John M. Heffron

Beyond community and society: The externalities of social capital building

The concept of social capital is both a very new and a very old one. Even the earliest human societies, in their efforts to manage and control a hostile physical environment, produced assets that gave their strivings a larger, cumulative effect, one of the earmarks of social capital formation. Pre-scientific societies, anthropologists tell us, engaged in a process of ordering and classifying their experience that if not scientific in our modern sense of the term was not entirely mythological either. What Claude L evi-Strauss has called the science of the concrete — ‘the organization and exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms’ — is a quintessentially human activity, as relevant to our ancient ancestors as it is to us today (Levi-Strauss, 1973: p. 16). Pre-modern forms of social capital tended to be nested in structures, not individuals; they were context dependent, time-bound, and almost exclusively group-based (Redfield, 1953).

Between Reconstruction and Restoration: Three Historical Case Studies

What are the most salient features of Afghanistan’s latest bid for social, economic, and political reconstruction? How has the presence of a weak central government, made weaker by a long devastating war, affected foreign aid to the country, now and in the recent past? Are language, culture, and a common historical heritage sufficient to unite a nation? Are they sufficient to heal it in the aftermath of the long war?

Soka education as a theory of leadership: Implications for the preparation, practice, and for the re-structuration of the modern principalship

This research poses two interrelated questions. How important is it for the formation of democratic ideas about educational leadership that the group or individual promoting those ideas is operating within a democratic political environment or, to the contrary, in the absence of one? And second, in the case of the latter, what are the available resources – historical, educational, philosophical, and transnational – for a countervailing vision of educational leadership, one rooted in precisely those democratic forms that have failed to find a hospitable environment in the home country: in the case of this research, feudal Japan in the 1930s and 1940s when a heightened form of militant fascism ruled the country. The strength of an idea, especially one that emerges in an inhospitable environment, that draws its strength from a kind of stress of opposites, and that survives the political machinations against it, may in selective cases be sufficient enough to overcome the structural limits of context. One such idea, the article argues, is ‘Soka,’ a Japanese term that translates as value creation. A fundamental critique of this philosophy is that ‘education is unproductive,’ not in the narrow economic sense of the term, but in the production of ‘benefit, good, and beauty,’ the building blocks of ‘value creation,’ a dynamic process of meaning-making within any given reality. The article demonstrates how an historical case from Japan can have broad contemporary use and significance for educational leadership and its preparation.

Conclusion: Linkages and Challenges

We have seen that some aspects of the evolution of development thinking and practice have been quite positive. First, the development agenda has been greatly expanded, bringing development efforts more broadly in line with the full pursuit of human dignity by going beyond economic growth to include equitable distribution, responsive governance, environmental protection, gender equality, and minimization of violence. Second, the expertise in the field of development has deepened and broadened. Development economics, development administration, human ecology, institutional analysis, gender studies, anthropology, and a host of other fields have been deployed to address development challenges. A host of institutions has accumulated and organized vast amounts of information, leading to broader and more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and challenges of development. Third, with experience has come greater pragmatism; in many circles the extreme ideological positions have given way to asking what works in particular contexts. And, as the monitoring of the MDGs has indicated, significant progress has been made in reducing poverty, illiteracy, discrimination against women, and some diseases in many countries, though these problems remain severe in numerous nations as well.

Economic Policy and Program Practice

We have seen that economic policy doctrines often do not correspond with the latest theories of development economics. Yet, to an even greater extent, economic policy practice has departed from theories and doctrines. Examining how and why these departures have occurred will build our understanding of the challenges that policymakers continue to face. We shall see that the decision-aiding methods derived from economic theory do not provide the guidance required to select optimal economic policies, programs, or projects. We shall also see the faltering progress of the major policy reform designed to further both equity and efficiency. These include liberalizing the economy to reduce rent-seeking, reforming or privatizing state-owned enterprises, enhancing tax collection, creating propoor social safety nets, extending social services, stimulating propoor regional development without provoking violence, managing natural resources soundly, redressing the bias against agriculture, developing sound physical infrastructure, and decentralizing economic decision making. While poverty alleviation has made progress in most developing countries, the full potential to redress poverty has been hampered by the failure to translate these propoor doctrines into practice. Finally, the inability to specify technically which sectors to promote for greatest societal gain leaves the field open to organized interest groups, often at the expense of the most vulnerable families.

Evolution of Foreign Assistance Theories and Doctrines

This chapter traces out how foreign assistance has been conceived and rethought throughout the post-WWII period. Whether in the hands of the US government, the Soviet Union, Western European nations, the East Asian Tigers, or international organizations, foreign assistance has served—but also disserved—both donors and recipients.

International Development in the American Grain: From Point Four to the Present

This chapter recounts the changing institutional and political context of US foreign assistance. This evolution is unique, not only in its dominance over the past 70 years but also in its major role in the global development assistance effort. The search for a stable US foreign assistance institutional structure has largely been accomplished, but the broader institutional arrangements have placed development assistance into a chronically precarious position. We must also acknowledge that even with a stable organizational structure, no matter what the organizational chart looks like, the funding for USAID and smaller assistance agencies is far too small to make major inroads in economic assistance. In FY 2014, total US foreign assistance was roughly

Evolution of Governance and Development Administration Theory

34 billion, of which

Evolution of Governance and Development Administration Practice

8.5 billion was for international security assistance and

The Transnational Context of Schooling

3 billion for multilateral institutions. USAID’s economic assistance was only