I didn’t mean to read this book. I am in the middle of another book I’m reading for review – Ed Carr’s Delivering Development (which I am really enjoying, but it’s new enough to me that I am also carefully taking my time). But I picked Damned Nations off my to-read pile the other day because I was on my way to the bank and needed something while I waited. About five days later, I’m done.
Everyone new to aid and development should read Damned Nations. It didn’t have a lot in it that was new to me, but it’s a fantastic overview of almost every major issue in relief and development aid. Health, conflict, rule of law – packed into 200 well-written pages. I’m going to recommend this book to pretty much everyone who writes to me wanting to know more about aid, and I’m going to give it to my entire extended family next Christmas. Professors should be assigning this to their undergrads.
This is the book that explains the why and how of what we do. It’s about the issues that make aid necessary, the ways to do aid right, about being a better aid worker and a better donor. From SWEDOW to the Paris declaration to .7%, it’s all in there. And that’s woven in with compelling personal anecdotes and powerful imagery. This is a book my cousins will actually read. It is a beginner book, but it’s an amazing beginner book.
Like pretty much every book on aid, Damned Nations does a better job of identifying problems than solutions. The last chapter, in which Nutt talks about better aid, is by far the weakest of the book. I think that’s a forgivable flaw. These are giant problems and we’re still figuring out how to do things right. Nutt doesn’t have a set of handy prescriptions to fix aid because nobody does.
Now that I’ve finished my copy of Damned Nations, I’m ready to give it away. Leave a comment on this blog entry telling me one of your favorite books on aid and/or development and why, and I’ll enter you in the drawing. I’ll give you one entry for each comment. I’ll close comments on the 14th, and I will mail the lucky winner their book at the end of the month when I am in the US for the TED conference.
(Amazon links in this post are affiliate links. I will earn a tiny pittance if you click them.)
I’m going to go a little bit left field because it’s not a book on aid and development, but it helped me learn a great deal about this area. And it’s fiction. A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, talks about poverty from the perspective of four individuals. All the while, as we follow the lives of the four main characters, the same even tone is used to describe the events, to give the impression that life goes on, no matter what. I learnt a great deal about India, poverty, and life from this book.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Fine-Balance-ebook/dp/B002RI9ZSG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328594232&sr=1-1
Some good reads (all sorts of levels, some commonly referred to others not so much and from a wide spectrum of opinion):
Partner to the Poor – Paul Farmer
The Wisdom of Whores – Elizabeth Pisani
Wars, Guns, and Votes – Paul Collier
Patrick Manson Philip Manson-Bahr (history, but interesting for PH)
A Bell for Adano – John Hersey (fiction)
Getting Better – Charles Kenny
Poor Economics – Banerjee & Duflo
World Poverty and Human Rights – Pogge
The Shallows – Nicholas Carr (not devt, but good)
The End of Growth – Richard Heinberg
… list could go on but that is a start.
From the description of Damned Nations it sounds similar to James Orbinski’s tales from MSF:
http://www.amazon.com/Imperfect-Offering-Humanitarian-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0802717624/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328598270&sr=1-7
It’s heart-wrenching but his passion for humanitarianism shines through and leaves you with a better introduction to all the ambiguities and unknowns at the field level.
On a positive note, Muhammed Yunus’ latest book on social enterprises has greatly inspired me to look beyond large-scale or ‘traditional’ aid and encourages making small differences in your local environment, where you understand the context and can find sustainable (in terms of money) solutions to social or environmental problems.
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-World-Without-Poverty-Capitalism/dp/1586486675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328598323&sr=1-1
I enjoyed Duflo and Banerjee’s Poor Economics a lot, mostly for its microeconomics approach, something completely new to me.
Out of Poverty by Paul Polak is above and beyond my favorite development book. It’s straightforward, entertaining, and very prescriptive. You don’t have to agree like he does that design for the BoP will save the world. You’ll still appreciate his perspective, especially if you are tired of development books written by economists like me.
http://www.paulpolak.com/
I’m actually still searching for my favorite book on development. A somewhat related book I enjoy is Chabal and Daloz’s Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument.
I’m not really in aid development so I haven’t read many books. Poor Economics, yes, but honestly I’m wearying a bit of “economics solves everything” pop theory.
Three Cups of Tea? I kid! I kid! (by the way, why is this book still *everywhere* in bookstores? Is it still selling?)
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs was my first intro to economics as development in college, and I’m thankful that my professor assigned it even if his theories have come under some understandable fire. One of my favs is Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer.
Also read A Fine Balance – very good book.
From my perspective as a local city planner and international program officer a book I would recommend to newbies or experts is:
“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”:
http://www.halftheskymovement.org/
Yes, it focuses on women pioneering development projects from Asia to Africa. I enjoyed reading the book because it detailed the issue and how a individual or group (without a large donor backing) funded a grass-roots community solution. I was so inspired after reading this book.
I saw Samantha Nutt speak at the EWB conference last month but didn’t have a chance to buy the book – she’s an incredibly powerful speaker, as well. Glad to hear the book lives up to that!
One of my crash-course books to aid and development was Stephen Lewis’ ‘Race Against Time’ – I haven’t reread it in awhile, so doubtless I might have some quibbles with it now, but at the time it struck me and struck me hard, and really forced Baby Me to think critically about a lot of international structures and how we respond to crises.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t rec Stephanie Nolen’s ’28 Stories of AIDS in Africa,’ which is beautifully written and researched.
(Can you see my Canadian bias? Haha.)
“Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder. I learned that any easy solution probably isn’t a sustainable solution. Slow and steady win the race. I try to read this book once a year, every year.
Another for Poor Economics – Duflo & Banerjee. I was teetering on the edge of attempting to delve into a career in international development when a board member had an extra ticket for a luncheon where Duflo was the keynote speaker. Not only did I sit enraptured, buy the book, finish it in a couple of days, but I am now enrolled in an international development graduate program. They hooked me.
Half the Sky – Great for an introduction to a huge issue area, and they give a particularly moving call to action (more persuasive than Sachs’, in my opinion).
For a different perspective, William Easterly’s Reinventing Foreign Aid. Compilation of essays by different people, and, if you like a good rant, his introduction at the beginning is worth a read.
I’ve read every one of your blog entries for the last several years. I haven’t read any aid books yet but am ready to take the plunge and start. Does that count? 🙂 Please? If I don’t win, I will be ordering this book based on your recommendation.
Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics. It calls attention to the systematic problems of development on a structural level, and it challenges some fundamental assumptions about poverty in reasonable and clear arguments. Not to mention it’s a book on economics that is completely accessible to non-economists!
Pathologies of Power (Paul Farmer). Farmer provides a thorough analysis of social, political, and economic issues associated with health through personal, poignant examples, and offers an interesting perspective on human rights.
The Bottom Billion (Paul Collier). Written from a sound economic perspective, Collier examines why the 50 failed states are in the situation they are in, and what should be done about it.
From a faith-based perspective, When Helping Hurts (Corbett & Fikkert). This great beginner’s book on international development challenges conventional practices of the church (particularly with short-term “mission trips”) and gives pragmatic advice on how to pursue development through sustainable, culturally-relevant avenues.
I’ve been working my way through the list you posted in Dec 2010 and am currently reading Orientalism by Edward Said. It’s a challenging read but it resonates so much with my experience in humanitarian aid.
The book I’ve been impressedwith is Revlutions in Development Inquiry by Robert Chamers. On the cover sheet it says that Chambers shows how approaches to aid can empower a local people. There is a hisgtorical round-up and makes the case gthat participatory methodologies can be transformative. He has wide and deep experience and is an inspiring teacher as I know from workshops I’ve attended. Its useful to have a book that can guide a practitioner in facilitating. With much talk of transparency and accountability, I suggest these methods have a role to play. Chambers claims that participatory numbers and statistics are a ‘largely unrecognised field’ – his book fills a gap in expanding our understanding.
Not strictly development, per se, but my one of my favourite books is O.N.G! by Iegor Gran. It’s fiction about a war between two NGOs and the intern caught in the middle. It’s an (exaggerated?) account for anyone who’s ever worked, or is going to work, in an NGO.
http://livre.fnac.com/a1374470/Iegor-Gran-O-N-G
OK, I’m going to go with some non-development books that I felt teach important lessons about development:
-On the satire front, “Florence of Arabia” (Christopher Buckley) humorously reminds us of the massive and complex web of overlapping interests in any attempt to “help.” Also, this might be stretch, but Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” though lampooning the rich, is still brilliantly relevant in how it walks through a series of coldly logical steps to arrive at a conclusion to help a country that is prima facie absurd. Might ring a bell for some people.
-For non-fiction, Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is a powerful reminder of the massive underlying forces that should keep any development worker’s ego in check. More recently, Tim Harford’s “Adapt” provides an excellent overview of how acceptance of and reflection on failure, rather than twisting everything into a supposed “success,” is the real key to positive change and innovation.
A few months ago, the Guardian posted a syllabus of sorts for development at this link. Here’s a brief rundown of some of my favorites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/sep/21/first-year-development-student-books
I do believe Amartya Sen’s “Development of Freedom” must be mentioned as a great theoretical primer to the field. Sen’s model of development as a holistic process of political rights, gender equality, etc shows that “development” is so much more than just raw numbers of GDP and growth. It is a great intro to the capabilities approach (a burgeoning field in development theory) as well.
Ha-Joon Chang’s book “Kicking Away the Ladder” is a great read for those more attuned to economics, as it explains how government policies over time have perpetuated a world in which rich countries stay ahead of poor countries. While most development books look at why poor countries are poor, his work is unique in his historical analysis of how the West got rich. The policy implications for such research suggest that “development” in the 3rd world will be intrinsically flawed until we fix the rules of the global economy that benefit the West. Joseph Stiglitz would approve.