Overview

"This book offers a broad historical narrative of foreign aid, international security and diplomacy. It emphasizes human development rather than economic development. The failures of foreign aid have drawn many assumptions into stark focus: the assumption that aid is reaching the bottom end of the socio-economic ladder, that those most capable of forming policy are in the Western academy, that decisions about where aid should go can be separated from culture and history. Picard and Buss suggest that continuing to discuss aid's problems using tired ideas won't work. They take an unconventional approach by placing aid in the context of larger security and foreign policy goals and by extending the history of aid prior to WWII and into the 19th century. Simplifying the complex world of foreign aid with all its diversity and meanings, the book serves as a contemporary introduction to a surprisingly old idea. """"A Fragile Balance"""" adopts both policy and normative perspectives, allowing readers to really get around the issues. It reveals the problems that remain and importantly, what can be done to fix the system. This text will serve as an invaluable introduction to undergraduate and graduate students studying foreign policy, security studies and economic development, but will also appeal to practitioners who want a fresh view of the so-called 'three Ds' of diplomacy, defense and development."

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9781565492950

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The most complete historical overview on US foreign aid in the literature. Much of the recent literature on foreign aid focuses on whether or not it works, but the landscape of much of the world receiving US assistance has changed. New diplomatic players, resource constraints and insurgents using both the oldest and newest of technologies provide new challenges to US foreign policy. A Fragile Balance provides historic context to the evolution of US foreign aid policy as a servant of strategic goals, and an efficient review of the dynamics of aid policy making as strategic goals changed overtime. Their peculiar strength is to illuminate the many current institutional debates about US foreign aid created by the strategic watersheds of 1991 and 2001: from human security to democracy and governance to trade and private investment. The authors could not be more correct [that implementing aid is a management problem]. Foreign aid implementation *is* a management problem and the authors are correctly critical of the short-term bridging training preferred by donor agencies.

The authors could not be more correct [that implementing aid is a management problem]. Foreign aid implementation *is* a management problem and the authors are correctly critical of the short-term bridging training preferred by donor agencies.

Author Information

Louis Picard is Professor in the Division of International Development, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. Terry Buss is distinguished professor of public policy at the Heinz College of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, Adelaide, Australia.

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