Everyone knows that aid is not working. That aid has negative side effects (unintended consequences) is widely accepted, but whether these are less, equal or greater than the positive effects of aid is hard to determine. The big question is how to change the status quo: change how aid is given, change how aid agencies work, change the international aid structures and processes, change the (ever growing) aid industry.
Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid is the most recent contribution to this debate, joining a spate of popular books on aid and Africa, including those by William Easterly, Paul Collier, Robert Calderisi. Moyo is not necessarily the most critical of aid, nor is her solution to stop giving aid over the next five years the most radical (see Calderisi for some suggestions that will make you wince, at least if you are against re-colonization). Many people feel strongly about foreign aid and Africa, but they lack a public platform to voice their concerns and be influential.
What is interesting about Moyo is that she moved from obscurity to celebrity in the matter of a few months. She is also the only one of these four authors who is not a white, male, former senior World Bank official. But she is a former World Bank official. Perhaps that is part of the reason for the publicity; the other part being that she published with a big trade book press. It is not necessarily because she is African: the contributions of Moyo’s African colleague Yash Tandon, published as Ending Aid Dependence with an obscure African press, remain largely ignored in the aid debate.
Who has a public platform to voice their views, and who does not, is an inherently unequal aspect of life—although the blogosphere is trying to change that. This GEG blog series on the (dead) aid debate aims to give a platform to other views—some equally critical as Moyo but with different arguments and different solutions—in order to advance the debate and to push it towards solutions that can be implemented, changes that can be made and ideas about how aid can be reinvented. The blog series also aims to move beyond polemical arguments to ones more grounded in empirical observations and research, including that carried out by academics connected with the Global Economic Governance Programme.
Bill Easterly has argued that polemics is useful in aid debates, because too often what happens in the foreign aid world goes against common sense and basic economics. However, the use of polemical arguments can backfire if they are equally unfounded and nonsensical as the arguments being railed against. Unfortunately, this is the situation in which the aid debate now finds itself. The debate is drowning in dichotomies. Aid is good, or aid is bad. Aid works, or doesn’t work. Aid promotes growth, or undermines it. More aid, or stop aid.
Rather than staying in this cul-de-sac way of debating the problems with foreign aid and the solutions which stem from these ways of defining the problem, we need to reframe the debate. Let’s talk about more humble aid, more honest, more pragmatic rather than ideological, and more piecemeal and less utopian in its objectives.
This is the first of a nine-part blog series on the (dead) aid debate, originally published as a Danish Institute for International Studies working paper. Keep an eye on the GEG blog, or visit GEG’s (Dead) Aid Debate Resource page for more.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I like your clear, serene and sensible introduction to what you rightly say is an unnecessarily heated debate. I especially like the idea of broadening the range of voices that can be heard and published. I hope your blog will serve as a vehicle for that.
February 8th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Thanks for taking up the aid issue on this fora. Until not long ago, outright criticism/rejection of “aid” was an unthinkable issue. Therefore it is energising to read the works of several African authors (Moyo and Tandon) on this issue.
It would have been ideal to list Tandon’s work too in the GEG recommended sources. While both the authors provide a critique of aid, the paths suggested for aid exit are markedly different.
“Ending Aid Dependence” is published by the Fahamu books, which by itself is an African platform and gives voice to African intellectuals. The book is available from:
http://fahamubooks.org/book/?GCOI=90638100770030