Foreign Aid & Civil Society

Development Aid: If and How?

On this blog, in class, and in arguments with friends I have often criticized the paradigm of International Development Assistance - and the belief that aid will help poor countries, especially the poorest in Africa. I believe it will not.

Yet, this past weekend I was forced to admit a weakness in my own stand. I argue that development aid has pernicious side-effects. But such criticism is only looking at half the picture. What of those that it does help? And as my friends pointed out to me, what is the alternative - to stand back and watch people live out their lives? If a government is weak or corrupt and cannot or will not provide health services for its citizens, should outsiders let the status quo remain, or step in and replace the government?

Development Aid - If?
My criticisms do not provide a solution - they only point out the problem, and even then only part of it. The question my friends posed was if aid should exist at all, not how it should be managed.

This is an ethical/moral question. How is one to decide? Perhaps using utilitarianism, one may suggest that if aid helps more people than it harms, it is acceptable. There are, however, so many factors that complicate this:

• I believe that in very small, poor, or weak countries both aid and civil society can overpower a government and make the public agenda beholden to powers outside the country. So is freedom of choice, including freedom from western influence, more important than getting your food delivered by WFP? Aid, like much else, involves a series of tradeoffs.
• In most large countries such as India, development aid resources are not of a scale sufficient to change the public agenda too much, nor cause systemic changes to society. So much the better. It is ironic, however, that the places where development aid can do the least damage are also the ones where they are least needed (or at least have alternative resources at their disposal).
• One reason to let aid exist is that most development and philanthropic money would never be spent, if it were not for this paradigm.

Development Aid - How?
For the sake of argument, let us assume aid will exist simply because people have money to give away. How then should it be managed?

The World Bank’s PSD Blog alerted me to this review of three books on development aid by Alan Beattie. It is an excellent read because rather than being a mere book review it is an introduction into the many theories of development aid that have come and gone, with little to show. The camps he talks about are:

1. Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton - and their belief in fair and more trade.
2. Jeffery Sachs - and his more aid, now, approach.
3. Robert Calderisi & William Easterly - and their skepticism of top-down development aid

This should be introductory reading on development aid policy, because it warns us of the many pitfalls and specious beliefs of development aid:

In reality, the solutions to the problems of countries that are very poor and appear stuck that way, which mainly means sub-Saharan Africa, should fall emphatically into the category of a known unknown. The battlefield is littered with the bodies of simplistic theories about poverty and failure, for every one of which there is a contradiction.

There is a temptation to which denizens of the “development community” - the fractious fraternity of ministers, international institutions, aid agencies, campaigning NGOs, rock stars and journalists - frequently succumb. This is to attach unrealistic expectations to a particular policy, agency or process…

I fall firmly into that third segment - skeptical of aid, yet unable to provide a better answer.

A Question to Self
Yet, faced with a simple question - should we stop aid entirely - I cannot give an outright yes. I would, if I believed it did more harm than good, and if a few million more die of hunger, so be it. But before I condemn them to such a fate, I must at least attempt to provide an alternative. And I must recognize that I see aid through the prejudiced, fiercely independent perspective of someone suspicious of western influence and arrogance.

Most of all, I must admit that my criticism of aid is based on my preference for the normative.

Voltaire said the perfect is the enemy of the good. In a Utopian world, governments would govern well and societies would be independent. But governemnts are not always good. Should we work towards that perfect outcome - which may be unattainable - or towards a more easily achievable ‘good’ outcome - governance supplemented (or supplanted) by development aid?

Update: If I needed a reminder on this issue, Rob Katz at NextBillion.net happily provided one - see his comments.

© 2006 The Discomfort Zone.