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This chapter explores the building stage of the relationships among Congress, the IMF, and the World Bank, along with their domestic constituencies in American politics. The exogenous change that facilitated this process was the gradual resumption of international lending after World War II when Citibank and Chase Manhattan extended their branch banking operations overseas. As the work programs of the IMF and World Bank evolved, they reached out to the corporate community and Wall Street, initially to enable securities legislation permitting the World Bank to raise capital domestically. The chapter argues that internationalists, together with banks and large corporations, forged a powerful bloc of support by promoting the Bretton Woods institutions as a rival development strategy to the communist one during the Cold War. The bloc subsequently assisted in passing legislation creating two new agencies under the umbrella of the World Bank Group, the International Development Association and the International Finance Corporation. An important mechanism of congressional advocacy in these years was the insertion of provisions in legislation creating them that influenced their early functioning.

In this chapter, the IMF, World Bank, and Congress entered the revived stage of the relationship among them. The revival was triggered externally by the international dimensions of the 2008 financial crisis. Internal change in the legislature came from the election of democratic President Barack Obama, ending the earlier period of divided government. The chapter argues that through congressional advocacy efforts, the IMF received an increase in its New Arrangements to Borrow, following an informal agreement to modify some conditionality and transparency practices. The World Bank achieved the authorization and appropriation for the fifteenth replenishment of the International Development Association, with provisions over the use of the labor indicator in the Doing Business report. The role of the IMF in the Eurozone bailouts associated with the Greek and Irish crises is not conclusive in 2011. However, the era of divided government that facilitated a certain degree of support for the Bretton Woods institutions ended with the close of the 111th Congress. The length and character of the revival faces the obstacle of the collapse of the traditional constituencies of support for the IMF and World Bank in the international banking communities in the long term.

Incentives for an aid agency’s staff to learn about sustainability of field activities is one of the most fundamental factors in that agency’s quest for sustainable development outcomes. It is essential for agencies to base their decisions about development cooperation programs on an ongoing learning and adjustment process. Drawing from the general discussion of collective-action problems in public organizations in earlier chapters, the IAD framework is employed to identify and analyze specific collective-action problems within the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and its relationships with counterparts and contractors, both at the Stockholm headquarters and in the field.

This chapter studies the state fragility index of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). This index serves as an example of the uses, creation, and supposed measurement through indicators of the concepts of fragile, failing, or failed states. It describes this term as a ‘trading language’, which is used to refer to complicated social realities that are very heterogenous and have very little empirical and theoretical agreement.

Classical International Development Law (IDL) has not kept its promises despite continuing attempts to implement it. Major legal principles such as the right of peoples to self-determination, sovereignty over natural resources, and the right to nationalize against just compensation have helped to found and consolidate the sovereignty of newly independent states and let them properly consider their development. However, the set of legal norms that were subsequently adopted, which are legally binding and have been provided with some effectiveness, have proved extremely disappointing in their application. The new IDL of the post-Cold War years, which currently applies concurrently with conventional law on the matter seems no more effective. To change the existing dire condition, three options are open: sticking to the neo-liberal pro-market paradigm — an economically efficient but socially unfair solution; jettisoning any model of development — a blind alley; and changing the rules of the global economic system, and creating a new and fair New International Economic Order. This third option aims at changing the rules of the global economic system, recasting the Bretton Woods financial institutions, changing the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and revising the World Trade Organization in a more equitable direction so that it finally refocuses relations between the various North(s) and South(s).

This chapter surveys the 20-year history of development partnerships between the United States and Mongolia, focusing especially on the work of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). It describes the evolution of the USAID program from one focused on immediate humanitarian relief to more sustainable long-term development. It also assesses some of the more notable USAID activities, including the Gobi Initiative, the GER Initiative, the establishment of Xac Bank and the revitalization of Xaan Bank. These early activities helped pave the way for a $285 million MCC program launched in 2008, one in which Mongolian partners played a key role.

This chapter explains the nature of American interest in international housing conditions after World War II, as well as the mechanisms by which Americans funnelled aid abroad. American aid flowed primarily through the international division of federal housing agencies, or the various agencies tasked with bilateral aid outside the Department of Defense. Americans also contributed to a wide array of international, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental bodies, exerting varying degrees of influence within each. This chapter details the various modes of American leadership and participation and then offers a short summary of the overarching organization of the book.

Chapters 4 and 5 respectively explore the international and domestic institutional arrangements that American universities created to promote economic development around the world. Chapter 4 explains the US government’s university contracts abroad program, created in 1951 as part of the effort to implement Point Four. It also provides two case studies of university activities in Pakistan under government contracts: Penn’s attempt to create the Institute of Public and Business Administration at the University of Karachi, and the University of Southern California’s subsequent public administration program at several Pakistani institutions. The USC program self-consciously reflected on its “institution building,” and the case study traces the rise of that concept in the nationwide discussion of universities’ overseas activities that began in the mid-1950s among academic, foundation, and government officials.

This chapter covers the first two decades of the World Bank’s operations, when it was transformed from a financial institution to a fully fledged development agency. After sketching the Bank’s founding and the key terms of its Articles of Agreement, the chapter describes a series of innovations in its early activities; the articulation by its President of a philosophy of “development diplomacy”; the establishment of the International Development Association, dedicated to the concerns of “underdeveloped” states; and the formulation of a legal hermeneutic that would allow continuous expansion of the Bank’s activities. The chapter ends by describing how the international political project of “Third-World” states presented a challenge to the Bank, eliciting among other things an important official interpretation of the political prohibition in the Bank’s Articles, and a broadening concern for the social dimensions of development.

This chapter explores the National Council of Negro Women's (NCNW) international work, focusing especially on NCNW's postwar work for human rights and its later formation of an international division in the 1970s. In 1973 Congress passed the Percy Amendment to the U.S. Foreign Service Act that pushed the U.S. government to ensure that women were beneficiaries of international development projects. In this climate, NCNW won $1.7 million dollars in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) between 1975 and 1985. The U.S. government saw the women of the NCNW, as a black American women-led nonprofit organization, as the "natural allies" of women of African descent worldwide. With this money, the NCNW first hosted a concurrent conference for women of African descent at the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City, established an international division, and tried to create international poverty programming like it had in Mississippi.

This chapter was published in 2008, shortly after the decision of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to reorganize some 90 zakat committees and bring them under central control. The chapter (originally published by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) set out to review competing interpretations of the nature of the West Bank committees during the “Oslo period”, after limited autonomy was ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority but before the split between the West Bank and Gaza which took place in 2007. Allegations in the counter-terrorist literature that the zakat committees had been simply fronts for Hamas are considered here and found to be unpersuasive, short of hard evidence and especially in the light of the confidence that – according to reputable opinion surveys – they earned from the Palestinian public. A more benign interpretation is offered in this chapter – that these zakat committees were a result of the “Islamic resurgence” and were typically grass-roots, community based organizations that were beginning to tap into the international aid system, in response to urgent humanitarian needs and the pressures inflicted by the Israeli Occupation.

This chapter shows how ideas about aid and development were shaped by events in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union, in particular the increasing focus in aid programmes on issues around governance, democratization and rights. It also looks at the growing importance of poverty reduction as the key objective of aid and development, and the emergence of the new International Development Targets (IDTs).

The long 1970s was a difficult time for those promoting investment treaties and ISDS. OECD members had not adopted a multilateral convention, and the Global South was demanding a change in the rules of the game. The norm entrepreneurs’ self-confidence was decreasing. In this challenging context, the International Chamber of Commerce took the initiative and put forward a conception of foreign investor obligations consistent with investment treaties and ISDS. This move conceded little to the Global South: the best companions to strong foreign investor rights are weak or even voluntary investor obligations. For a while the outcome was uncertain, as different imaginations competed for the space of international investment law. This chapter examines some of these competitors, including the 1974 UN report on the impact of MNCs, the US position on the topic, and the 1974 UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.

Monteverde is renowned among tropical biologists, conservationists, and ecotourists for its cloud forests, quetzals, and Golden Toads. These forest ecosystems have been preserved while many other rain forests in Latin America have been destroyed for agriculture, wood products, and development. Initially, the area was preserved because it was nearly inaccessible; it remains protected because of dedicated efforts by local inhabitants, the development of effective grassroots organizations, and funds and expertise from the international scientific and conservation communities. In this chapter I document the development and contributions of grassroots conservation organizations that promote conservation practices and thinking. Four organizations preserved forested areas that now constitute the Monteverde Reserve Complex (see Fig. 1.7): (a) Bosqueterno, a reserve and organization formed by the Quaker settlers to protect their watershed; (b) the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve (MCFP) managed by the San José-based Tropical Science Center (TSC); (c) Bosque Eterno de los Niños (Children’s Eternal Forest; BEN), whose land was acquired by the Monteverde Conservation League (MCL); and (d) the Santa Elena High School Cloud Forest Reserve (SER) established by the local high school (colegio). Other activities discussed in this chapter are efforts to (1) protect reserve areas, (2) protect forest fragments outside the reserves and create corridors to link forested areas, (3) reforest and rehabilitate damaged land, (4) develop environmental education at all levels, (5) develop complementarity and cooperation among organizations, and (6) establish projects in sustainable development. These topics are linked with the growth of scientific knowledge and the development of ecotourism in the zone. The thesis of this chapter is that conservation organizations emerged as a series of responses to newly perceived environmental needs and opportunities. I identify successes and failures of conservation efforts by organizations in the Monteverde Zone and the factors responsible for them, analyze problems that have been or need to be resolved, and determine the extent to which institutional developments in the Monteverde Zone may serve as models in conservation and sustainable development for other areas.

This chapter aims to show—by moving between policy-making sites in the United States and Madagascar—how the evolution of America's environmental investments in Madagascar was both constitutive and reflective of power relations between public and nonprofit organizations that transcended national boundaries. It first discusses the history of early U.S. aid to Madagascar. The chapter then analyzes the progression of contributions by the United States to the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP), documenting how the relationship among NGOs, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. Congress evolved through various conservation trends. It also evaluates impediments to the USAID mission's efforts to promote integrated environment and agriculture programs and the ways in which actors creatively worked around these constraints. Finally, the chapter explores the relationship between conservation politics in Washington, D.C. and in Madagascar.