THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
| Published date | 01 August 2011 |
| Author | Mark Turner,Peter Blunt,Jana Hertz |
| Date | 01 August 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.592 |
THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
PETER BLUNT
1
*, MARK TURNER
2
AND JANA HERTZ
1
1
World Bank, Indonesia
2
University of Canberra, Australia
SUMMARY
Prevailing paradigms of macro‐economic management and levels and distributions of poverty in some rich countries suggest
that economic and strategic self‐interest rather than poverty reduction in poor countries are likely to be the primary objectives of
much development assistance. The incommensurability of the paradigms of development discourse makes it unlikely that
strongly held ideologically based positions on these matters will change quickly or easily. Moreover, non‐altruistic positions
can be maintained more readily by virtue of the loose construction of international declarations such as the Paris Declaration.
Based on different interpretations of the Paris Declaration, empirical evidence from Cambodia and Indonesia of donor
opportunism that is designed to maximise aid control and aid distinctiveness for non‐altruistic purposes is presented. Recent
sharp declines in donor legitimacy have made this more difficult to do, but even so, there have been no concomitant reductions
in donor self‐assurance concerning their exclusive possession of the moral and technical high ground. Such behaviour is,
however, increasingly resented particularly by government officials in lower middle‐income countries like Indonesia. Resulting
relationships lack trust and are therefore unlikely to contribute optimally either to the realisation of non‐altruistic purposes or to
poverty reduction. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
key words—aid effectiveness ; altruism; legitimacy; Paris Declaration; opportu nism; neo‐liberalism; paradigms; aid
distinctiveness; Cambodia; Indonesia; trust
I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace (President George
Bush, quoted in Abbott et al., 2007).
Political language …is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind (George Orwell, 1946).
Conventional development assistance rhetoric proclaims poverty reduction and sustainable development in
poor countries to be its principal objectives.
1
It is widely recognised, however, that development assistance has a
mixed, but generally poor, track record of achieving these objectives. There is a literature stretching back decades
that has warned of donor self‐interest (Meier, 1974; Todaro, 1981; Maizels and Nissanke, 1984; Griffin, 1986) and
of donors ‘nefariously pursuing self‐interest under the cloak of doing good’(Hancock, 1989), ‘unfavourable
repercussions’(Bauer, 1971) or outright exploitation and impoverishment (Hayter, 1971; George, 1988, 1992). In
more recent times, authors such as Murshed (2009) and Moyo (2009) have continued the critique, arguing that aid
is designed principally to provide economic benefits for donors and to serve ‘domestic special interests’. Easterly
(2006) went further, stating that development assistance has been an abysmal failure in reducing poverty and
promoting sustainability in development. The development assistance establishment is resistant to, and resentful
of, such criticisms. For example, in defending ‘development professionals’against claims that they are simply
*Correspondence to: P. Blunt, World Bank Office Indonesia, Tower 1, Stock Exchange Building, Jakarta. E‐mail: pblunt@worldbank.org
The views expressed in this article are solely those of its authors.
1
Cornwall and Brock (2005) contended that ‘barely any development actor could take serious issue with the way the objectives of development
are currently framed. This new consensus is captured in a seductive mix of buzzwords. “Participation”and “empowerment”, words that are
“warmly persuasive”and fulsomely positive, promise an entirely different way of doing business. Harnessed in the service of “poverty
reduction”and decorated with the clamours of “civil society”and “the voices of the poor”, they speak of an agenda for transformation that
combines no‐nonsense pragmatism with an almost unimpeachable moral authority’(p. 1043).
public administration and development
Public Admin. Dev. 31, 172–187 (2011)
Published online 5 May 2011 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.592
Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
‘active participants in neo‐colonial development agendas’, Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff (2010, p. 113) referred to
such critiques as ‘donor‐bashing’and ‘anti‐development perspectives’(see Public Administration and
Development, 2010, special issue on ‘The Future of Development Management’).
Using as its epistemological lens the interpretive paradigm of social analysis and elements of what Burrell and
Morgan (1979) referred to as radical humanism,
2
in this article, we provide supporting empirical evidence and
argument for the continuing and enhanced plausibility and validity of the hypothesis that proposes (for some
donors more than others) a preponderance of self‐interest over altruism in development assistance. We propose
that the ascendency of self‐interest is consistent with the prevailing economic and political orthodoxies of the
industrialised nations. In particular, the extent and character of poverty and deprivation in rich countries with more
pronounced forms of market capitalism (such as the USA) reveal the limited influence of altruism at home,
suggesting that such (seemingly low) levels of altruism are unlikely to be exceeded abroad.
Our view of altruism is the conventional one, namely, unselfish or selfless concern for the welfare of others. The
discussion of Le Grand (2003) on the subject—partly in terms of variations according to era (in the UK: post‐war,
Thatcher, etc.), suggesting ‘knightly’(altruistic) attributions in the post‐war era and ‘knavish’(self‐interested) ones
during the Thatcher era—suggests a relationship between political and economic ideology and altruism, which
supports our argument concerning the correlation between economic and political orthodoxies in the rich countries
and donor altruism or lack of it.
We, of course, recognise that all donors cannot be tarred with the same brush and that the extent to which
development assistance is driven by national self‐interest rather than altruism will be likely to vary along a
continuum whose construction (we hypothesise) will correlate highly with the degree of open‐market capitalism
that prevails in the donor country—the greater the latter, the greater the degree of self‐interest. The plausibility of
the face validity of this hypothesis is enhanced by the evidence we present below on poverty and inequality in the
USA and Australia. It is supported also by the findings of Easterly and Pfutze (2008) concerning differences
between donors, in terms of their transparency about a number of aid practices, which are discussed briefly later in
this article.
We suggest further that the (self‐interested) behaviour of donors is highly resistant to change through counter‐
argument because of its strong ideological underpinnings and because of the incommens urability and
imperviousness of competing paradigms of development discourse. This makes it unlikely that contrary views
will be heard or considered by ideological opponents. This is similar to the observations of Gulrajani (2010) on the
division between radical and reformist development management that has led to a lack of interaction between the
two approaches.
Moreover, major international declarations concerning aid effectiveness (such as the Paris Declaration [PD]) are
so loosely constructed that they can easily accommodate all manner of donor self‐interest and opportunism. We
demonstrate this by deconstructing
3
donor behaviour in relation to a central feature of the PD—national ownership
or government leadership—and showing how these notions can be disfigured by donor proclivities for control, or
control retentiveness in the interests of aid distinctiveness
4
and maintaining the (non‐altruistic) status quo. Aid
distinctiveness is crucial, we suggest, to creating an impression of good intentions and of altruism and to the
forging of harmonious relations with recipient nations. This paves the way for, and cloaks, the expression of
2
An interpretive view of social reality regards it as a productof individual perceptions, interpretations and meanings. Radical humanism shares this
approach to social reality, but it does so with a willingness to question the established or presenting order of things, especially distributions of
power that can lead to social domination and exploitation. In this respect, it is the obverse of structural functionalism, which accepts the status quo
in these terms without question (see Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Blunt, 1986, pp. 18–26). Our quarrel with structural functionalism is that advanced
by conflict theorists who have criticised functionalism’s concept of systems as giving far too much weight to integration and consensus and
neglecting independence and conflict. In particular, in its interest to explore how societal functionscontribute to stability and integration, it does not
account for those parts of the system that might have opposite tendencies, which reveal themselves as resistance and conflict among actors. In this
view, structural functionalism is an expression of the dominant interests of welfare capitalism and the maintenance of the unequal status quo
(Holmwood, 2005:100).
3
Our use of the term is simply meant to imply a critical dismantling of the taken for granted in written and behavioural ‘texts’, or their surface
presentation.
4
By aid distinctiveness, we mean aid that can be clearly or visibly tied to its source, that is, the identity of the donor providing it.
173DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 31, 172–187 (2011)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
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