Partos – Book Tour Dirk Jan Koch: Foreign Aid and its Unintended Consequences

Dirk-Jan’s online book tour invites everyone interested in the side effects of foreign aid. Especially organisations interested in exploring unforeseen consequences, willing to take them into account and wanting to share their knowledge with others are more than welcome to join.

Dirk-Jan Koch will give an online book tour on his new book ´Foreign Aid and its Unintended Consequences´ at Partos. In this book, he brings together his teams’ research and his personal experiences with the side effects of foreign aid. Foreign aid (be it humanitarian, peacebuilding or development support) frequently brings with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. Dirk-Jan encourages organisations to pay more attention to unforeseen side effects of projects and critical reflection and to focus less on reaching targets and donor-driven goals. Next, he emphasises the importance of working more with local people when measuring the effects of a project, instead of organisations only using their own people and methods.  

• Opening by Liana Hoornweg, Director of Partos.
• During this session, you can engage with Dirk-Jan on your experiences with the side effects of international development efforts.
• Irene Sleven, co-director of VSO NL, will moderate the session and share her reflections

Dirk-Jan is active as a diplomat, writer and social scientist and works as the Chief Science Officer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and is a Professor of International Trade and Development Cooperation at Radboud University. 

He has combined practice in diplomacy and development (in, amongst others, Nigeria and the DR Congo) with an academic career for the last two decades. He aims to strengthen both policy and academia by creating cross-fertilisation between these two realms, which are – in his view – too often operating in isolation.