Anthony Ware

The MDGs in Myanmar: relevant or redundant?

Myanmar is a developing country with significant humanitarian needs. It is therefore a country for which achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be a high priority. While exact data are difficult to obtain, Myanmar is performing poorly across most of the MDG targets. This is partly an unintended but direct consequence of the international sanctions and concomitant reduced aid flows into Myanmar. Myanmar receives the lowest level of aid per person of any of the 50 Least Developed Countries, raising the very direct question of whether the MDGs are relevant or achievable in Myanmar. Failure to achieve the MDGs could have serious implications in 2015 on future international funding and on reform programmes in the country. This paper considers how the political goals of the international community negatively impact upon the ability to achieve the MDGs and proposes a way forward by increasing aid and by tailoring the MDGs to the Myanmar context, as several regional neighbours have done.

Domains of faith impact: how “faith” is perceived to shape faith-based international development organisations

ABSTRACT Increasing interest in faith-based international development organisations (FBOs) recently has improved understanding of these agencies. One reason for complex, often contradictory findings is the lack of frameworks analysing the interactions of worldviews on organisational structures, processes, and behaviours of agencies, and development outcomes. We utilise Lincolns (2003. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press) four “domains of religion” to explore how the literature reports faith impacting the shape of development FBOs’ structures, behaviours, and outcomes. Literature suggests faith has a significant impact upon these agencies. We outline very specific similarities and differences, highlighting the importance of nuanced analysis of faiths role in FBOs. Further research is needed to build more evidence around these impacts of faith on FBOs.

Beyond the Usual Suspects: Complexity of Fragility and Analytical Framework

Making development work in fragile states is one of the biggest challenges for [the] international community... Fragile states are the hardest countries in the world to help develop. Working with them is difficult and costly and carries significant risks. Aid programmes in fragile states pose difficult policy dilemmas. All too often, donors have made the calculation that it is less harmful to do nothing or to rely on humanitarian responses.

L’implication des missionnaires pentecôtistes dans l’aide au développement en Asie du Sud-Est

A noticeable shift has been recently observed in Western-based Pentecostal mission agencies’ activities in mainland Southeast Asia. Where once these organizations avoided a visible priority on social justice as being at odds with their understanding of mission, the funding for and implementation of such programs has increased dramatically for the last two decades. This shift in focus is best understood by considering the motivations for this work and the perceived differences between evangelism and development work. This paper explores the motivations of these agencies for engaging in international development, and in particular the extent to which development programs are seen by these agencies as a strategy for proselytization and the extent to which they are conducted out of other humanitarian motivations. The research is based on a phenomenological literature survey and new interview data exploring development operations of western-based Pentecostal mission organizations in mainland Southeast Asia. Analysis of these data challenges preconceived notions of a distinction between motives of evangelism and humanitarian concern.

Development in a Fragile Pariah State: Myanmar 1990–2010

It has been suggested that the sociopolitical context of Myanmar during the 1990s and 2000s ‘calls into question much of fragile state policy .. [and] creates a new challenge for humanitarian policy’ (Duffield 2008, p. 39). Myanmar has been a United Nations’ least developed country for the past 27 years, and, as the poorest country in mainland Southeast Asia, is a ‘fragile state’ by most definitions. However, during most of this same period Myanmar was isolated as an international pariah, ostracised (particularly by the West) as a ‘pariah state’ that did not belong to the community of civilised nations over its human rights record. Strangely for this combination of factors, the regime that took power in 1988 had policies (at least in the beginning, and at least in rhetoric) which favoured foreign investment, neoliberal economic development, democratisation and international engagement. This paradoxical combination of poverty, fragility, pro-international engagement for economic growth polity and yet international isolation created an unusual and enigmatic context for international agencies, and one in which the existing frameworks for development in ‘fragile states’ do not appear overly relevant.

Critiques and alternatives: development in contexts of fragility

Effective development in fragile contexts has emerged as a key priority of international development actors over the last decade or so. This has been driven by a number of factors, including the belief that underdevelopment and security are interrelated, and concerns over the relationship between governance and development. This prioritisation is underscored by an increasing concentration of the world’ s absolute poor in such difficult sociopolitical contexts due to progress in more stable states, resulting in up to one-and-a-half billion people now living in fragile contexts (depending on definitions), with two-thirds of the world’ s remaining low-income countries being classified as ‘fragile’.

Development in Fragile States and Situations: Theory and Critique

Over the last decade or two, in particular, ‘fragile states’ have been linked in policy discourse with the worst extremes of personal and international security risk, including cross-border violent conflict, extremism, terrorism, organised crime, smuggling, human trafficking and pandemic disease. While factors like poor governance, human rights abuses, weak institutions and contested power may allow such eventualities in some cases, and the vast majority of contexts assessed as ‘weak’, ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ have high levels of poverty and insecurity, the correlations are not as simple as once thought. These are complex issues, plagued with ambiguity and contested terminology, which fit within a discourse driven as much by power and national security self-interest as by a desire to address the underlying issues for the people most impacted.

Through the Eyes of the Sponsored

Child sponsorship (CS) international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have a long history of using individual change stories in their marketing materials. However, a feature of the ongoing debate over the merits of CS-funded programmes is the reality that those parts of the discussion accessible in published literature have often been dominated by Northern journalists, aid industry insiders and academics. Often, the perspectives and lived experiences of those who are, or who have been sponsored in the South, have been marginalized and pushed to the periphery of discussion by experts in their haste to pass judgment on the legitimacy of CS-funded interventions. Yet, of all the perspectives on CS one might explore, perhaps one we should consider to be equally significant, is that of sponsored children and previously sponsored adults. The lived experience of those who grew up within a CS scheme, their own analysis of that experience, and the impact the experience has had on their lives, is an important set of perspectives to capture in a volume of this nature.