Development analysts tend to give short shrift to the seemingly minor bureaucratic hitches faced by practitioners - those who design, manage, implement, and evaluate aid projects. Often critical of foreign aid either for its apparent ineffectiveness at alleviating poverty or its purported neocolonial implications, the academic literature rarely acknowledges the experiences and pressures faced by practitioners themselves as they implement aid-funded development projects - the meetings, paperwork, negotiations, site visits, financial transactions, logistical arrangements, interviews, program activities, and beneficiary interactions - that keep projects running. And yet the impact of aid projects, and indeed the impact of development itself, often grows out of the daily activities and personal interactions of development practitioners. This unique book considers challenges from the perspective of development practitioners who confront technical, managerial, political, theoretical, and moral quandaries on a daily basis.

Introduction 1. Children Can't Wait: Effective Development Assistance for School Readiness in Jordan [Katherine A. Merseth] 2. Of High Hopes and Input-Driven Development [Mark Lynd] 3. Balancing the Contradictions: The Business and the Practice of International Development [Terrence Jantzi] 4. Relationships, Emotional Intelligence, and the Management of International Development Programs [Jerrold Keilson] 5. Sustainability in Development Projects: How Do We Do It, and Do We Really Want To? [Joshua A. Muskin] 6. The Walls of Kano: USAID Education Programming in North Nigeria and the Problem of Sustainability [Michael Gubser] 7. Practitioners Caught in the Middle: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo [Nathalie Louge] 8. Participation and Partnerships: Power Plays in Lowland Bolivia [Elizabeth Phelps] 9. Accompanying Reparations in Colombia: Mampuján and Las Brisas [Anna Vogt] 10. Development and Peacebuilding: Disparities, Similarities, and Overlapping Spaces [Carl Stauffer] 11. Education for Development: Theoretical Perspectives and the Nigerian Situation [Abdalla Uba Adamu] 12. Fantasy, Reality, and Illusion in International Aid: Challenges NGO Workers Face in the Field [August Longino]