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This chapter discusses various ways in which the donor countries and agencies can help the developing world in conserving their forest resources and increase community participation in it. The mood within the international aid agencies in the 1990s, particularly the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Department for International Development of Great Britain, sharply swung toward sensitive and participatory approaches in their aid programs. To ensure the success of their aid programs, donor agencies should be more responsive to the just demands of local civil-society groups and progressive government agencies. Donors should also help in extending microcredit facilities to individuals, small user groups, and local communities whose subsistence depends on harvesting forest resources and selling or trading them. They can also help in the formulation of national-level research and policy advocacy efforts for sustainable community-based forest management and in the formation of community land trusts.

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.

This chapter introduces the main study of this book, which focuses on the efforts of Luo-speaking people and others in Kenya to make sense of, and cope with, foreign interventions in the form of credit. It discusses how by both insiders' and outsiders' judgments, tropical Africa, and western Kenya within it, are short of capital for agriculture and other productive uses. The chapter reveals that credit has been a standard response of international aid agencies to reports of declines in Africa's per capita agricultural production or rises in its population. It has come by itself or tied together with training, extension, marketing infrastructure, pricing interventions, conditional requirements about exchange rates, and free emergency relief. However, the philosophy, language, and career incentives of aid officials have been geared to the idea that poor people and countries must borrow.

This chapter compares the tobacco-growing project of British American Tobacco (BAT) with the government and international aid agencies' projects in Kenya, revealing that the tobacco-growing project offered inputs on credit without land titles as collateral security. While the government and international aid agencies' projects were an exercise in strategic complexity, the tobacco-growing project was an exercise in strategic simplicity. The BAT story suggests just how tightly a big organization with a strict, streamlined management and an expensive “extension” apparatus can control crop production for a highly lucrative cash crop—and how deeply, in doing so, it can affect the ecology and economy of a region it touches. The chapter suggests that the changes are by no means limited to material or financial ones; they profoundly influence social and indeed religious life as well.