The structure of German Official Development Assistance (ODA) is in a state of transition. Germany’s growing international role, the increasing importance of climate issues as well as the refugee crisis are contributing greatly to a significant increase in German ODA, which has more than...

Populism is a style of politics that attacks the existing normative consensus within society, making systematic use of marginalisation and bogeyman tactics. Typical marginalisation strategies target minorities within the population and adopt an anti-scientific world view. Restrictions on civil...

Does aid contribute to development? If so, under what conditions and to what extent? These questions are as old as the field of development policy itself and they have been controversially discussed among researchers and policymakers ever since. Yet, two main trends put questions related to aid...

German municipalities are getting increasingly involved in development policy work in Germany and abroad, with the nature of that involvement becoming ever more diverse. However, very little is known about the background or the type of these activities. Against this backdrop, the German...

The development cooperation (DC) of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the 1990s can be described and assessed as follows: • The UN is an important pillar of multilateral DC. The organization is endowed with some fundamental presuppositions (universality, a high level of legitimation, good...

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the year 2005 offers a number of important opportunities for political action (G8 summit; debate on the report on the Commission for Africa – CFA; review of the progress made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs). On the one hand, this is a chance...

Sub-Saharan Africa comprises 48 states at various stages of social, economic and political development. Despite the heterogeneity of these countries, the following general developments relating to statehood and governance in the past 15 years can at least be identified: Such pan-African...

How does reforming public financial management (PFM) help to improve governance in developing countries? In both industrialised and developing countriesPFM reforms affect fundamental interests of state andgovernance. Although PFM has steadily grown in importancein development cooperation in...

In the current development debate, so called results based approaches play an important part. There are two aspects to this debate: On the one hand, further improving the effectiveness of development cooperation (aid) is important to the specialists, whereas on the other hand many donors...