ABSTRACT
There has not been space in this volume to discuss all areas of importance for contemporary development in South Asia. Aid, for example, analysed by Anders Nárman under the title ‘Getting towards the beginning of the end for traditional development aid’, in the first volume of this series has not been a focus of analysis within this book, even though for Bangladesh, Nepal and some other areas across South Asia foreign aid remains an extremely important part of the development budget. Clearly aid itself has undergone major changes since its inception 50 years ago, just as the conceptualisations of modernisation and development have themselves been subject to critical scrutiny. The increasingly sharp focus of national and international aid programmes on identifying and targeting poverty and achieving sustainable development reflects the extent to which critical analysis of aid programmes in the 1970s has influenced the agendas of international aid-giving bodies. The focus of World Bank thinking on poverty itself reflects a profound change from its policies of the 1970s. From within Bangladesh the example of the much discussed and finally abandoned Flood Action Plan illustrates the extent to which, far from being a straightforwardly top-down or paternalist programme, national aid programmes have become more reflexive and subject to international and national critiques and pressures. Yet aid itself is dwarfed in significance by the move towards neo-liberalism which became the hallmark of the 1990s and which has left its imprint on all the countries of South Asia, as it has across the South.
