Does it make sense to maintain development cooperation as a recognizable policy area when public support, like the aid budget have declined and the most recent policy memorandum ‘Doing what the Netherlands is good at’ more openly than ever promotes the now equally dwindling aid budget as an instrument to promote well-understood self-interest? Yes, it does. But that does not imply that this article advocates a return to a bygone era when development experts professed the gospel of poverty alleviation by trying to keep the merchant and the diplomat out of the door. On the contrary, this article wishes to emphasize that isolating development cooperation from political and economic interests does not make sense because is not possible and therefore has never been successful. Anyone who dares to face this, will also more easily come to the conclusion that, under certain conditions, the fight against poverty can indeed go hand in hand with the promotion of other goals and interests.

Studying the impact of development interventions is not straightforward. Simple comparisons fall short, because differences in, for example, poverty are often not due to just the intervention, but also to other factors. In this article, we discuss examples of projects that studied the impact of interventions in a meaningful and reliable way. We then discuss some practical challenges. We call for a critical approach to impact evaluation designs and for a joint search for opportunities to evaluate impact in a meaningful and reliable way.

Most discussions about international development cooperation focus on objectives and results, while hardly any attention is paid to the organization and implementation of policies. However, the actual possibilities to achieve strategic goals are largely determined by the institutional organization. This article analyses how the tension between policy priorities and intervention options leads to dilemmas in the field of governance and management of international cooperation programs and identifies some possibilities for a more coherent and effective Dutch development policy.

After years of development cooperation focused on service delivery and technical assistance, several years ago the Netherlands put the political role of civil society organisations in the South centre stage with the programme ‘Dialogue and Dissent’ (2016-2020). The aim was to strengthen the voice of marginalised groups in order to achieve more structural solutions to issues of poverty, inequality and exclusion. Compared to previous programmes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this new approach represented a fundamental shift in thinking, a paradigm shift.
This article describes two archetypal approaches to development cooperation: the technical management approach and the social transformative approach. It then describes how ‘Dialogue and Dissent’ makes the shift from one to the other through a stronger focus on the political role of CSOs, establishing partnership relations, and on flexible and more qualitative forms of monitoring and evaluation. It addresses tensions, growing pains and dilemmas that arise during implementation. It provides tools for policymakers, politicians and researchers to question the paradigms we find ourselves in, and relate the choices we make to them.

Since 2014, more Municipal Councils in the Netherlands break with the longstanding tradition of simple majority coalitions and choose to work with a council-wide program. In such council-wide programs all the parties work together on a common agenda. Municipalities that do so, no longer have a fixed coalition and opposition, but make decisions based on council-wide agreement. Although this practice has become more common over the past years, hardly any empirical research has been done into this new way of political decision-making in local government. In this article we explore the practice of coalition-wide agreements and draw conclusions about the viability of this new model.