ABSTRACT
Small-scale projects demand more contact between the providers and the recipients of aid, thus facilitating long-term relationships that can help participants better conceive, implement, and evaluate a project. Some of the most interesting grassroots initiatives that promote development and environmental protection are debt-for-nature swaps. Americans have discovered that, unlike most NGOs acting alone, communities can carry out grassroots foreign policy activism with legitimacy and money. Municipal foreign policies provide people at the grassroots with more diverse sources of information that they can use to evaluate, criticize, and improve national foreign policies—and they provide more opportunities to participate directly in international affairs. The proposals in the chapter suggest a fundamentally new direction for US foreign policy.
