Official development assistance (ODA) – or aid – is a small but conspicuous pillar of the international order, and its frailties are being exposed by COVID as surely as those of the other foundations of this order. The assumptions underpinning aid and its management have long drawn fire from a broad range of critics, but this has been particularly acute in recent years. This has resulted in dwindling confidence in aid as an instrument of development, giving rise to a series of sensible, if slow-moving, initiatives to address some of its systemic flaws. This alphabet soup of overlapping approaches focuses on prioritising contextualised, local knowledge and the space for local ownership. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified these flaws and lent urgency to a reform agenda.
We argue that these initiatives are welcome but, in and of themselves, are incapable of lifting aid effectiveness to meet the lofty rhetoric of the expectations that it is burdened by. This is because the tendency to prioritise reforms to the delivery of aid ignores the elephant in the room: the deeper structural inequalities between ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ countries. These inequalities sit well beyond the grasp of even the most well-meaning and contextually appropriate aid programmes because they rest on entrenched differentials of power that are, often, between countries that have been plundered in multiple ways and those that have benefited from this.
You don’t begin with development; you begin with climate, conflict and security, mobility, international crime
Instead, more of this energy for reform should be applied to revisiting the central tenets of aid and to entertaining a radical shift in our models of thinking about what it means to be developed. There is strong and growing support for this general proposition, both within and beyond the aid sector. Marta Foresti writes, there is a need to “bring development inside policy conversations not about poor countries but about global challenges…You don’t begin with development; you begin with climate, conflict and security, mobility, international crime.” Similarly, as Kate Raworth articulated in a recent tweet, “every country – whether rich or poor – is a ‘developing country’, with social shortfall &/or ecological overshoot.” What is required, therefore, is a more complete understanding of the drivers of global poverty and insecurity – one that includes wealthy donor countries in its diagnostic frame. So while the growing momentum for reform of international aid, particularly through localising its delivery, may be a step in the right direction, it is a small one that misses the forest for the trees. This article will suggest how we might initiate a shift in focus by placing the real impediments to equitable development – those that exist outside of ‘recipient’ states’ domestic circumstances – at the heart of the conversation. Changing how we think about where the power to affect change is located is the first step to reforming our practices.
Some of the biggest flaws in the aid system arise from its neglect of two intertwined realities which lie at the heart of many of the problems that it purports to address; first, that local actors understand, and are therefore often best placed to address, their own problems without the burden of also managing external expectations; second, that while ‘their’ problems are typically framed as having largely local origins, most are also reproduced by inequitable global power structures – something the international system of aid is largely unable to respond to and, indeed, helps to mask.
Spending targets and budgetary incentives amplify aid agencies’ focus on ‘burn rates’
Consequently, the developmental problems that aid is applied to are invariably defined and projectised by international actors, despite burgeoning rhetoric to the contrary. Conventional donor-funded projects of this kind are typically, but not always, encumbered by burdensome reporting obligations, myriad donor policies, unwieldy management structures and foreign, technical – but often poorly contextualised – advice. Currently, for development assistance to be counted towards the 0.7% of national income that is widely accepted – and in some cases legislated – as an annual spending target for international donors, aid has to be classified and reported in extremely specific ways. Moreover, spending targets and budgetary incentives amplify aid agencies’ focus on ‘burn rates’ – the need to spend money in time to ensure that it is replenished in the next funding cycle. These are the inevitable accoutrements of projects devised, funded, and implemented according to the conventions of the OECD-DAC system of aid, and of the domestic demands of political accountability in donor states.
Of course, this should not be taken to mean that all foreign aid is inevitably redundant. The authors have all been involved in a variety of aid projects in recent years which, in one way or another, have sought to address some of these flaws and promote more local ownership of the issues they address.
For example, in 2020, one of the authors worked with the Ministry of Social Solidarity and Inclusion (MSSI) in Timor-Leste to help design and implement its emergency cash transfer programme. The programme was a response to COVID-19, aimed at stimulating the economy by providing cash grants to households and wage subsidies for both formal sector employees and public transport operators thereby, according to Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak, “filling consumption gaps in the absence of economic activities”. MSSI quickly developed a new system for universal household payments, based on an appropriate legislative framework and adapted delivery mechanisms. That this is possible should not be surprising, and is offered here as a reminder of how locally-appropriate solutions emerge when externally imposed constraints are lifted.
Because of the COVID-driven departure of the vast majority of foreign aid workers, ODA was neither available nor, as it turned out, necessary
This enabled cash payment to an estimated 300,000 households in all 452 villages (or ‘Suku’) across the country over a 30-day period, costing approximately USD$60million. A system to facilitate payment to formal sector employees and public transport operators was also developed and implemented, benefiting more than 100,000 individual workers. Several international organisations reported that the government cash transfer scheme had a positive impact on the local economy, improving short-term food security whilst also supporting rural businesses to reopen and re-establish trade vital for additional cash income. Timor-Leste gained its hard-won independence from Indonesia in 1999, and has since been heavily reliant on ODA, making it one of the most aid-dependent countries in the world. A disproportionally large amount of this is delivered through international advisers. Because of the COVID-driven departure of the vast majority of foreign aid workers, there were very few international advisers in Dili in 2020; the initiative was led, planned and executed by the Government of Timor-Leste with a minimum of international advisory support (noting that there has, of course, been some critique of its implementation).
Another of the authors was involved in the launch of the Savo Solar Initiative in Solomon Islands. This is a small-scale solar energy initiative co-designed by the community in Kuila on Savo Island, an Australian solar energy start-up, and a US non-profit. The project emerged from fieldwork exploring the diverse impacts of energy poverty and diesel dependency. What became clear from that fieldwork is that key community businesses reliant on diesel were acutely aware of their conundrum – and knew what the solution was. However, they were unable to facilitate change or seek financial assistance because there had been little outreach to their community by either the government or the international donor community. Indeed, it is questionable whether the major donors were willing or able to provide the kind of small, flexible grant needed for this project.
The Savo Solar Initiative began with a conversation with the community of Kuila. From those diagnostic conversations, the problem of diesel dependency was identified and a solution co-designed with the community and solar technicians from Australia. That ‘package’ – an efficient and locally-resonant development project with pre-existing community buy-in and design – was then presented to prospective not-for-profit and governmental donors. A genuinely ‘bottom-up’ project, the Savo Solar Initiative complements the existing solution – eco-tourism – the community of Kuila had designed and implemented for their own economic benefit. Without imposing an economic architecture onto the community, it worked instead to maximise the local economic value of that existing solution by minimising the cost of its most expensive overhead, diesel.
There is widespread recognition of the need for radically different approaches
These examples are not unique, nor even ground-breaking; indeed, they reflect the now-widespread recognition of the need for radically different approaches outlined at the beginning of this piece. As Graham Teskey points out (in his afterword to this book), however, getting locally-led programmes up, running and poised to deliver is a highly complex, long term balancing act requiring the delicate alignment of various incentives and fortuitous political winds. It is clear to us that when those stars do align and the programmes do yield results, even these exemplars of politically-attuned, adaptive success cannot hope to offer much more than a temporary balm for the pressing challenges and dilemmas at hand. To move beyond short-term fixes, external actors must – along with being content to recede to background-supporting roles – adjust the diagnostic lens to a more global, structural scale.
For example, what if international aid practitioners also committed to assessing and advocating on the drivers of global conflict and poverty that emanate in whole or in part from their home countries? What if, even as a conceptual exercise, we begin thinking about how developed, donor countries or their enterprises are implicated in things like: inequitable trade deals; the perpetuation of global debt regimes that siphon money from South to North; illicit financial flows (such as trade misinvoicing) that transfers massive amounts of wealth from South to North each year; illegal trafficking (in humans, narcotics, arms and wildlife, for example); exploitation of labour in the global South; legal regimes permitting multinational corporations to hide their wealth in tax havens, allow money laundering by global banks, or the offshoring of profits by crime syndicates; the use of flags of convenience to evade maritime law; the global laws that allow corporations to sue countries to protect their profits; provision of military assistance to abusive regimes; and, not least of all, vaccine nationalism (including obstructions to patent waivers for global South countries) in the allocation of the COVID vaccine.
Aid agencies are structured to provide aid, not challenge the global power hierarchies that make the provision of aid seem necessary
Re-examining development programmes in light of the drivers of poverty and insecurity that emanate from wealthy donor countries might strike some as infeasible and naïve. Aid agencies are structured to provide aid, not challenge the global power hierarchies that make the provision of aid seem necessary. But until there are shifts in this direction – and aid agencies in wealthy countries do have more power in these areas than their recipients, should they choose to creatively explore it – the ‘new orthodoxy’ of aid will continue to be blinkered by cognitive dissonance.
Our view is that, in the current international climate, there has never been a more opportune time to rectify this imbalance of attention and ask of our governments: what are the biggest problems faced by our neighbours; how do those problems affect us; and what are we doing about it? Indeed, those questions are already being asked by publics the world over. To take one example for us here in Australia: what impact are Australian-linked COVID travel restrictions having on our Pacific neighbours? How might those impacts in turn affect Australia over the medium to long term? And what steps can we put in place to mitigate these impacts for future calamities? Aid practitioners can and should be facilitating more of these kinds of discussions.
We know that aid programmes can do some good, but it is also widely recognised that they tend to do good only in isolation, at best producing small islands of fleeting prosperity. The looming challenges of our time demand that we finally start to put this recognition into effect – by building better bridges of support between those islands and nurturing a shift towards a larger us rather than them and us.
The authors would like to thank Dan Honig for his thoughtful and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
The views expressed by the authors in this article are theirs alone and do not represent the views of their respective employers.
