The practice of rich countries providing financial assistance to developing countries has become increasingly controversial. Foreign aid is now characterized more by its failures than its successes, making foreign assistance budgets easy targets for politicians. In academic and policy circles the claim is made that foreign aid has outlived its usefulness. The original essays in Transforming Development take a more optimistic view, and instead of foreseeing the end of foreign aid, show how it might be revived.

The essays in this volume argue that foreign aid is, first and foremost, a humanitarian enterprise. The contributors suggest ways to reform the practice of development assistance including new approaches to development financing and novel strategies for increasing the effectiveness of foreign aid, maintaining that development assistance must continue to receive donor support.

This forward-looking collection is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in international development and a valuable resource for practitioners and policy-makers in the field.

Jim Freedman is on leave from the University of Western Ontario, serving as Programme Analyst in the Office of the Iraq Programme at the United Nations in New York.

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