There is little easily publishable information on the project I am working on- that’s why I have no links or description on my blog. If you send me your e-mail, I can send you a summary.

As you mention, this may be a moot point, because according to the Mittelabfluss problem, the aid paradigm will remain. All that one can do is to make it better.

BTW, I looked at your blog but find no mention of the details of your project.
The feed has been fixed. Thanks for the pointer.

> “- I believe that in very small, poor, or weak countries both aid and civil society can overpower a government and make the public agenda beholden to powers outside the country.”

Here you have a range of solutions that the development community is in the process of trying to implement. E.g.: budget support (money that goes directly to governments in support of the national budget); PRSPs, participative strategy development, government capacity building and similar methods to enable countries to develop their own agendas according to which donors (at least in theory) allocate their aid.

> “It is ironic, however, that the places where development aid can do the least damage are also the ones where they are least needed (or at least have alternative resources at their disposal).”

The much sought after, but rarely successfully implemented answer to this is leveraging: projects that launch whole new sectors or other sources of funding. Concrete examples of this are micro-financing (e.g. Grameen Bank), and public-private partnerships (e.g. 50% subsidies for new enterprises.

> “One reason to let aid exist is that most development and philanthropic money would never be spent, if it were not for this paradigm.”

Ah yes, the famous Mittelabfluss Problem (I don’t know the English expression unfortunately). The concept is basically, that donors want to see there money go, and have targets set along those lines. The result is over-priced projects and the destruction of local markets through dumb “dumping” of donor funds in projects. This is still the worst curse of the development industry. I would welcome it, if more organisations did as MSF did during the tsunami assistance, where they basically said “Please don’t send us more money. We don’t have the people to implement anymore activities on the ground.”

Maurice (working on a public-private partnership project for the micro-hydro sector in Rwanda).

Excellent post on development aid which made me think further than what i said earlier in my blog.
http://alexmthomas.wordpress.com/2006/08/06/a-caveat-to-india/
http://alexmthomas.wordpress.com/2006/08/04/development-a-suspicious-alternative/

Keep the posts relating to economics coming!