Download Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Cooperation in a Complex World AudioBook Free
It is greatly recognised that the international help system - which today entails every country on the globe - is looking for extreme change. But there are conflicting views in regards to what is necessary. Some demand dramatic rises in resources, to meet long-overdue commitments, and scale up what's already being done about the world. Others point to the flaws in help, and bang the drum for lowering it totally - and claim that the fate of poor and vulnerable people be best put in the hands of market segments and the private sector. Meanwhile, growing figures are recommending that what's most needed is the creative, innovative change of how help works. Help on the Edge of Chaos is strongly in the 3rd of the camps. In this ground-breaking publication, Ben Ramalingam demonstrates the linear, mechanistic models and assumptions which foreign aid is built would be more at home in early-20th-century factory floors than in the strong, sophisticated world we face today. All around us, we can see the costs and limitations of coping economies and societies as though they are really analogous to machines. The truth is that such communal systems have far more in common with ecosystems: They are really complex, strong, diverse, and unpredictable. Many thinkers and experts in science, economics, business, and general population policy have began to accept more "ecologically literate" methods to guide both thinking and action, up to date by ideas from the "new science" of sophisticated adaptive systems. Influenced by these efforts, there can be an emerging network of help practitioners, analysts, and policy makers who are experimenting with complexity-informed responses to development and humanitarian difficulties. This publication showcases the insights, experiences, and often amazing results from these efforts. From transforming methods to child malnutrition, to rethinking techniques of economic expansion, from building calmness to combating desertification, from rural Vietnam to urban Kenya, Help on the Edge of Chaos shows how embracing the ideas of sophisticated systems thinking can help to make foreign help more relevant, more appropriate, more innovative, and much more catalytic. Ramalingam argues that dealing with these ideas will be a vital area of the transformation of help, from a post-WW2 system of resource copy, to a really innovative and strong form of global cooperation fit for the 21st hundred years.
