Paved with Good Intentions–Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism (book review)
S trange how reality works in mysterious ways sometimes: While I had started f eeling guilty that I had not started to read and review Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay’s book Paved with Good Intentions – Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism , the current discussions around a potential dissolution of CIDA give the book an even more contemporary relevance as it gets ready for the second printing. The book tells and important – and certainly not just limited to Canada! – story about the changing relationships between the s tate, civil society, NGOs and, depending on your political viewpoint, the professionalization/ depoliticization /selling out of this growing sect or of the global aid industry. The book attempts to, and often successfully manages, to bring together three narratives ab out the history of Canadian NGOs, neoliberal politics and a focus on the situation in Haiti where the authors were involved as a cross-cultural activists. Before I will go into