The Aid Chain explores the role of funding conditions in shaping co-operation and resistance as aid moves from donors, to NGOs, to local communities. Significant proportions of aid flow through the non-governmental sector but questions are increasingly being asked about the role of NGOs and whether they can deliver on their ambitious claims. This study examines whether the existing aid processes widely used by donors and NGOs are effective in tackling poverty and exclusion. Findings from fieldwork in Uganda, South Africa and the UK are used to show how the fast changing aid sector has, in the context of a dynamic policy environment, encouraged the mainstreaming of a managerial approach that does not admit of any analysis of power relations or cultural diversity. This increasing definition of the roles of NGOs as essentially technical, limits the extent of the very development that the organizations were initially established to promote.