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Putting People First Again: Non‐Governmental Organisations and the ‘New Orthodoxy’ for Development
Author(s) -
ALLEN TIM
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7717.1990.tb00973.x
Subject(s) - orthodoxy , citation , library science , media studies , sociology , history , computer science , archaeology
Partly because we are entering the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, agencies involved in disaster mitigation are reviewing their activities. This book is a contribution to the discussion from an increasingly fashionable perspective: it stresses the need for grassroots projects implemented through NGOs. In this article I shall highlight some of the issues raised in the book and go on to question the effectiveness of the approach it espouses. I shall suggest that the shift in emphasis towards long term, participatory development strategies, which has now taken on the character of a bandwagon, can be seriously damaging and that NGOs would do better to concentrate on what they are good at, which is certainly not ’empowering‘ the poor.