International cooperation supplies international aid to developing countries and emerging economies, typically through projects; to manage these projects, a specific approach based on the “project cycle” was introduced in 1970. In recent decades, many development agencies have adopted the project cycle, but they have also changed it over time, and today agencies work with different standards. In this article, the history of project management systems in international cooperation is reported, and the approaches adopted by five of the main worldwide governmental development agencies are compared. The analysis shows both the common aspects and differences in order to highlight limits and propose further research.
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