Faculty
Peter Wad og Peter Ørberg

Course Coordinator
Peter Wad og Peter Ørberg

Relevant Bachelor degree in business and management or equivalent

The course aims to provide students with practical analytical tools and experiences with development assistance intervention. Within the contemporary context of international development policies giving priority to market and private sector driven development the course will introduce students to the state-of-the-art of theories and methods of designing and analysing development projects, programmes and sector programmes with particular focus on aid interventions in support of local business development and poverty alleviation. The course covers Danish and international aid strategies, experiences and analytical tools and draw upon practical experiences and assessments made by people within state and NGO development assistance and private consultancy communities.

The course is divided into four parts: The first part consists of an introduction to the trends in international development assistance with particular emphasis on the evolution of policy aims, themes and strategies of OECD donor countries in relation to recipient developing countries. The second part presents mainstream and alternative methodologies and tools for planning, implementing, evaluating and communicating development interventions, framed in terms of development projects, programmes, sector programmes and other forms of development assistance. For example will programme management tools like the Logical Framework Analysis (LFA), reviews and evaluations be addressed. The third part will focus on Private Sector Development (PSD) programmes with special attention to the Danish Business Sector Support Programme and the Business-to-Business Programme (B2B). This section will critically discuss the premises, relevance, design, effectiveness and sustainability of the various types of PSD programmes and related analytical tools. However, other donor PSD programmes and experiences will also be included. The fourth and final part will address the cross cutting question of poverty alleviation and pro-poor aid interventions emphasising the potential impacts of aid on poverty reduction and recent initiatives to combat world poverty like the Poverty-Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) of the World Bank, the UN Millennium Goals and the UN Global Compact. Specifically, evaluation of aid impact and the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Programme will be discussed. The course ends by way of contrasting the rhetoric and practice of development aid agencies and critically assessing successes and failures in the state-of-the-art of development aid management.

Teaching methods:

The course is designed to integrate analytical and practical aspects of managing development interventions. The course will mix lectures by faculty and external aid researchers, administrators and practitioners respectively and include active participation of students through student presentations of case analysis, group discussions and plenum debates. The course includes two sessions where students will work in groups in order to analyze empirical cases and present the results in class: First, based on a case on rural development from Africa, the students will apply the LFA method to an empirical context and achieve a better understanding of the LFA concepts and work process, including the strengths and weaknesses of the tool. The second case work session concerns evaluation methodology and is based on a case regarding evaluation of a private sector development programme. Participation is obligatory in at least one of these case work session. The syllabus will comprise theoretical, methodological and practical material, including cases of concrete aid interventions. The course readings will amount to 800-1000 pages.

Integration:

The course is an integrated part of the CMI Business and Development Studies (BaDS) and a sequel to the Development Strategy in a global Economy course, where the focus is on the role of states in economic and social development, situated within regional and global regulatory institutions and international political relations. The course relates to the other tools-oriented course of BaDS, Foreign direct investment projects in developing countries: Strategy, planning and management, which takes on strategic, analytical and practical issues of foreign direct investment projects in the South, and also to the more theory-laden courses, International business and economic development, and Business strategy in developing countries and emerging markets.

Having completed the course the students should be able to:

English mediated oral examination (20 minutes) on the basis of a written synopsis and assessment by an internal and external examiner.

Compendium: Wad, P. & P. Ørberg (eds) (2009) Managing Development Intervention, Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur (hopefully available end of week 5, 2009).

The compendium includes all obligatory texts, also material from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (download from: www.um.dk/en). In addition materials are available at the internet, uploaded at the sitescape or handed out.