Two views, founded on divergent rationales, have been used to explain the allocation of official bilateral aid. One view explains the allocation of aid in terms of the humanitarian needs of the recipient, the other in terms of the foreign policy interests of the donor. Although the foreign policy view is now clearly dominant, it has not been developed systematically. This paper initially develops an analytic foreign policy model of aid allocation. The model suggests that the provision of aid leads to the establishment of commitment and dependency, enabling the donor to realize certain foreign policy utilities. These utilities in turn allow the donor to pursue its interests. These interests may be ordered into five substantive foreign policy models. The main research objective of the paper is to test these models in the context of U.S. aid by making a cross-national, longitudinal study of the distribution of U.S. aid over the years 1960- 1970. We find that the foreign policy model which best explains the allocation of U.S. aid is one that is consonant with the political interpretation of imperialism.

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As a consequence of Truman's Point Four Program of 1949, the provision of economic assistance to independent low-income countries became the official policy of the United States. In the early and mid-1950s economic development assistance, though growing, received relatively little attention as the Korean war turned the USA's foreign aid in the direction of military assistance. However, by the start of the 1960s, the transfer of economic assistance from high-income to low-income countries had developed into an institutionalized relationship. Economic assistance was clearly distinguished from military assistance and administered separately; the USA's monopoly of aid was decreasing as other high-income countries, partially under the USA's pressure, were establishing their own aid programmes; and the volume of aid and the number of recipients were increasing.

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This article attempts to sketch the broad parameters of the English school's approach to International Relations. Rather than linking the English school to a via media and, in particular, to the idea of international society, it is argued that the school, from an early stage, has been committed to developing a pluralistic approach to the subject, expressed in both ontological and methodological terms. As a consequence, members of the English school not only distinguished ontologically between international systems, international societies and world societies, but they have also tacitly acknowledged that different methodologies are required to grasp the distinctive features of each of these ontological units. International systems are associated with recurrent patterns of behaviour that can be identified most effectively using positivist tools of analysis. By contrast, international societies need to be explored using interpretivist or hermeneutic methods that focus on the language that lies behind the rules, institutions, interests and values that constitute any society. Finally, world society can only meaningfully be discussed by drawing on critical theory that identifies the direction that the society needs to take in order for human values to be realized. Whereas monists wish to privilege a particular method and ontology, the English school can be seen to favour a pluralist approach that aims to expose the various cross-currents that prevent International Relations from moving in any one direction.

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As civil infrastructure projects have grown in scale and scope, their cost has increased accordingly. As a result, we have entered what has been termed the era of the infrastructure megaproject; those that typically cost more than US$1 billion (oftentimes much more) and also have major impacts on communities, the environment, and public finance. Although constructed works of enormous cost and impact have existed since ancient times and have often been financed by the private sector, what distinguishes the modern megaproject is its unfortunate association with huge delays in delivery time and large cost overruns. This article examines some of the reasons why megaprojects have become synonymous with poor cost and schedule performance and suggests that innovative project delivery methods, broadly termed public-private partnerships (PPP or P3), have the potential to improve project performance by better integration of the project delivery organization in the allocation and management of risk.