Originally published in 1967, the modest and plainly descriptive title of Development Projects Observed is deceptive. Today, it is recognized as the ultimate volume of Hirschman's groundbreaking trilogy on development, and as the bridge to the broader social science themes of his subsequent writings. Though among his lesser-known works, this unassuming tome is one of his most influential. It is in this book that Hirschman first shared his now famous "Principle of the Hiding Hand." In an April 2013 New Yorker issue, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an appreciation of the principle, described by Cass Sunstein in the book's new foreword as "a bit of a trick up history's sleeve." It can be summed up as a phenomenon in which people's inability to foresee obstacles leads to actions that succeed because people have far more problem-solving ability that they anticipate or appreciate. And it is in Development Projects Observed that Hirschman laid the foundation for the core of his most important work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and later led to the concept of an "exit strategy."

This book deals with problems frequently encoun-tered by agencies, managers, and technicians who try to implement large-scale development projects. Specifically, it focuses on the implementation problems associated with projects sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank in developing countries. Some historical background on how implementation problems became a focus of concern is presented below. Development assistance on a significant scale started with Marshall Plan aid to reconstruct Western Europe following World War II. [1] In that case, the donor (the United States) asked not to be part of the process that determined how the money was to be spent. Instead, the United States asked the West European countries to establish their own priorities for assistance (which they did after a considerable amount of inter-country negotiation).

International assistance programmes for developing countries are in urgent need of revision. Continuous testing and verification is required if development activity is to cope effectively with the uncertainty and complexity of the development process. This examines the alternatives and offers an approach which focuses on strategic planning, administrative procedures that facilitate innovation, responsiveness and experimentation, and on decision-making processes that join learning with action. A useful text for academics and practitioners in development studies, geography and sociology.

Expatriate leadership of USAID projects is complex, this title seeks to unravel those complexities. Expatriate leaders frequently find project success elusive, due to a multiplicity of factors, from adapting to a developing country’s socio-political-economic conditions to USAID’s policies. This book aims to explain why success is elusive.

This effort constitutes the most comprehensive and authoritative work to date on the history of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the World Bank. Author-editors John Lewis, Richard Webb, and Devesh Kapur chronicle the evolution of this institution and offer insights into its successes, failures, and prospects for the future. The result of their intense labors is an invaluable resource for other researchers and a fascinating study in its own right. The work is divided into two volumes. The first is organized thematically and examines the critical events and policy issues in the World Bank's development over the last fifty years. Chapter topics include poverty alleviation, structural adjustment lending, environmental programs, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Development Association (IDA), and the evolution of the Bank as an institution. The second volume contains case studies written by experts with experience in the various regions in which the Bank operates. There are chapters on the Bank's activities in Korea, Mexico, Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. Volume 2 also contains essays on the World Bank's relationship with the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, and its partnership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). By special arrangement, the authors have had wide-ranging access to confidential documents at the World Bank, making this work a unique source of information on the internal workings of this critical institution. They have also drawn on extensive interviews with current and past Bank officials. Moreover, publication could not be more timely, coming as it does when many in the development community and in the U.S. Congress are questioning the Bank's track record and even its reason for existence. The World Bank: Its First Half Century will be of great interest not only to development practitioners but also to students of international relations, development economics, and global finance. During the course of the project, John P. Lewis and Richard Webb were nonresident senior fellows, and Devesh Kapur was a program associate, in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Development is not a purely economic phenomenon; it also has a strong sociological element. The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change explores how economic socio-cultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Surveying narratives of how development occurs, from early evolutionary models to recent types of development theory, it outlines the main long-term changes in how socioeconomic development has been envisaged through time. The Many Faces of Socioeconomic Change presents the argument that socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and a general faltering of confidence in economists' boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty first century, development research is being pursued using research methods that generate disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that Neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory. With a broad scope of content and clear exposition of academic thinking this book guides the reader through the way in which the policy adopted as a consequence of modern theories has been less effective because of the neglect or a misunderstanding of the social context within which they operate.

The Elgar Companion to The World Bank provides a comprehensive review of the past 80 years for this powerful development institution. Using different theoretical approaches from an expert group of scholars as well as practitioners, it presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the World Bank and the wider field of International Relations.

Presents a selection of topics of special interest and relevance to eight Pacific Island countries that are member of the World Bank (PMCs)--Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Western Samoa. The themes selected are: the impact of recent changes in the external trading environment of the PMCs; economic diversification into tourism; improving the management of and getting better returns for natural resources such as fisheries and forestry; and regional cooperation. The report also includes profiles of these eight countries.

Land settlement in Latin America has become a subject of growing concern as governments renew efforts to develop agrarian potential and to relieve the pressure on overpopulated rural and urban areas. In this book, land settlement is viewed as the development of resources, both human and natural. The spatial organization of land settlement is examined in light of social and spatial patterns that may complement economic activities, lead to viable communities, and facilitate the provision of social and cultural amenities. The farm family is seen as the basic socioeconomic unit, and the family farmstead as the basic spatial nucleus.