Foreign aid organizations collectively spend a huge selection of vast amounts of dollars annually, with blended results. Area of the issue in these endeavors lies in their execution. When should foreign aid institutions empower actors on leading lines of delivery to guide aid interventions, so when should distant head office lead?

In Navigation by Common sense, Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of international aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in about Navigation by Common sense: Why so when Top Straight down Management of Foreign Aid FAILS faraway headquarters. Tight controls and a concentrate on reaching pre-set measurable targets frequently prevent front-line employees from using skill, local knowledge, and imagination to solve complications in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Sketching on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete advancement projects across nine help companies and eight paired case studies of development tasks, Honig concludes that aid agencies will most likely benefit from offering field realtors the expert to use their personal judgments to guide aid delivery. This ‘navigation by judgment’ is particularly valuable when conditions are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is normally hard to accurately measure.