Country Concepts and the Rational Actor Trap: Limitations to Strategic Management of International NGOs

Growing criticism of inefficient development aid demanded new planning instruments of donors, including international NGOs (INGOs). A reorientation from isolated project-planning towards holistic country concepts and the increasing rationality of a result-orientated planning process were seen as answer. However, whether these country concepts - newly introduced by major INGOs too - have increased the efficiency of development cooperation is open to question. Firstly, there have been counteracting external factors, like the globalization of the aid business, that demanded structural changes in the composition of INGO portfolios towards growing short-term humanitarian aid; this was hardly compatible with the requirements of medium-term country planning. Secondly, the underlying vision of rationality as a remedy for the major ills of development aid was in itself a fallacy. A major change in the methodology of planning, closely connected with a shift of emphasis in the approach to development cooperation, away from project planning and service delivery, towards supporting the socio-cultural and political environment of the recipient communities, demands a reorientation of aid management: The most urgent change needed is by donors, away from the blinkers of result-orientated planning towards participative organizational cultures of learning.Des critiques croissantes de l'aide au développement inefficace exigent de nouveaux instruments de planification des bailleurs de fonds, y compris les ONG internationales (ONGI). Une réorientation de la planification des projets isolés vers des concepts holistiques de la planification de l’aide par pays ainsi que la rationalité croissante d'un processus de planification orientée vers les résultats ont été considérés comme réponse. Toutefois, si ces concepts de pays - nouvellement introduites par les grandes OING eux aussi - ont augmenté l'efficacité de la coopération au développement est ouvert à la question. Tout d'abord, il y a eu l’impact des facteurs externes, comme la mondialisation de l'entreprise de l'aide, qui a exigé des changements structurels dans la composition des portefeuilles des OING vers la croissance de l'aide humanitaire à court terme. Cela était difficilement compatible avec les exigences de l'aménagement du territoire à moyen terme. Deuxièmement, la vision sous-jacente de la rationalité accrue de la planification, concentré sur les resultats, comme un remède pour les grands maux de l'aide au développement était en soi une erreur. Un changement majeur dans la méthodologie de la planification, étroitement liée à un changement d'orientation dans l'approche de la coopération au développement, qui n’est pas concentrer sur planification du projet et la prestation de services, mais qui soutienne l'environnement socio-culturel et politique des communautés bénéficiaires, exige une réorientation de la gestion de l’aide: Le changement le plus urgent est un changement par les donateurs eux-mêmes, qui devrait implanter des cultures de collaboration étroit avec les partenaires et la population locale

Re-membering Mwanga: same-sex intimacy, memory and belonging in postcolonial Uganda

Proponents of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 have denounced homosexuality as an import from the West. Yet every June, hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims in Uganda commemorate a set of events, the hegemonic textual accounts of which pivot around the practice of native ‘sodomy’. According to these accounts, the last pre-colonial Kabaka (king) Mwanga of Buganda ordered the execution of a number of his male Christian pages in 1886 when, under the influence of their new religion, they refused his desire for physical intimacy. These events have assumed the place of a founding myth for Christianity in Uganda as a result of the Catholic Church’s canonization of its martyred pioneers. This article explores how public commemoration of these events can coexist with the claim that same-sex intimacy is alien to Uganda. Unlike previous scholarship on the martyrdoms, which has focused primarily on colonial discourse, the article pays attention to contemporary Ugandan remembering of the martyrdoms. And against the grain of queer African historical scholarship, which seeks to recover the forgotten past, it explores the critical possibilities immanent within something that is intensively memorialized. The article maps Ugandan public memory of the martyrdoms, unravelling genealogies of homophobia as well as possibilities for sexual dissidence that lurk within public culture