Mobile Professional Voluntarism and International Development : Killing Me Softly?
This book explores the impact that professional volunteers have on the low resource countries they choose to spend time in. Whilst individual volunteering may be of immediate benefit to individual patients, this intervention may have detrimental effects on local health systems; distorting labour markets, accentuating dependencies and creating opportunities for corruption. Improved volunteer deployment may avoid these risks and present opportunities for sustainable systems change. The empirical research presented in this book stems from a specific volunteering intervention funded by the Tropical Health Education Trust and focused on improving maternal and newborn health in Uganda.
Methodological approaches to societies in transformation : How to make sense of change
This book provides methodological devices and analytical frameworks for the study of societies in transformation. It explores a central paradox in the study of change: making sense of change requires long-term perspectives on societal transformations and on the different ways people experience social change, whereas the research carried out to study change is necessarily limited to a relatively short space of time. This volume offers a range of methodological responses to this challenge by paying attention to the complex entanglement of qualitative research and the metanarratives generally used to account for change.
Indigenous Cultures and Sustainable Development in Latin America
This book outlines development theory and practice over time as well as critically interrogates the “cultural turn” in development policy in Latin American indigenous communities, specifically, in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Bolivia.


