The book is very much a collective endeavour, growing out of a three-year research project supported by the Norwegian Development Agency (NORAD) through the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen. The substantive themes and tentative conclusions were discussed at three seminars held in the second half of the 1990s: in Dar es Salaam, hosted by the Centre for Foreign Relations; in Cape Town, organised by the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town; and in Oslo, organised by the Chr. Michelsen Institute. Participants included African and Nordic scholars as well as practitioners from government and private aid organisations. All the participants—too numerous to be named individually—contributed to the project by forming, in effect, a constructive and critical panel of experts that helped develop ideas and reacted to the papers presented.