We Are Bridging Cultures and Countries: Migrant Organizations and Development Cooperation in the Netherlands

It is customary in the Netherlands to celebrate just about any happy occasion with a speech and a glass of sherry or genever. So when our first volume of essays, Expansion and Reaction, came off press in December, 1977, we invited our friends in the vicinity to hear the then Minister of Development Cooperation J.P.Pronk. We have chosen to print his remarks because they illustrate from what viewpoint government officials view our activities. Pronk is now Professor at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and M.P. for the Dutch Labour Party.

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Organizing Collaboration

Ending Global Poverty ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198850175.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 22-42

Author(s):

Constantine Michalopoulos

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

World Bank ◽

Development Cooperation ◽

The Political ◽

Global Poverty ◽

Poor Countries ◽

Political Situation ◽

The World Bank ◽

The World ◽

The Uk

The story of Eveline Herfkens, Hilde F. Johnson, Clare Short and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, all of whom, with different titles became ministers in charge of development cooperation in the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and Germany in 1997–8, and what they did together to bridge the gap between rhetoric and reality in the war against global poverty, starts with a short discussion of their background. This is followed by a discussion of the political situation and the different government arrangements that determined development policy in their countries at the time. The last part of the chapter reviews the beginnings of their collaboration which focused on ensuring that the debt relief provided to highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs) in programmes supported by the World Bank and the IMF resulted in actually lifting people out of poverty.

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Encounter and engagement: negotiating otherness in the Dutch Protestant development cooperation network in Brazil

Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology ◽

10.1590/s1809-43412012000100020 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 599-621

Author(s):

João Rickli

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

Development Cooperation ◽

The World ◽

Cooperation Network ◽

Development Initiatives

This article investigates encounters occurring in the development cooperation network facilitated by two Dutch Protestant agencies - ICCO and KiA - in Brazil, focusing on the process of negotiating otherness inherent to development initiatives. The text is based on multi-sited ethnographical research conducted in Brazil and in the Netherlands. In its first section, the text introduces the two organisations, highlighting the overlap between religious and secular moralities in their discourses and practices. The second section describes a meeting they promoted with their partners in Brazil, analysing how a grammar of difference is mobilised by the actors to make sense of the world and of the "far-away" other, creating what could be called cosmologies of development cooperation. The text focuses mainly on how concrete interactions influence these cosmologies, actualising, reproducing or contesting them in practice.

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