Unusual times require unusual readings and I finally found the time to read Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty-The power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business . I had always thought of Lords of Poverty as the source of Ross Coggins’ famous The Development Set poem, but it is not so I finally had to turn my attention to the remaining 200 pages of his book… Similar to Cassens’ Does Aid Work? or Linear’s Zapping the Third World , Hancock’s book, first published in 1989, fits into an emerging discourse around exposing failed development aid at the end of the 1980s in in the style of mixing journalism, polemic exposure, a linear narrative of wasting taxpayers’ money topped off with a good dose of bureaucracy bashing. And if you think ‘well, that sounds an awful lot like the Daily Mail ’s coverage of aid 30 years later’ you are pretty much bang on the money! All jokes aside, this makes the book such an important and useful contribution to the ‘aid does not work’ ca...
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