In this final review of aid critics for GEG’s blog series The (Dead) Aid Debate, Lindsay Whitfield examines the contributions of Ugandan international political economist Yash Tandon in Ending Aid Dependence (2008).
Yash Tandon gets us on the right track by arguing that the conceptual starting point is not aid but development. However, he also brings us back to two polarized debates that have been ongoing since the 1980s which trap us in a cul-de-sac mindset. The first is the definition of development. He argues that growth is not the same thing as development, although growth is important. True, but then he focuses on attacking the neo-liberal formula where growth comes from open markets, foreign direct investment, plus good governance. He argues instead, that development should be defined in terms of human well-being, plus democracy, minus imperialism. He sees the international aid system as pursuing an imperial project which impedes the pursuit of national projects by reducing policy space.
These are all old arguments and, while they contain elements of truth, they do not highlight and describe adequately the real issues regarding both the economics and the politics of aid to Africa. On the economics side, there is the need for economic transformation and the need to address the structural constraints in achieving such transformation. It is important for African countries to learn lessons from South and East Asia and to apply them within an understanding of the different global economic conditions that they face today. On the politics side, we need to understand how the foreign aid system interacts with domestic politics in African countries. It is no longer accurate, if it ever was, to see it as the national project versus the imperial project.
But Tandon does make an important contribution to the debate. He argues for distinguishing between different types of aid. His rainbow categorization of aid into a spectrum of Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue/Green and Purple has inspired me to think about the usefulness of breaking down what we call ‘aid’ into categories which actually indicate what is being provided. Do we even need to talk about ‘aid’ at all, or can we just call a spade as a spade?
Different forms of aid are problematic in different ways. Instead of talking about ‘aid’, let’s be specific:
- Political and military support
- Commercial transactions and foreign investments
- Charity and NGOs providing money, goods and services
- Humanitarian and emergency aid (which is not a pristine form of ‘giving’ but can be extremely political, as the case of Sudan makes clear)
- Balance of payments support (traditional IMF territory)
- Concessional loans, particularly for infrastructure and provision of large public goods (traditional World Bank territory)
- Policy prescriptions (which became attached to balance of payments and sector loans)
- Individual projects (often designed by aid agencies)
- Technical assistance
Of course, these various forms of aid can be, and often are, bundled together in one package from aid agencies. But once we break it down like this, we can be clear on what we are talking about and more specific about changing the aid system and how aid is provided.
Lindsay Whitfield is Project Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and editor of The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (2009). This blog was published as a Danish Institute for International Studies working paper. For more on the (dead) aid debate, visit GEG’s resource page.
