Recent critiques of international development practice, affecting aid organizations such as Oxfam, Action Aid and the Red Cross, have attacked the motives of those heading the 'machine' of development suggesting that it is in reality just too politically complex for good ever to come of it. But, despite the genuine need for a critical appraisal of development work, the anti-development backlash would appear to result in a moral dilemma. Should we try to help countries and people in need, or refuse potentially corrupt or harmful involvement?This book comments on how international development might once again become a visionary project. With perspectives from workers in the development industry, it draws lessons from actual projects to propose a theory of 'emergent ethics': that local moral responses to specific projects must form the basis of a way forward.

Part One: Evolving a New Approach 1. Interventions in Development: Towards a New Moral Understanding of Our Experiences and an Agenda for the Future, Philip Quarles van Ufford,Ananta Kumar Giri, and David Mosse Part Two: Coping With Ethical Challenges: Development Programmes and Projects 2. The Making and Marketing of Participatory Development, David Mosse 3. The Icarus Effect: the Rise and Fall of Development Optimisms in a Regional Development Project in Luwu District, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, Philip Quarles van Ufford and Dik Roth 4. The Monolithic Development Machine? Elizabeth Harrison 5. Tapping the Bell at Governee Temple: Project Implementation in Sarawak as Moral Narrative, Alan Rew Part Three: Coping With Different Kinds of Knowledge, Peter Penz 6. Development, Displacement and International Ethics, Peter Penz 7. Charges and Counter-charges of Ethical Imperialism: Towards a Situated Approach to Development Ethics, George Ulrich 8. Social Science Intervention: Moral versus Political Economy and the Vietnam War, Oscar Salemink 9. Anecdotes, Situations, Histories - Varieties and Uses of Cases in Thinking about Ethics and Development Practice, Des Gasper 10. The Virtual Reality of Development Aid, Els Scholten-Schravenzande 11. What Are We in Fieldwork For? Albert Alejo S.J. 12. Reconstituting Development as a Shared Responsibility: Ethics, Aesthetics and a Creative Shaping of Human Possibilities, Ananta K. Giri and Philip Quarles van Ufford 13. Afterword: The Calling of Global Responsibilities, Ananta K. Giri About the Authors