About the book

Between 2002 and 2013, bilateral donors spent over $64 billion on AIDS intervention in low- and middle-income countries. During the same period, nearly 25 million died of AIDS and more than 32 million were newly infected with HIV. In this book for students of political economy and public policy in Africa, as well as global health, Kim Yi Dionne tries to understand why AIDS interventions in Africa often fail. The fight against AIDS requires the coordination of multiple actors across borders and levels of governance in highly affected countries, and these actors can be the primary sources of the problem. Dionne observes misaligned priorities along the global chain of actors, and argues this misalignment can create multiple opportunities for failure. Analyzing foreign aid flows and public opinion polls, Dionne shows that while the international community highly prioritizes AIDS, ordinary Africans view AIDS as but one of the many problems they face daily.

Doomed Interventions is published by Cambridge University Press and available on Amazon.com. The first paperback copies of the book were sold at Amherst Books, an independent bookstore in Amherst, MA.

Dionne uses fascinating cases across a number of sub-Saharan African countries to demonstrate how the mismatch between donor and citizen priorities limits the effectiveness of HIV programming, as does the sheer number of actors involved at multiple levels of governance. One of the book’s key contributions is its attention to AIDS interventions at the subnational level, particularly the role of village headmen, which Dionne situates with rich detail in what she aptly calls the global supply chain of AIDS interventions.

–Rachel Sullivan Robinson
Author of Intimate Interventions in Global Health: Family Planning and HIV Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa and Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

Rachel Sullivan Robinson

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Malawi, Dionne offers a provocative warning to the international AIDS community about the dangers of pushing policies without sufficient consultation and buy-in from local people who may have other priorities. This book will be of great interest to AIDS experts and development practitioners alike.

–Joshua Busby
Co-Author of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin

Joshua Busby

Recent Posts

More Posts