Environment-shaping: An Alternative Approach to Applying Foreign Development Assistance

Development assistance has a chequered past, in large part because planning for development assistance is historically such a fractured enterprise internally, and so disassociated from development assistance recipients’ assets and needs. The authors of environment-shaping offer an alternative development programme planning methodology that highlights above all else the ever-important relationship between development assistance and the environment into which it is offered. The authors employ an asset-based, rather than a traditional deficit-based, approach to assessing the environment for which development assistance will be formulated. The authors then highlight the power of perceptions in the creation of policy programming and in identifying and reinforcing opportunities for positive feedback loops within the recipient environment as critical to truly ‘sustainable’ development.