IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/jintdv/v28y2016i1p57-73.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Charity Rankings: Delivering Development or Dehumanising Aid?

Author

Listed:
  • Logan Cochrane
  • Alec Thornton

Abstract

Individuals want to know which organisations to donate to, and a variety of organisations have developed ranking systems to guide them. This paper explores charity ranking, with a particular focus on the increasing role of impact and ‘cost‐effectiveness’. Ranking systems are composed of a selection of metrics, which may miss important components and, as a result, create a set of unintended outcomes. We argue that an emphasis on cost‐effectiveness and impact in ranking promotes simple, technocratic activities, negatively affects human rights‐based interventions and de‐prioritises inventions that work in remote, complex settings. The topic of charity ranking and its influence on private donors is limited in the literature, and this paper seeks to make a contribution to this important debate. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Suggested Citation

  • Logan Cochrane & Alec Thornton, 2016. "Charity Rankings: Delivering Development or Dehumanising Aid?," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(1), pages 57-73, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:jintdv:v:28:y:2016:i:1:p:57-73
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1002/jid.3201
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Logan Cochrane, 2017. "Stages of food security: A co-produced mixed-methods methodology," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 17(4), pages 291-306, October.
    2. Jonathan Morduch & Ariane Szafarz, 2018. "Earning to Give: Occupational Choice for Effective Altruists," Working Papers CEB 18-017, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    3. Logan Cochrane & John-Michael Davis, 2020. "Scaling the INGO: What the Development and Expansion of Canadian INGOs Tells Us," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 9(8), pages 1-14, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:jintdv:v:28:y:2016:i:1:p:57-73. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/5102/home .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.