Understanding Global Development: A Guide to Success and Failure

Why do some development projects succeed where others fail? This book looks at the success stories and considers what enabled them to alleviate poverty in some of the world's most deprived communities. Using case studies from ten countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Meera Tiwari's innovative approach offers a multi-layered understanding of poverty in order to provide insights into causal, enabling, and impeding factors.

While a macrolevel analysis of development is a common feature of much of the current literature, there has been little attempt to develop a microlevel understanding of development at the grassroots. Tiwari's work fills this important gap while drawing attention to the importance of engaging local actors at an individual, collective, and state level, demonstrating how achieving a "convergence" of goals among all actors is a crucial and overlooked component to a development project's success.

Looking beyond the case studies to consider how this unique "convergence framework" might be usefully applied to other contexts, the book has profound implications for how we view fragile states and conflict zones, and the ability of the international agencies to take effective action.

Meera Tiwari is associate professor of international development studies at the University of East London, where she leads the Master of Science program in NGO and Development Management. Her previous books include After 2015: International Development Policy at a Crossroads and The Capability Approach: From Theory to Practice.