Charity Rankings: Delivering Development or Dehumanising Aid?

Logan Cochrane and Alec Thornton

Journal of International Development, 2016, vol. 28, issue 1, 57-73

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.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1002/jid.3201

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:jintdv:v:28:y:2016:i:1:p:57-73

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Development is currently edited by Paul Mosley and Hazel Johnson

More articles in Journal of International Development from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().