WHY WE LIE ABOUT AID, PABLO YANGUAS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1843 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
BOOK REVIEW
WHY WE LIE ABOUT AID, PABLO YANGUAS
A book review
Much has been written about international development aid, most of
it critical on the grounds of how little it has to show for its consider-
able funding and expectations (Easterly, Peters, Moya, Katz, De Haan,
Brautigan, Collins, Stiglitz, Gulrajan, and Collier, among many others).
Yanguas, yet another critic of aid breaks from the pack with an intrigu-
ing and appealing twist: focusing not on aid's outcomes but how it is
conceptualized and approached by donors who—according to him—
seem to miss the true nature of development, adopting practices that
he sees as deceptively misleading. The book flows well and contains
numerous gems of insightful commentary on development aid, making
for engaging and informative reading.
Yanguas' point of departure is a dressing down of donor posturing
in view of the larger domestic political debate where aid is a mere
pawn caught between the aid auspicious left and the castigating right.
Self‐interest of donor bureaucracies, bilateral as well as multilateral, is
also pointed out as a dysfunctional feature of aid to which he attri-
butes much of development aid's maladies. In so stating, he overlooks
the self‐critique of many aid insiders who share this concern. One
such self‐critic from a prominent international development bank
who has walked the walk rather than talk the talk, put in the following
terms: “we pretend to lend for development and they pretend to
borrow for it,”an allusion to the miss use of aid funds by recipients
and the addictive serial debt relief rounds benefitting such recipients
of debt burdened countries. Well taken from his opening critique of
mostly new donors in the aid landscape is the aid diplomacy practice
of conflating aid with international relations. The intent of this form
of soft power is to gain recognition and expand these new donors'
sphere of geo‐political influence.
Yanguas breaks down the domestic donor political arena into
those on the right, who see aid as another boondoggle contributing
to fiscal imbalance and those on the left, who value the promotion
of development around the world by way of legitimate pursuit of
the transformational impact of aid programs. He illustrates this point
by focusing on the aftermath of the 1978 global recession when
detractors of aid ushered in a policy of austerity that did not spare
aid budgets, having in the U.K. Thatcher and the U.S. Reagan govern-
ments their chief protagonists. Following suite, management analysts
in the U.K. Treasury Department launched an intensive theory building
and methodological honing based on the seminal notion of “value for
money”(VFM). This approach maximized the utilitarian driving force
of aid complemented by the alleged misguided notion of certainty
about the outcomes of aid programs, all encompassed by what
Yanguas degradingly calls part of “the theatrics of aid, at best a fanciful
illusion and at worst a deceptive mirage.”He argues that “the kinds of
institutional change processes that most development interventions
embody or require cannot be neatly captured by modeling of measur-
able risk and outputs.”He buttresses this point by reference to the
work of Andrew Natsios who states in one of his writings that “it is
an inescapable conundrum of aid that quantifiable interventions tend
to be the least transformational and vice versa.”
Yanguas sees in the emergence of this managerially inspired
theory of aid the quintessential “dirigiste”force behind his alleged mis-
guided approach to development, the hall mark of his book. Further
reinforcing his argument, Yanguas devalues all attendant managerial
devices such as packaging aid in performance oriented programs and
projects that seek results verifiable by quantifiable indicators on the
basis of goals and targets, outputs, and outcomes, all inspired in a
measure of certainty. Yanguas' argument against VFM becomes wob-
bly when he attributes its emergence to a counter aid‐bureaucracy
campaign by fiscally restrictive governments. In fact, the movement
emerged thanks to the strong advocacy of managerially driven techno-
crats of the same aid bureaucracy in the U.K. Treasury, followed by
those in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and later wholeheartedly
endorsed by the public sector technical group in the World Bank and
other multilaterals. VFM thrived and became the standard approach to
formulate fundable aid programs and projects that sought develop-
ment by way of institutional reforms.
Yanguas carries his anti managerialism argument to an outrageous
extreme when he states “it seems to me that determining the success of
aid by what can be accurately measured in a two‐to‐five year time
frame is a fool's errand. I will go further than that: it is methodologically
questionable, organizationally self‐defeating and morally suspect.”It
flies in the face of the armies of aid evaluators that labor incessantly
to keep aid legitimately focused on results in a measurable manner. In
sum, he argues that all such machinations centered on the elusive cer-
tainty are anathema to the true nature of development and how to
bring it about through systemic transformations, mostly of an institu-
tional nature, only achieved through “smart politics”by donors. This
naïve argument is tantamount to discrediting the organizational and
programmatic foundation on which donor agencies rest and the time
tested method of seeking and securing public funds to finance them.
The upstream formulation of aid programs and projects consistent
with donor and agency policies and programs, as they intersect with
the needs and interests of requesting aid recipients, is dictated
by organizational rules and norms. These strictures, which shape the
Received: 26 October 2018 Accepted: 26 October 2018
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1843
190 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin Dev. 2018;38:190–192.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad
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