Dilemmas in donor design: organisational reform and the future of foreign aid agencies

With growing uncertainty over the value and impact of traditional bilateral foreign aid to advance development in poor countries, there is disquiet about the future of national public agencies and ministries with responsibility for managing and delivering international assistance. Growing reputational damage to foreign aid has triggered a lively discussion in development policy circles about the best structural configuration for organizing and governing international development functions within donor countries. To date, public administration scholars with expertise in questions of bureaucratic design and performance have yet to weigh in on this debate. This article is an attempt to present current controversies about donor governance and offer guidance for resolving current dilemmas by exploring the potential contributions of public administration

Populations of planets in multiple star systems

Astronomers have discovered that both planets and binaries are abundant throughout the Galaxy. In combination, we know of over 100 planets in binary and higher-order multi-star systems, in both circumbinary and circumstellar configurations. In this chapter we review these findings and some of their implications for the formation of both stars and planets. Most of the planets found have been circumstellar, where there is seemingly a ruinous influence of the second star if sufficiently close (<50 AU). Hosts of hot Jupiters have been a particularly popular target for binary star studies, showing an enhanced rate of stellar multiplicity for moderately wide binaries (>100 AU). This was thought to be a sign of Kozai-Lidov migration, however recent studies have shown this mechanism to be too inefficient to account for the majority of hot Jupiters. A couple of dozen circumbinary planets have been proposed around both main sequence and evolved binaries. Around main sequence binaries there are preliminary indications that the frequency of gas giants is as high as those around single stars. There is however a conspicuous absence of circumbinary planets around the tightest main sequence binaries with periods of just a few days, suggesting a unique, more disruptive formation history of such close stellar pairs.Comment: Invited review chapter, accepted for publication in "Handbook of Exoplanets", ed. H. Deeg & J. A. Belmont