Development Aid Confronts Politics

The Almost Revolution

Thomas Carothers, Diane de Gramont

• Publisher: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780870034022
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

A new lens on development is changing the world of international aid. The overdue recognition that development in all sectors is an inherently political process is driving aid providers to try to learn how to think and act politically.

Major donors are pursuing explicitly political goals alongside their traditional socioeconomic aims and introducing more politically informed methods throughout their work. Yet these changes face an array of external and internal obstacles, from heightened sensitivity on the part of many aid-receiving governments about foreign political interventionism to inflexible aid delivery mechanisms and entrenched technocratic preferences within many aid organizations.

This pathbreaking book assesses the progress and pitfalls of the attempted politics revolution in development aid and charts a constructive way forward.

Contents:

Introduction

1. The New Politics Agenda

The Original Framework: 1960s-1980s

2. Apolitical Roots

Breaking the Political Taboo: 1990s-2000s

3. The Door Opens to Politics

4. Advancing Political Goals

5. Toward Politically Informed Methods

The Way Forward

6. Politically Smart Development Aid

7. The Unresolved Debate on Political Goals

8. The Integration Frontier

Conclusion

9. The Long Road to Politics

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Adrian Leftwich, “Bringing Agency Back In: Politics and Human Agency in Building Institutions and States: Synthesis and Overview Report,” Research Paper 6 (Developmental Leadership Program, June 2009), 13.

CHAPTER 2

1. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).

2. Harry Truman, “Inaugural Address,” Washington, D.C., January 20, 1949.

3. John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid,” March 22, 1961, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8545.

4. Lipset himself warned that the existence of a connection between these factors and democracy did not mean that economic development would necessarily lead to democracy in all cases, but these cautions were not always heeded. See Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 53, no. 1 (March 1959): 69–105.

5. Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

6. For further discussion of the Harrod-Domar model and its future implications for development policy, see William Easterly, “The Ghost of Financing Gaps: How the Harrod-Domar Growth Model Still Haunts Development Economics,” Working Paper 1870 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, July 1997). Also see Robert Solow, “Perspectives on Growth Theory,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 45–54.

7. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7–8.

8. Hollis Chenery and Alan Strout, “Foreign Assistance and Economic Development,” American Economic Review, vol. 56, no. 4 (September 1966): 679–733.

9. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth.

10. Chenery and Strout, “Foreign Assistance and Economic Development,” 729.

11. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 284.

12. Christopher Adam and Stefan Dercon, “The Political Economy of Development: An Assessment,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 25, no. 2 (2009): 175.

13. David Lindauer and Lant Pritchett, “What’s the Big Idea? The Third Generation of Policies for Economic Growth,” Economía, vol. 3, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 4–5.

14. See Arthur Goldsmith, “Institutions and Planned Socioeconomic Change: Four Approaches,” Public Administration Review, vol. 52, no. 6 (November-December 1992): 582–87.

15. Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Building Institutions to Serve Agriculture: A Summary Report of the CIC-AID Rural Development Research Project (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1968).

16. James Gardner, Legal Imperialism: American Lawyers and Foreign Aid in Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).

17. David Trubek and Marc Galanter, “Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States,” Wisconsin Law Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (1974): 1062–1102, and Gardner, Legal Imperialism.

18. Gardner, Legal Imperialism.

19. Trubek and Galanter, “Scholars in Self-Estrangement.”

20. Gardner, Legal Imperialism.

21. Devesh Kapur, John Lewis, and Richard Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997), 209–10.

22. Donald Fraser, “New Directions in Foreign Aid,” World Affairs, vol. 129, no. 4 (January–February–March 1967): 244–45.

23. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on International Relations, Legislation on Foreign Relations Through 2002 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003), 142.

24. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, 104.

25. William Gaud, “A.I.D. Progress Toward Title IX Objectives,” Statement before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, March 20, 1968, in Increasing Participation in Development: Primer on Title IX of the United States Foreign Assistance Act (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, 1970), 43.

26. USAID, Increasing Participation in Development.

27. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World.

28. See USAID, “Report to the Congress on Implementation of Title IX, 1967,” in Increasing Participation in Development, 45. For a broader critique of the feasibility of democracy promotion, see Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, 190.

29. George Axinn, “The Application of the Institution Building Model: An Overview of IB Programs,” paper presented at the Special Session on Institution Building Abroad at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society (Washington, D.C.: 1970).

30. Joel Bernstein, “Institutions and the Political, Social, and Economic Development,” in Institution Building: A Reader, edited by Amy Mann (Bloomington, Ind.: Program of Advanced Studies in Institution Building and Technical Assistance Methodology, 1975), 5.

31. Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Building Institutions to Serve Agriculture: A Summary Report of the CIC-AID Rural Development Research Project, 9–10.

32. C. S. Gulick, “Effectiveness of AID: Evaluation Findings of the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Canadian International Development Agency,” draft, August 3, 1984, II–42.

33. Gardner, Legal Imperialism.

34. Ibid., 261.

35. Albert Hirschman, Development Projects Observed (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967).

36. Ibid., 22.

37. Ian Hamnett, “A Social Scientist Among Technicians,” IDS Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1 (October 1970): 24–29.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, 180.

41. Roger Riddell, Foreign Aid Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

42. Kapur et al., The World Bank: Its First Half Century.

43. UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/S-6/3201, May 1, 1974.

44. Marcos Cueto, “The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 94, no. 11 (November 2004): 1864–74.

45. Declaration of Alma-Ata, International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata, USSR, September 6–12, 1978.

46. Overseas Development Institute, “Basic Needs,” Briefing Paper no. 5 (London: Overseas Development Institute, December 1978), and Paul Streeten, First Things First: Meeting Basic Human Needs in Developing Countries (Washington, D.C.: Oxford University Press and World Bank, 1981).

47. David Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).

48. Overseas Development Institute, “Basic Needs.”

49. Kapur et al., The World Bank: Its First Half Century, and Streeten, First Things First.

50. Kapur et al., The World Bank: Its First Half Century.

51. The Overseas Development Institute explained in 1978 that “in some developing countries, but in only a few and not those containing many of the world’s poor, aid donors may have sufficient leverage that pressure by them might have a significant effect in altering the recipient government’s policy in respect of Basic Needs” (emphasis added). Overseas Development Institute, “Basic Needs,” 3–4. For an account of the World Bank’s policy advocacy efforts in Brazil, see Kapur et al., The World Bank: Its First Half Century.

52. Kapur et al., The World Bank: Its First Half ...