Development in Wadi Rum? State Bureaucracy, External Funders, and Civil Society

Bibliographic Data

ID8968407
AuthorsLaurie A Brand (0009-0000-4989-9940, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume33
Issue4
Pages571-590
Publication date2001-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743801004056
OpenAlexW1972091782
LanguageEN
Citations received14

One of the most important lessons development agencies claim to have learned over the past decades is that the absence of local participation at various stages of project planning and implementation leads to what at best can be termed “inferior results.” 1 The conclusion that community participation is necessary (if not sufficient) for project success has developed concomitantly with the belief in the halls of power that the state is not the ideal executor of a variety of tasks previously deemed its proper realm. Both of these changes in development thinking converged in practical terms beginning in the 1980s in the emergence of a greater stress on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Not only were NGOs and other civil-society actors (including the private sector) seen as untainted by the rent-seeking behavior attributed to state bureaucracies; they were also seen as products of more local or community-based and -interested organizing, a critical vehicle for local participation that so many development projects had lacked. Some of this literature also regarded such institutions as the forerunners of and central to democratic transitions. 2

Bureaucracy · Civil society · Democracy · Executor · Ideal (ethics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Public relations · Realm · Sociology · State (computer science · Variety (cybernetics · International Development and Aid · Law · Public Administration

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