GEOG3682 Essay
Due 17 November 2019
As you have seen, international development is a complex and heterogeneous topic; choosing a single place to focus on is a very helpful way to learn about it and apply the concepts you have learned. Using your country, choose one of the following prompts for your paper and be sure to cover all aspects of it.
All papers should have abrief introduction WITH a thesisso the reader has an idea of what will follow. How you choose to organize your paper is up to you. Papers should be approximately1,500 words, properly cited (APA, MLA or Chicago style), well-researched (this means your research should go beyond World Bank project documents and draw on additional *published academic papers* as well as course readings and concepts).Submit electronically to Canvas.
Option#1: Critical project evaluation of a contemporary development project
Purpose: To get a sense of international development practice via its fundamental unit: thedevelopment project.
Identify a World Bank project in CHINA. World Bank projects are available athttp://projects.worldbank.org(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site./(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.- note that you can browse (1) geographically by country or area, (2) by sector (e.g. agriculture, education, health, energy, etc.), or (3) by “theme” (e.g. economic policy, human development and gender, urban and rural development, etc.). I recommend that you select a project with an available “Implementation and Completion Report”.
Critically evaluate the project.You should address the following:
- Project details:What was the project? When was it carried out, and where? Who was involved, and what were their roles? How much money was spent, and on what?
- The problem:What problem or set of problems was this project designed to address? What were the key dimensions of the problem, and how did the project document explain their origins (where they came from/why they exist in the first place)? Why did this problem demandoutsidehelp in the form of a World Bank loan?
- Project evaluation:How successful was the project, and how did the evaluators come to this conclusion? What were the reasons for key successes or failures? Were issues of inclusiveness regarding participation by women, ethnic minorities or other groups addressed, and if so, how? What were the lessons learned, and how might these inform later projects?
- Consider: How does the project/intervention define “needs”? In what way does the project justify its intervention? Does the project perpetuate or reinforce certain ways of understanding development? What is foreclosed or excluded, as a result? Does the project reflect mainstream ways of thinking about development (Keynes, Smith, Sachs, Friedman, the Washington Consensus, etc.)? What kinds of terms, languages, discourses are used in the project? What is the effect?
- Your analysis: What do you think about this project? The three sets of questions above are fairly narrow, and should be answerable from the project evaluation document alone. This question is more open-ended; you might choose to focus on the project’s relevance, its design, its evaluation methods or conclusions, or some other angle. You also might need to do a bit more digging into the wider social, political, historical, or environmental context of the project; this will help you get a better sense of the country where the project is set, and will help prepare you for later papers as well.