BOOK REVIEWS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1954.tb01222.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1954 |
| Date | 01 December 1954 |
BOOK
REVIEWS
Social Aspects
of
Technical Assistance in Operation
Fqty Years
of
Technical Assistance
UNESCO and
H.M.S.O.
1954.
Pp.
79.
4s.
Bv EDWIN A.
BOCK.
Public Administration Clearing House (Chicago).
1954.
Pp.
65.
si.50
TECHNICAL
assistance is coming of age
sufficiently to be acquiring a literature
of
its
own.
Not that there is anything very
new in technical assistance as such;
missionary societies and the big founda-
tions as well as other groups have been
putting it into practice for decades and
the second of these two volumes
sum-
marises the experience which voluntary
organisations in the United States have
acquired in this field. There have also
been large-scale transfers of techniques
to under-developed countries in the last
hundred years in the normal course of
industrial and public works development.
This aspect of technical assistance, from
which many valuable lessons can be
learned, is not considered in either of
these books.
What is new is the large-scale activity
conducted and financed by Governments
-for instance the American Point
IV
programme and
the
Colombo Plan-and
by the international agencies whose
operations are co-ordinated by the United
Nations Technical Assistance Board.
Social Aspects
of
Technical Assistance
in
Operatton
discusses the problems which
these programmes have thrown up.
It
was prepared by
a
representative group
of people from the
‘‘
providing
”
end who
had had experience in administering these
and other technical assistance programmes.
Fifty Years
of
Technical Assistance
is an
expanded version of
the
material which
was provided to the group on the ex-
perience of American voluntary agencies.
Neither book attempts to do more than
summarise views expressed in discussion
and
so
they reach few definite conclusions.
The reader and
the
would-be practitioner
is left to form his own judgment on the
often conflicting views which are presented
to him.
Tliis
form of Government to Govern-
ment
assistance is still
so
new, and
so
many individuals and groups are now and
will in future be engaged
in
it, that any
serious attempt to analyse what is being
done is very much to be welcomed. These
books should be read by anybody working
or about to work in this field or studying
this new form of international administra-
tion since they touch on all the important
issues that arise. They are most useful
where they deal with issues that are
peculiar
to
Government
to
Government
programmes, e.g., the selection and
recruitment of foreign experts, their role,
and the limits to what they can and
cannot do in the country to which they
are sent. If the advice given on these
matters is heeded, it should be possible
to avoid a good many of the mistakes
which have been made in the past. But
the bulk of both books is concerned with
the selection, formulation, administration
and evaluation of projects. Here too
there is a lot of good common sense, but
the subject is treated as though it were
peculiar to technical assistance for the
reason, no doubt, that the participants in
the discussions were thinking more of the
“
providing
”
than of the
“
receiving
”
end. But these are primarily matters for
the government of the country where the
project is located since it has to assimi-
late the project into its general economic
and administrative pattern, and a good
deal
of
confusion, or worse, could arise
if it were thought that different criteria
had to be applied in the case of assisted
and non-assisted projects. The arguments
in these books are very relevant for experts
who are asked to advise a government on
the selection and formulation of projects.
But the principles applying to the admin-
istration and evaluation
of
projects are
surely the same, whether they are tech-
nically assisted or not.
GEOFFREY
WILSOX.
47
1
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