“Development aid confronts politics” review
“Development Aid Confronts Politics” by Diane de Gramont and Thomas Carothers is a summary of a wave of political thinking modestly rippling through the often unsuccessful development aid industry. To sum it up: politics is important when wealthier countries give aid to poorer countries. Otherwise wily leaders will cheat their citizens, conflict and self-interest will continue, wealthy countries will continue to push programmes that don’t work, tyranny will be entrenched, and many other delightful things will happen. However, despite the importance of politics, we don’t want to work politically! This is because it could be offensive, because we might risk making enemies of dictatorships, and because political pursuits are not simple enough for us to describe in a tiny paragraph in the charity newsletter. But we need to work politically, and my favourite parts of the book show tested policy suggestions that tentatively promise to deliver sustainable development by taking politics more seriously. The book presents an honest, historically informed, clear and optimistic picture of an industry that is slowly coming to see how the dream of foreign aid might finally be realised in a more holistic sense. Join me for a clumsy exploration of this scholarly and penetrating book, focusing on the following: How history illuminates the political realities of aid, how to support political goals, and how donors can respond to this growing articulation of the political problem.
The history of political goals and methods in foreign aid illustrates both desperate needs and hopeful opportunities. An elegant table somewhere in the book documents the extensive re-occurrence of a sentiment in speeches and official documents over the last sixty years, the sentiment being that aid only works when those receiving it are committed to change. The expression of this political sentiment was always made with the air of having discovered something for the first time. We came to these realisations with great excitement, and forgot them with great skill. The book’s political lens brings a history that we found so blurry and forgettable into focus, revealing the enduring role of politics in animating social and economic outcomes, and the way the aid industry has often danced around any acknowledgement of the need to work politically.
It must firstly be said that there were reasons for development aid’s apolitical stance. For example, disagreement around the most suitable government system for development has fermented amongst aid practitioners since aid’s inception. It was difficult to encourage governments to lean this way or that (democracy, totalitarian force, etc) when aid practitioners themselves didn’t know which way would be most likely to lead to development. In contrast to this uncertainty, there was an early confidence that economic success would bring about democracy. According to the contemporary wisdom, democracy didn’t lead to wealth but wealth led to democracy. So investing in a country’s economy would mean buying one (wealth) and getting one free (democracy), and given economic growth was the main goal anyway, this was clearly the way to go. By administering economic aid, we would get positive political outcomes for free! or so we thought. Various “technocratic” interventions were tried; for example, offering neatly packaged resources, training, and advice. The rigid economic focus left very little room to engage with formal or informal political realities. This approach was accompanied by the firm belief that governments would commit to development, grasp on to these resources and proceed ever upwards economically and therefore democratically - that human rights and freedom would go hand in hand with increasing economic development.
For some in the aid industry, however, this certainty was fractured by academic critiques and through observation of countries that grew economically but experienced no such democratic progress. Others still operated as if they believed the myth of political empowerment following economic success - because in many ways it was more convenient, justifying tidy programs and simple, measurable goals to reassure donors. The cold war encouraged this apolitical inertia - tensions were high and although Western countries promoted a one-dimensional democracy, most aid organisations did not adventure into those highly contested waters, preferring to stay within a safe, technocratic, economically focused brief. It wasn’t until the end of the cold war that donor countries began to feel free to act on an increasing unease with the political blindness of aid organisations. One result of this was a movement away from a narrow emphasis on “governance”. This term was initially used to refer to the way a country governed for specifically economic outcomes, but later it took on a broader meaning, including human rights and other outcomes relevant to political freedom. Political goals became more of a focus. Eventually, more politically savvy methods became (to some degree) more integrated or “streamlined” across aid in general. The ending to this history promised a somewhat more politically realistic approach on the part of development actors. The book was published in 2013, and I’m writing in 2024- I hope we have progressed further since then, and I will attempt to interview experts to find out. The extent to which we progress from here remains conditional on how thoroughly the recommendations of these authors and many others are received and acted upon.
Alongside development in understanding why political goals are important, we have learned how to better support their achievement: with a thoroughgoing praxis of accountability. If you would - join me in a morbid obsession. Picture an inactive government propped up by aid. The government is accountable only to small but wealthy interest groups who support government officials financially in exchange for favours. Foreign aid is only a convenient additional injection of capital and resources, galvanising programs that the government can use for its own benefit or otherwise not at all. NGOs disillusioned by the government’s inactivity can break free entirely and do some real good for poorer, disempowered citizens at the expense of any sustainability whatsoever, as the government no longer has to devote funds to capacity building in areas that the NGOs specialise in. This incentivises a self-preserving edge to the local aid industry at the expense of any real empowerment of the country or its citizens. We can imagine governments on a spectrum ranging from totally corrupt on the one hand to completely well-intentioned but limited by capacity on the other. All will have at least some degree of inactivity or inefficiency , depriving citizens of basic needs and human rights. These bleak vignettes are addressed by what the book calls “demand side work”. This is encouraging people to demand better services: basic necessities, an end to human rights violations, etc, from the government. The progression of “demand side work” is also explored historically; to cut a long story short, aid providers have learned to engage with a country, rather than a government. This means bringing together government officials, organisations providing checks and balances, and people from a wide range of classes and political affiliations. It means strengthening the frameworks that are likely to support this process, whether legal, social or economic - not by simply providing training, but by using contextual awareness to identify the best ways to do this. It means moving away from a dichotomy of “the people” and “the government,” towards a more holistic picture. Such dichotomies neglect the fact that “citizen interest groups” (assumed to represent “the people”) may contain those interested in political cross-purposes (counter-productive), or on the other hand may contain nobody with any real political power at all (ineffectual). Robust demand side work will also acknowledge the informal power dynamics that nuance, complement or control formal structures. This may involve research of local context, for example political economy analyses, which are also treated at length in the book. In short, the book identifies ways to work with citizens at all levels of power, influence and wealth to devise and strategically pursue better outcomes. This is a more holistic accountability, and therefore an avenue to achieving political goals.
In order to help disenfranchised people achieve these goals, we need to be more generous and patient with aid. As donors, we assume the responsible thing to do is to set SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. We judge cost-effectiveness by these metrics - if a goal is not SMART, then it is not smart for us to donate, and we should put our money towards a cause that will spend it more SMARTly. Political aid does not always operate this way. A politically aware project is often a fuzzy project, with uncertain deadlines (since political will cannot be easily or reliably manufactured) and even shifting goals (because a sustainable, shared outcome may require negotiation). According to our preferred methods, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of such a project. As a result, we have a tendency to default to simpler projects, which can be assessed with clear, quantitative methods. However, insisting on these assessment methods causes us to dramatically restrict the kinds of projects we can undertake, leaving us with a narrow range of options that often simply do not fit the reality of a political landscape. One focal point of the epistemological conflict around aid assessment is the RCT (randomised controlled trial). I don’t want to demean the scientific method or to devalue quantitative data. However, even with simple interventions it is often very difficult to control enough variables in foreign aid to gather meaningful quantitative results - and so we should not insist on restricting projects to those which can be assessed with an RCT. I have heard this point of view from various sources and can only assume that many aid organisations acknowledge the contextually limited benefits of RCTs. However, this is only one manifestation of a general desire to tightly control outcomes in aid from the top down.
Politically aware projects are also associated with a lack of efficiency. A politically aware project often requires more resources (to carry out political economy analyses for example) or more staff (eg. governance specialists). Thus, these projects are not only less certain but also more expensive. However, it is worth remembering how ineffective aid has been historically. A dynamic chart showing aid received per person vs GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) can demonstrate that there is no positive relationship between aid given and development: press play in the bottom left corner and observe the countries receiving less aid rising slightly faster overall in GDP! In other words, it is far from clear that aid boosts income. So even if the standard approach to aid is cheaper, it is hard to argue that the money has been well spent. Perhaps in this case you get what you pay for. Historically we have not given local actors enough autonomy to contrive and chase their own solutions. We have found it difficult to acknowledge how poorly our blueprints can fit local contexts, although we knew about local cultural variation and political nuance. As long as we remain blind to the bigger picture, each link in foreign aid’s food chain will continue to sign off on the sorts of interventions we have been doing for sixty years. To be honest, these interventions remain appealing! This is what we always want to know: Has a well been dug? Has a course of medication been administered? Have government officials been upskilled? These are earthy, practical concerns which we should still dearly desire. However, movements should arise in as many countries as possible to carry out these things internally, with the volition of and for the good of the country at large. If we don’t encourage political goals and methods in aid, then these economic interventions will continue to prop up structures and functions that are parasitic on both citizens and outsiders, and aid will continue to have little to no positive effect.
Historically, the amount of aid given to a country does not necessarily correlate with improved economic outcomes for that country. The most significant improvements in income and living standards in the last thirty years have been India and China, and in both cases this is on a scale that dwarfs any positive or negative effect of aid, being driven instead by internal policy choices. As has been observed in “Development Aid Confronts Politics”, we may have begun to see the political mechanisms behind aid’s failures. We have an historically unique opportunity to, through research, persistence and generosity, help facilitate small improvements to societies which, over time, could add up to allow fairer and freer environments for disempowered people.
