Today international development policy is converging around ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction. What does this mean for the local and international dimensions of aid relationships? The Aid Effect demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. The contributors provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official aid policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the working of power inequalities built through the standardisations of a neoliberal framework. The contributors take on new challenges to anthropology presented by a global aid architecture which no longer operates through discrete projects but has moved on to sector wide approaches, budgetary support and other macro-level instruments of development; but they remain faithful to the fieldwork methodology that is anthropologys strength and the source of rare insight.

1. Introduction: The Ethnography of Donors and Neoliberal Policy by David Mosse 2. An Ethnography of Loan Arrangements between the Bretton Woods Institutions and the Government of Malawi: Good Governance as Technology by Gerhard Anders 3. Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania by Jeremy Gould 4. The Reinvention of Ownership at the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation by Monique Nuijten and Jilles van Gastel 5. Who Owns the Gift? Donor-Recipient Relations and the National Elections in Bolivia by Rosalind Eyben and Rosario Leon 6. Interconnected and Interinfected: DOTS and the Stabilisation of the Tuberculosis Control Programme in Nepal by Ian Harper 7. The Worshippers of Rules: Defining the Right and Wrong in Local Project Applications in Estonia by Aet Annist 8. Unstating the Public: An Ethnography of Reform in an Urban Public Sector Utility in South India by Karen Coelho 9. The Disjuncture of Things: Some Remarks About a New Agenda for Studying Development by Philip Quarles van Ufford