Donors in transition and the future of development cooperation: What do the data from Brazil, India, China, and South Africa reveal?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1861 |
| Author | Raphaëlle Faure,Nilima Gulrajani |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
Donors in transition and the future of development
cooperation: What do the data from Brazil, India, China, and
South Africa reveal?
Nilima Gulrajani |Raphaëlle Faure
Overseas Development Institute, UK
Correspondence
N. Gulrajani, Overseas Development Institute,
203 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8NJ, UK.
Email: n.gulrajani@odi.org.uk
Summary
How are Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors evolving their financial
flows and aid modalities in response to the growing influence and economic power
of Southern BRICS? After presenting the shifting landscape of international develop-
ment cooperation, we explore five hypotheses about the changing nature of DAC aid
allocation patterns and modalities in BRICS countries. In our conclusion, we reflect on
the evolution of DAC engagement in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa (BASIC
countries) and what it might mean for all official donors. Our assessment is that the
changing geopolitical environment for development cooperation is once again
privileging economic diplomacy concerns within DAC donors, propelling specific
kinds of decisions about the choice of instruments, sectors, and modalities in BASIC
countries. It would appear that the administrative practice of foreign aid is increas-
ingly derived from changes within the institutional environment for international
development.
KEYWORDS
bilateral donors, Brazil, BRICS, China, development cooperation, foreign aid, India, SouthAfrica
1|INTRODUCTION
To date, there has been relatively little empirical analysis of the effects
that emerging powers are having on the ways development assistance
is delivered by established Northern donors within the Development
Assistance Committee (DAC). At the heart of this paper is a desire
to empirically investigate the extent to which DAC donors are
responding to the opportunities and challenges presented by the rising
economic and political power of the BRICS by altering the modalities
and allocation of their development assistance.
The BRICS label designates five middle‐income countries (MICs)
with growing economic weight in the world economy. They possess
a high degree of hard power capacity or potential, significant political
influence in their respective regions, sufficient national political
cohesion to affect global change, and limited integration within the
Western liberal order (Chin, 2013, pp. 2–3). The BRICS are all pro-
viders of development cooperation to poor countries, even as they
continue to receive aid. Lying outside the DAC, they seek to practi-
cally and philosophically distinguish their assistance from Northern
donors. Though they reject identity as a “donor”because of its associ-
ation with the paternalistic practices of former colonial powers (Eyben
& Savage, 2013; McEwan & Mawdsley, 2012), the real reason may lie
in the obligations and responsibilities implicit in the “donor”label
(Bracho, 2015).
1
The central question of this paper is thus as follows: How are DAC
donors evolving their financial flows and aid modalities in response to
1
The use of the term “donor”in this paper is meant as a neutral reference to both DAC and non‐DAC providers of development cooperation and highlights the common functional purposes
involved in fulfilling this role as a provider of official forms of finance and technical assistance for the purposes of poverty reduction.
Received: 8 April 2018 Revised: 27 May 2019 Accepted: 5 June 2019
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1861
Public Admin Dev. 2019;39:231–244. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad 231
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