International Development Policy offers an analytical perspective on the interface between religion and development: In particular, it highlights the partnerships between faith-based organizations and the major development agencies, especially the World Bank, in an effort that had reached significant importance in the 1990s and the early 2000s under the leadership of Bank president James Wolfensohn but has subsequently faded from prominence. In spite of this variable attention from the policy community, the research presented in the volume emphasizes that the role of religion in development is neither new nor marginal. Because religion has always played, and continues to play, an integral part in the daily lives of the people that development affects, it also profoundly influences the process of development itself.

The volume compiles fourteen contributions organized into three groups. The first part, “Religion and Development as a Field of Research,” discusses how religion is defined and understood, and the extent to which religious values ultimately cannot be separated from the material pursuits that development organizations often lay claim to. “Faith-based Organizations and Secular Development” chronicles the challenges facing religious organizations engaged in partnerships with secular development agencies. The third section, “Religion: Alternatives to Technocratic and Neoliberal Development,” analyzes the successes and failures of development models derived from religious perspectives.

A number of contributions to the volume (Philip Fountain, Katherine Marshall) caution against strict “instrumentality” — that is, the view that development organizations can use religious groups as policy instruments (15, 35). Marshall also makes the point, however, that a true collaboration between the two has the potential to address major social ills such as famine, infant mortality and maternal deaths (35–36). Eliott Mourier discusses the case of Brazil, where the public sector was simply unable to provide the health care services to which it had committed; the state became dependent on religious organizations to carry out its own policy. This result might seem to undermine the legitimacy of the state, but Mourier argues that the opposite may have been the case. However, cooperation may be difficult. As a former high ranking official who had worked directly under Wolfenshohn at the World Bank, Marshall attests to the challenges of bringing about a true alignment of goals.

Religious goals such as pursuing spirituality and salvation may compete with, and can even explicitly prohibit, material objectives. While Levent Ünsaldi explores the successful Turkish model, which integrates Muslim morality with a neoliberal model of development, this contribution also highlights the many potential contradictions that Turks are left to reconcile. Win Van Daele explores how farmers in Sri Lanka struggle to reconcile their belief in balance with what they perceive as excessive desire sparked by the consumerist culture. Despite different religious backgrounds (Christian, Muslim, and Budhist), Sri Lankan victims of bombing ultimately deal with their suffering in similar ways: not only do they turn to religion, according to Indika Bulankulame, but they also find the materialist pursuits of the neoliberal economy to be incompatible with their religious values. The volume highlights that the critique of the consumerist values appears to be a nearly universal theme across cultures and across different religions.

Even the potential for religious critique of development goals may affect the terms of aid. Gerard Clarke points out that the tension between religious goals and materialist goals means that development agencies may often seek to tightly control the outlines of their partnership with religious organizations. The resulting conditionality can be cumbersome to the basic operations of religious organizations, as well as to their more general principles. As an example, Clarke cites the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, which introduced contractual language that required the recipients of its money to refrain from opposing “Swedish values.” For the recipients of the aid, this raised questions not only about enforcing the terms at the grass-roots level but also about who would define the values and how the values would be defined. Hence, even when the critique does not actually appear, expectation of it can affect the behavior and the policies of the development agencies.

Even though the two can occupy the same milieu, what religion means to the development world and what development means to the religious world is a ground filled with potential pitfalls. The book concludes by highlighting the main themes of the volume, perhaps paramount of which is the extent to which, according to Moncef Kartas and Kalinga Tudor Silva, “religions and religious movements (or some of them, at least) hold a potentially powerful critique of the dominant, economy-centric vision at the core of development” (214). That is, religion can be critical of economic goals because those can compete with spirituality.

However, this critique may be a red herring. The volume does not theorize when the religious critique of development is held at bay and when it is deployed. Partly this may be explained by the analytical lens employed by many of the contributors. Although the book is interdisciplinary, many of the contributions come from the field of anthropology; it contains a relatively limited political science perspective. From such a perspective, however, the volume is open to a larger critique about agency, not only from the development world but also from the religious world. An example of the Catholic Church may be illustrative. While the Church vehemently opposed economic development in its more distant history, since then it has significantly reversed course. In fact, Ludovic Bertina discusses the extent to which the Church has become a strong proponent of development, albeit development on its own terms. To the extent that the core set of beliefs of the Roman Catholic faith has not changed, the change in policy is more likely explained by the political and strategic objectives of the Church's religious elites. From an academic perspective, this raises a question to what extent the religious critique against economic development is merely rhetorical: It may not necessarily reveal deep contradictions between religious values and economic development but rather may speak to the political interests of religious elites. From a policy perspective, a more systematic analysis of when such interests align to support development and when they are more likely to conflict, can help development organizations determine when equal and effective partnerships with faith-based organizations are feasible.