Aid Triangle

"Making Aid Work" focuses on the human dynamics of international aid; from impoverished farmers to aid workers; donor diplomats to multilateral bureaucrats; celebrities to activists, and to the unconcerned and uninvolved. This timely work illustrates how the aid system incorporates power relationships, and therefore relationships of dominance. It explores how such dominance can be both a cause and a consequence of injustice. It explains how the experience of injustice is both a challenge to, and a stimulus to, personal, community and national identity, and how such identities underlie the human potential that international aid should seek to enrich.Using the concepts of dominance, injustice and identity "Making Aid Work" provides an innovative and constructive framework for producing more empowering and more effective aid. The authors explains how people take actions which strive to achieve identity, esteem, and empowerment and how aid efforts often present obstacles to this because they - ironically - symbolise challenges to what people strive for. "Making Aid Work" elucidates how the psychology of political reality - at all levels of aid relationships - constitutes the gravitational field in which human dynamics try to orientate themselves. Written by three authoritative academics with the dirt of aid and development under their fingernails, this book beckons a new paradigm for aid by thinking it through, 'as if people mattered'.