Rosalind Eyben

• Ph.D
• Professor Emeritus at University of Sussex

When moustaches were at the height of European fashion among men of all classes, why did luxury restaurants require their waiters to be clean-shaven and why did some waiters object? The article draws primarily on the contemporary press to examine the ambivalent gender and class position of waiters who did a ‘woman’s job’ and dressed like a gentlema...

This article contributes to making visible the actors and the spaces in which discourses of aid and development are constructed and contested. I take as a case study a two-year process of the production of texts on 'empowerment' involving a group of officials from the head offices of bilateral and multilateral agencies comprising a 'task team' in t...

Understanding and demonstrating the effectiveness of efforts to improve the lives of those living in poverty is an essential part of international development practice. But who decides what counts as good or credible evidence? Can the drive to measure results do justice to and promote transformational change – change that challenges the power relat...

The author draws on her own experience as a feminist bureaucrat involved in the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing to make the case for multiple feminist narratives of Beijing that woven together can create a myth that points to the importance of collective organising that cuts across state–civil society boundaries.

How can international aid professionals manage to deal with the daily dilemmas of working for the wellbeing of people in countries other than their own? A scholar-activist and lifelong development practitioner seeks to answer that question in a book that provides a vivid and accessible insight into the world of aid – its people, ideas and values ag...

Reflexive practice, surprisingly, is still relatively rare among development professionals. Nevertheless, the challenges that new donors – erstwhile aid recipients – are currently posing to international aid’s historical identity, relationships, values and ways of working is an opportune moment to review the past five decades through a reflexive le...

Through the consideration of seven interconnected facets of reflexive aid practice, I return to Cohen's thesis about states of denial, examining its relevance for international aid. Reflecting on what happened with my father, I have learnt that owning up to what I know – and asking myself what I should do about that knowledge – helps navigate a pat...

I review the last decade of international aid from a more marginal location in a development studies institute. Here I seek to position myself between the different mental worlds of development and academic practice to look at how relational and rights-based approaches to aid have struggled to survive since 9/11 and the rise of results-based manage...

The Millennium was a heady moment for many people concerned with the international aid system. Enthused by the vision of partnership in building a global moral community, I was blind to how policy actors from the South perceived us differently as a former colonial power using new means in pursuit of the old imperial interests. Through the failure o...

Through the consideration of seven interconnected facets of reflexive aid practice, I return to Cohen's thesis about states of denial, examining its relevance for international aid. Reflecting on what happened with my father, I have learnt that owning up to what I know-and asking myself what I should do about that knowledge-helps navigate a path in...

My experience of Bolivia in the throes of a political and social revolution – provided new insights on how aid can support locally-generated efforts for social justice by less powerful groups. My internal arguments between the old and new ‘me’ revealed the contradictions in international aid when principles of equal importance come into conflict. T...

The geopolitics of development is in a state of uncertainty and transition that the Busan High Level Forum both mirrored and contributed to. Busan established a new discourse of international development cooperation in which the old donor-recipient relationship is replaced by an equator-less landscape of a multi-stakeholder global partnership. But...

This is the longer version of what subsequently became Chapter Two in Eyben et al (2015 ) The Politics of Evidence and Results in International Development.

This article historicises the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Development Assistance Committee (DAC) as a site where the meanings of development and the purposes of aid were contested and where gradually a more diverse set of actors were invited to engage in the argument. The author's ethnographic approach examines the micro-l...

This paper uses power analysis and the notion of hegemony to enquire into the historical neglect of unpaid care in the international development sector. In the light of that analysis the paper looks at how to exploit the hegemonic contradictions that provide openings for getting care onto development policy agendas. Addressing feminist practitioner...

Although what has been called ‘the people-centred development decade’ of international aid in the 1990s can be explained at the systemic level by the end of the Cold War, such an account does not tell us how it actually came about. This article argues that a contributory factor can be identified through the life-histories of a generation of develop...

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women's rights and gender equality specialists in the United Nations as analysed from a practitioner perspective. Part 1 by Joanne Sandler analyses the experience of feminists struggling with the institutional sexism of the UN bureaucratic machine and shows how this playe...

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women's rights and gender equality specialists in international non-governmental development organisations, as analysed from an insider practitioner perspective. Part 1 identifies the strategies used and the challenges encountered when Turquet lobbied DFID on its gender e...

Rosalind Eyben describes her participation in a high-level international meeting on women's economic empowerment. She examines how the concept of empowerment is being constructed, contested and shaped in international aid policy.

La vogue actuelle pour la ‘gestion axée sur les résultats’ est l’expression d’un mode de pensée historiquement dominant dans le domaine de l’aide internationale, à savoir le ‘substantialisme’, qui conçoit le monde essentiellement en termes d’ entités telles que ‘la pauvreté’, ‘les besoins de base’, ‘les droits’, ‘les femmes’, ou ‘les résultats’. Un...

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly?...

I explore how the importance of ‘being there’ in the country related to working and socializing with each other and a handful of Bolivian consultants and government officials, rather than getting to know the country and its people in any broader or deeper sense. The very frequent meetings (both formal and informal) between expatriate staff in donor...

‘Women's empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of...

Many international development agencies have incorporated rights into their policy approaches but the relationship between rights and shifting power relations is still rarely addressed. In this article, the authors consider that rights-based approaches should inherently politicise development by inviting power structures to be challenged, from the...

'Participation' has long been an interest at IDS and has led to considering how power shapes people's capacity and opportinities to engage in political and social life. Recently, we have been exploring issues of power both from the perspective of people living in poverty and struggling to claim their rights, and by finding out how power operates wi...

Transformative learning - learning that leads to fundamentally new ways of looking at an issue - is difficult for donor governments. Weak accountability for aid between donor and recipient governments, and between donor governments and their own citizens, does not encourage such learning. Drawing on ideas from complexity theory and "critical accoun...

Official policy documents are outcomes of intensely fought internal struggles. Through an analysis of a series of publicity booklets produced by the British aid programme between 1986 and 1998, this article explores how particular ways of thinking about women and gender were taken up by one donor agency. Based on the author's own experience, the ar...

Development practice is informed by theories of change, but individuals and organisations may not make them explicit. Practitioners may be unaware of the extent to which strategic choices and debates are informed by disparate thinking about how history happens and the role of purposeful intervention for progressive social change. In the past few ye...

Incl. bibl., abstract Harmonisation of donor efforts is one of the current buzzwords in the world of official aid. However, while it is an attractive idea in theory, as long as donors do not recognise and address the operations of power in the aid relationship, harmonisation is likely to be counterproductive in promoting locally initiated responses...

This article describes the exploratory and preparatory phase of a research project designed to use co-operative enquiry as a method for transformative and participatory action research into relations between donors and recipients in two developing countries, Bolivia and Bangladesh. It describes the origins of the idea, the conceptual challenges tha...

Depending on the speaker's positionality, international aid relations have tended to be described in the language of either contracts or entitlements. The new aid modalities of budget support and donor harmonisation appear to reinforce efforts by donor recipient governments to understand aid in one of these two ways. However, conceptualising aid as...

A decade after the United Nations conferences on gender equality and social development, this paper explores their policy origins and discusses their differential impact on international aid since 1995. The author draws on her direct experience to consider why Copenhagen led to Poverty Reduction Strategies and the first Millennium Development Goal,...

The amount of aid that flows to ‘Middle Income Countries’ (MICs) has recently been challenged and some donors are shifting the balance of their aid so that more goes to poorer countries. Is there still a role for aid to MICs and what should that role be? Drawing on cases from the Andean region and Jamaica, this paper seeks to contribute to that deb...

Written by the first Chief Social Development Adviser of the Overseas Development Administration (now called the Department for International Development), this article describes when, why and how an understanding of the social dimension became mainstreamed into the policy and practice of the British aid programme. Exploring the growth within the c...

Insights from postmodernist anthropology can inform development practice by encouraging eclecticism and challenging orthodoxy, although they can work against a practical agenda. The most useful insights for development organizations in recent years have come from the study of transnational coporations, rather than from anthropology. Organizations a...

PIP An aid program's potential contribution to social development is greatly increased if those designing and administering it are conscious and informed about the social context in which aid is provided. Such knowledge can affect decisions about what kind of aid should be offered and to what purpose, while increasing awareness of both the opportun...

What is aid? Is it a gift or an entitlement? To whom does it belong and who should receive it? Staff working for donor and recipient governments in countries such as Bolivia constantly reformulate and re-interpret their answers to these questions in multiple encounters and struggles over roles and responsibilities. The interpretational struggle is...