Drawing on Mauss's classical essay on “The Gift,” the authors examine the relationship between Western development nongovernmental organizations and their Southern counterparts. It is argued that what starts out as a seemingly free gift is transformed into a heavily conditional gift when it reaches the ultimate recipient. Despite the apparent one-way flow of goods, there are in practice symbolic forms of reciprocity that tie together the Northern donors and Southern receivers. While the complexities of this relationship do not make partnerships between North and South impossible, they certainly make them problematic: there is no such thing as a free gift.

Short-term development consultants are employed in the development industry ostensibly because of the pragmatic impacts their work on development is thought to have. Yet in practice, their work is judged more by aesthetic than pragmatic criteria. This article argues that these aesthetic criteria are based on a particular vision of modernity and that this also informs the ‘culture of consultancy’, a culture which sees itself as the epitome of rationality. It is also suggested that this is nothing new, today’s development workers being heirs to the missionaries and colonial civil servants of the past.

Over the past 20 years, the development industry has changed rapidly and now presents evaluators with a series of new challenges. This article considers this process of change. It argues that there has been a move away from a 'project-based' approach to a broader vision of development centred on the Millennium Development Goals, which has led to a change of the evaluation approach: from an assessment of outputs to an evaluation of results. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of ways in which the development process is conceptualized demands increasingly sophisticated and interpretive approaches to evaluation. Whilst there will remain space for positivist approaches in certain sectors of the industry, it is increasingly likely that other approaches will become more dominant.

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