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Views from the Center
CGD experts offer ideas and analysis to improve international development policy. Also check out our Global Health blog and US Development Policy blog.
The Warlord and the Ambassador: A Review of Dante Paradiso's "The Embassy"
The Embassy: A Story of War and Diplomacy by Dante Paradiso tells the inside story of how US Ambassador John Blaney and his team kept the Liberian embassy open, risked their lives to cross the front lines to meet with General Cobra, and played a crucial role in negotiating a complicated sequence that included Taylor being forced into exile, the rebels allowing ECOWAS peacekeepers to reopen the port, and getting peace negotiators back to the table. Paradiso, a foreign service officer who served in that embassy, skillfully tells the story through the eyes of several unsung heroes.
Todd Moss
Too Big to Succeed? Why (W)Hole-of-Government Cannot Work for U.S. Development Policy
This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post.
While talking beautifully about its development plans, the Administration is really not living up to its rhetoric of elevating development to equal status with diplomacy and defense, the so-called 3Ds. If development is really such an equal partner alongside defense and diplomacy, why is USAID increasingly a minor subcomponent of the State department? The promises of making USAID the "world's premier development agency" are ringing embarrassingly hollow. How can an agency be influential when it doesn't even control its own budget or set its own strategic priorities? Even in areas where USAID has traditionally been very strong—disaster relief and food security, for instance—the State Department has taken over. (The Feed-the-Future initiative is effectively directed by State and, despite early promises that USAID would lead on Haitian earthquake relief and reconstruction, it was recently leaked that a State coordinator is running the show.) And it should hardly be surprising that USAID is getting its lunch eaten in the interagency when it had no head for a year and, nearly two years in, still has less than half of its top managers on the job.
But what if the problems of the 3Ds aren't really about the staff vacancies, the battle of Washington egos, and an empire-building State Department? What if the real problem is that the much-vaunted "whole-of-government" approach is fundamentally unworkable in the United States?
What to Do with USAID? Lessons from Kabul
Very interesting op-ed in Sunday's WashPost on U.S. efforts to promote health care in Afghanistan that cuts to the heart of the debate over integrating development into U.S. foreign policy. The authors, two noted health experts, claim that American programs have done immediate good: up to 100,000 infants and children have been saved from early death this year alone. Perhaps more importantly for the long-term:
(-) Remove State Department filter State Department
USAID (2) Apply USAID filter
aid (1) Apply aid filter
Aid Effectiveness (1) Apply Aid Effectiveness filter
MCC (1) Apply MCC filter
US government (1) Apply US government filter
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