients, which apart from its neocolonial overtones, often results in failure. However, much has recently been made by donors about the shift from aid provided predominantly for projects to “program-based approaches”. Donors claim that program-based aid (such as sector-wide approaches), not being tied to particular projects, provides for greater ownership and flexibility by recipients in designing and implementing their development priorities. Hira and Parfitt contest this claim, arguing that donors still exert control through conditionality in their program aid, which is thus likely to meet the same fate as project aid.
The authors argue that only a bottom-up approach—“development from below”—can rescue aid from this fate. Salvation lies principally in empowering the beneficiaries to participate in development, from identification to design and implementation. Participatory development, which owes much to the work of Robert Chambers, comprises a whole family of methods that enable local people “to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, and to plan, act, monitor and evaluate.” In what amounts to their core chapter, Hira and Parfitt provide a constructive critique of such methods, including Participatory Rural Appraisal, suggesting that they can also become routinized and lose their participatory praxis. They point to other methods such as Participatory Action Research that are less vulnerable to this shortcoming.
The book has some weaknesses. Its chapter on the history of postwar development aid contains some factual errors. There are editorial problems: it is clear that the chapters are separately authored. However, perhaps its biggest weakness relates to a degree of naïveté about the Realpolitik of aid. It is difficult to conceive of any aid system, present or future, in which the donors completely, or even largely, surrender control over the use to which their aid is put. In that context the book also provides little recognition of the importance of the prevailing neoliberal development paradigm and the relative unimportance of aid. Far more important than aid are international trade, foreign direct investment, volatile capital flows, the debt burden, migration, and most of all, the economic policy framework imposed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and the major industrial countries. Participatory, bottom-up development can probably do little to counter these huge global forces.
Nevertheless, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Hira and Parfitt succeed in lighting a candle for thousands of people—in aid agencies, NGOs, consulting firms, and most of all, the communities, families and individuals in the developing world who wage a daily struggle to improve their lives and those of their children.
