The management of international development projects

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. Different tools have so far been developed inside the project cycle management (PCM) framework, but the most widely known and used is the logical framework. As the analysis shows, even if starting from the same roots (Baum's PCM and the original logical framework from USAID), the standards now present differences and probably will diverge even more.