This study directs attention towards a South-South dimension of knowledge transfer: specifically, China's educational exchange programs for Africa.

This study directs attention towards a South-South dimension of knowledge transfer: specifically, China's educational exchange programs for Africa.

Since the humanitarian response to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, there has been a growing body of literature on quality and accountability in humanitarian action. One of the most recent trends has been a focus on ‘humanitarian cooperation’ between the governments of disaster affected countries and other humanitarian actors. The research presented in this book builds on this trend by comparing two governmental recovery agencies, namely the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the Aceh Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR). Through a review of the literature on policy transfer, the creation of an integrated conceptual/analytical framework for policy transfer and the application of Lijphart’s ‘comparative method’, the research attempts to identify both whether or not policy transfer occurred between the two contexts, as well as the possible causes for the difference in both agencies’ ability to ‘build back better’. The outcomes of the research are then used to suggest possible areas of future research and related hypotheses.

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Cubans in Angola explores the unique and influential cooperation between two formerly colonized countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean in the global south.

With the rise of the ‘knowledge for development’ paradigm, expert advice has become a prime instrument of foreign aid. At the same time, it has been object of repeated criticism: the chronic failure of ‘technical assistance’ – a notion under which advice is commonly subsumed – has been documented in a host of studies. Nonetheless, international organisations continue to send advisors, promising to increase the ‘effectiveness’ of expert support if their technocratic recommendations are taken up. This book reveals fundamental problems of expert advice in the context of aid that concern issues of power and legitimacy rather than merely flaws of implementation. Based on empirical evidence from South Africa and Tanzania, the authors show that aid-related advisory processes are inevitably obstructed by colliding interests, political pressures and hierarchical relations that impede knowledge transfer and mutual learning. As a result, recipient governments find themselves caught in a perpetual cycle of dependency, continuously advised by experts who convey the shifting paradigms and agendas of their respective donor governments. For young democracies, the persistent presence of external actors is hazardous: ultimately, it poses a threat to the legitimacy of their governments if their policy-making becomes more responsive to foreign demands than to the preferences and needs of their citizens.