The Positive Role of Culture: What Cross-Cultural Psychology Has to Offer to Developmental Aid Effectiveness Research

Abstract

Developmental aid is designed to bring at least some relief to people who suffer from hunger, disease, and other challenges to their psychological and physical well-being. To this end, large aid organizations, national governments, and other international bodies pour large amounts of money into aid efforts and local projects that work with people in their daily settings. Success of these efforts is obstructed by many factors though, including tools that do not really meet a desired end and the rejection of aid by recipients. In the present article, I review evidence on the challenges to aid effectiveness that relate to the need for ecological validity, thus the extent to which the project designers’ understanding of problems and solutions matches reality, and I propose a model that is based on the theory of generative entrenchment, to expand and extend the relevance of cross-cultural psychology into developmental aid effectiveness research in terms of essential conditions for cultural change. The model contains the three processes of generalization, transmission, and mobility, as a means to see whether behavior is successful in a particular environment. The value of the proposed model lies in the provision of opportunities for extending cross-cultural psychology into the field of developmental aid.