Criticism relevant, but too sweeping

In recent years, several publications, while not disputing the aspirations of development cooperation (DC), have been highly critical of its practice. Two such books were published in 2006. Both consider today’s DC too controlling and too hierarchical, and both call for decentralised structures of cooperation.

Stephen Browne is a typical example of an experienced practitioner who, drawing on academic literature, has undertaken a thorough reckoning with DC. Most of his arguments are well known, at least to experts. For instance, Browne reports how DC strategies are constantly drafted at short notice, always latching onto new trends. At the same time, he shows that development assistance is seldom based on purely altruistic motives, but is also influenced by diplomatic, security, foreign-trade and similar concerns. For this reason, he reports, it is hardly surprising that there has been too little impact at the structural level so far. In fragile states in particular, aid-allocation criteria have been drawn up with too much regard for donors’ own motives, thus hindering efforts to increase the efficiency of DC.

According to Browne, the interests of the donors have wielded far too much influence in past development assistance, at the expense of those in need in the recipient countries. The reforms agreed by the donor countries in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 similarly tend to focus more on top-down than bottom-up approaches, in Browne’s view. He would like to see international DC completely remodelled. Donors should introduce market mechanisms for the allocation of technical and financial support. In his opinion, such incentives are the only way to ensure that donor bureaucracies comply with the needs of the recipients.

While the author addresses numerous topics, no clear line of argument is identifiable in his book. He comments on many aspects of the aid-effectiveness debate, but fails to analyse them in detail. Browne tried to give his book an academic touch, but did not review the academic literature diligently. Just a few pages at the end of the book are devoted to the “solution approach” of introducing market mechanisms – too few in view of the complexity of such a task. Some parts of this book offer an interesting, if rather unstructured, analysis of the subject matter, but its conclusions are far too general.

“The White Man’s Burden” by William Easterly is a more stimulating and thought-provoking book. Easterly, arguably one of the most internationally-renowned development economists today, has a style which makes his book accessible to a wide circle of readers. He makes use of anecdotes, some peppered with sarcasm and anger, to illustrate his arguments, which he then mostly backs up with academically serious statements and data.

Easterly’s book is more clearly structured than Browne’s and focuses on fewer core arguments. Easterly explodes the myth that extensive aid could trigger a huge development thrust in poor countries. His analysis suggests that DC has become a policy field dominated by paternalistic, central-planning practices. He says that the planning apparatus is increasingly self-absorbed, untransparent and hierarchical.

In his opinion, therefore, development cooperation is hardly capable of helping to overcome the structural barriers to development, even if more cash were available. Implementing projects and programmes over a long chain of actors gives rise to numerous control problems, he claims. These are aggravated by agencies’ lack of accountability and by inadequate reform efforts of the elites in developing countries. Therefore Easterly, too, concludes that only decentralised and market-friendly allocation mechanisms show any promise of success.

Although Easterly argues more logically than Browne, his recommendations are similarly vague. What exactly should market reforms look like? And how are they to be introduced – presumably against the interests of quite a number of DC organisations? Such issues would have deserved further elaboration.

Both books focus on structural shortcomings of DC. Significantly, they show that aid-effectiveness problems do not occur only on the recipient side, but in equal measure on the donor side. However, in their widely sweeping condemnation of current development cooperation, both authors largely ignore the positive results achieved by decentralised DC programmes, upon which reforms could be based. Much more research should be devoted to comparing of various bilateral and multilateral DC organisations. Doing so would be the only way to understand which kinds of organisations produce good results, and which kinds are less worthwhile. Jörg Faust