ABSTRACT
The increasing globalization of the last decades has brought international development aid into the focus of legal and social sciences. Particularly in developing countries, there are only few actors who are locally and internationally as well networked as international development agencies. Because of their systematic work at the relevant interfaces between state law, local customary law, religious law and international human rights, they raise many new and interesting questions for the legal and social sciences. An example is their contribution to the formation of a new ‘transnational legal reality’ (Glick Schiller, 2003) that influences and intersects existing local, national and international legal provisions and thus helps significantly to shape the mobility of law. Such organizations are, however, not only important ‘inroads’ of globalization (Nader, 2002) but can also be seen as ‘street-level’ (Lipsky, 1984), ‘dirt-road’ or even ‘parquet-floor bureaucracies’ (BendaBeckmann, K. von, 2001) of international law. Given their importance, there is a need for more insight into the internal working methods of development bureaucracies. This insight, however, is still considered quite limited (BendaBeckmann, K. von, 2001, p. 37; van Gastel, 2001, p. 6; Günther and Randeria, 2001, p. 62).
