The thesis concerns the origins, creation and progress of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Most scholars believe that development assistance is largely motivated by self-interest. At first glance, the Centre appears to be an anomaly in Canadian foreign aid. The IDRC's disbursements are not formally tied, has an international board of governors, and its structure was specifically designed with autonomy in mind. This Canadian federal organisation has spent one and a half billion dollars are funded over 5,500 projects since its founding in 1970. During this time, the Centre has disbursed between 70-95% of its programme funds overseas, mostly to developing country university researchers. These researchers have designed and executed research intended to help developing countries alleviate poverty, social decay and more recently, environmental challenges. / A detailed archeology is conducted of Pearson's own internationalism regarding science and technology, foreign policy, development assistance, environment and culture. Our analysis shows how Pearson's thinking, and that of colleagues who were to have key influences on the Centre, Barbara Ward and Maurice Strong, were embedded in deeply held beliefs and values. We identify a tension between an internationalist impulses and Canadian-centered or parochial pre-occupations common in most of the federal public service, especially central agencies. Central agents, responding to pressures from academics, and the internal values and beliefs that tend to form in these secretaria, have sought to make the IDRC conform to their own expectations. The author concludes that the Centre has survived and prospered, despite these pressures, partly because of the skill of its top officers, but principally because of the IDRC's capacity to lay claim to being an expression of internationalism. / We also show how another dialectic, between more socially-oriented perspectives and more technical ones affected the development of the IDRC. The thesis suggests that the two dialectics, the internationalist and parochial, and the technical and social, are both synthesising into, respectively, interdependence and holism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39878 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Stockdale, Peter |
| Contributors | Noumoff, Samuel J. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Political Science.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001473843, proquestno: NN08159, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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