Emerging Powers as Development
Actors: How the BRICS are changing
the international aid industry
Emma Mawdsley
President Truman announcing the
Four Point Program at his inauguration
in 1949
President Truman announcing the
Four Point Program at his inauguration
in 1949
A panel at the 2011
High Level Forum on
Aid Effectiveness in
Busan, Korea
Paradigm shift in foreign aid?
• The new millennial development/aid
effectiveness paradigm
• A ‘perfect storm’
– Internal problems; the challenges and opportunities
of the ‘re-emerging development partners; the
changing geographies of poverty and wealth; the
global financial crisis
• The ‘development effectiveness’ paradigm
– The search for a ‘New Global Partnership for Effective
Development Cooperation’
• Four theoretical lenses
The ‘new millennial aid paradigm’
• Quantity and quality of aid
• Reform of donor and recipient practices to ensure
aid effectiveness
• Key elements:
– Partnership; country ownership; donor-recipient
alignment; donor-donor harmonisation; results-based
development; mutual accountability
• Based around a series of international
development targets (notably the MDGs)
• Centrality of poverty-reduction
Governance
• Central role for the OECD-DAC; individual DAC
bilaterals; World Bank
- Over the decade extended to recipients, rising
powers, civil society organisation, private sector
- Formation of an ‘independent’ Working Party on
Aid Effectiveness (WP-EFF)
• 2003: Rome High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness
• 2005: Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness
• 2008: Accra Agenda for Action
• 2011: Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness
A straw figure …?
• Elements of the ‘new
millennial paradigm’ had
unprecedented buy-in and
coherence, but ….
• Bilateral donors continued to
transgress aid ‘norms’ and
‘soft laws’
• Huge variations in bilateral
donors
• Reviews showed major
shortfalls in donor
commitments and recipient
change
• Reformist debates over
‘technical’ problems
• Radical critiques of obscured
politics and power
The gathering storm
1) The ‘emerging’ donors/development partners and
development norms, modalities and institutions
The ‘emerging’ donors/development partners
• Proliferation, plurality, fragmentation
• Different categories and concepts of
‘development assistance’
– ‘Aid’, ‘aid-like activities’, blurred and blended with
trade, investment, diplomatic agendas etc
• Different sectoral focus
• Different cultures, ethics, discursive regimes
• Different structural location in relation to
global development governance
The ‘emerging’ donors/development partners
Western donors
Southern development cooperation
partners
Charity
Moral obligation to the unfortunate
Opportunity
Solidarity with other Third World
countries
Expertise based on direct experience
of pursuing development in poor
country circumstances
Empathy based on a shared identity
and experience
The virtue of mutual benefit and
recognition of reciprocity
Expertise based on superior
knowledge, institutions, science and
technology
Sympathy for different and distant
Others
The virtue of suspended obligation, a
lack of reciprocation
Mawdsley 2012
The ‘emerging’ donors/development partners
• Proliferation, plurality, fragmentation
• Different categories and concepts of
‘development assistance’
– ‘Aid’, ‘aid-like activities’, blurred and blended with
trade, investment, diplomatic agendas etc
• Different sectoral focus
• Different cultures, ethics, discursive regimes
• Different structural location in relation to
global development governance
The ‘emerging’ donors/development partners
“The sheer number of aid players, both public and private,
has exploded. There are significant benefits to this
dynamism: more resources, more innovative solutions,
more direct action. But there are also costs. The number of
development projects has grown while the average size of a
project has declined, burdening weak administrative
structures in recipient countries. There is overlap and waste
in many studies needed for each donor. Accountability and
sustainability are threatened. Mechanisms for information
sharing, coordination, planning and scaling up are breaking
down. The key issues facing development aid are those that
arise from this fragmentation and the accompanying
volatility of aid disbursements”. (Kharas 2007: 3)
2) Changing patterns of poverty and wealth
“Trade between developing countries, and between them and the
BRICS, is rising twice as fast as world trade. Even more strikingly,
while growth has headed south, debt has headed north, the
opposite of what happened in the 1970s and 1980s, when poor
countries ran up vast debts. Gross public debt in the rich countries
is rising, from about 75% of GDP at the start of the crisis in 2007 to
a forecast 110% by 2015, says the IMF. Public debt in emerging
markets is below 40% of GDP and flat”
The Economist (2010: 69, cited in Sidaway 2012)
The G20 countries account for 90% of the world’s GDP, but they also
house 58% of the world’s poor (Sumner 2010; Glennie 2011).
3) The ‘global’ financial crisis and ‘traditional’
donors
•
http://devpolicy.org/end-of-the-aid-boom-the-impact-of-austerity-on-aid-budgets-and-implications-for-australia/
The ‘global’ financial crisis and ‘traditional’ donors
•
http://devpolicy.org/end-of-the-aid-boom-the-impact-of-austerity-on-aid-budgets-and-implications-for-australia/
Paradigm shift? Busan and ‘development
effectiveness’
• Amnesiac approach to ‘aid effectiveness’ review and
targets
• Open turn to a critique of ‘aid’
– Brian Atwood (the chair of the OECD-DAC): ‘mercifully,
even the word ‘aid’ will bite the dust’.
• Growing buzz around ‘development effectiveness’
– Growth, infrastructure, productivity, private sector
– National interest
– Blurring and blending financial tools; eroding formal
ODA/OOF/private categories: aid remains, but as a catalyst
Global development governance
• Emerging, pluralised, fragmented, imploded?
“While the OECD-DAC remains the core of the global
aid system, its monopoly of world ODA [Official
Development Assistance] is eroding with the rise of
the so-called new development partners …
Traditional donors that form the OECD-DAC can no
longer claim to speak for the world’s donor
community.”
Kharas et al (2011: 38-9, parentheses added)
Paragraph 2 of the Busan Outcome Document:
“The nature, modalities and responsibilities that apply to
South-South cooperation differ from those that apply
to North‐South cooperation. At the same time, we
recognise that we are all part of a development agenda in
which we participate on the basis of common goals and
shared principles. In this context, we encourage increased
efforts to support effective cooperation based on our
specific country situations. The principles, commitments
and actions agreed in the outcome document in
Busan shall be the reference for South‐South partners on
a voluntary basis”.
Shifts amongst the ‘traditional’ donors
• Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs: letter to the House of Representatives in
2010, now released new policy document
• Opening paragraph in ‘new principles of development’:
“Investment in sustainable growth enables developing countries to
solve their own problems and become less dependent on aid. To this
end, they need a strong private sector; businesses operating
internationally can help them. In fleshing out its four policy
spearheads, the government will therefore promote a good business
climate, and will invest in cooperation with the business community. It
will do so by means of economies of scale and expanding publicprivate partnerships, continuing and improving business-related
development instruments, and conducting regular strategic
consultations with the business community.”
Shifts amongst the ‘traditional’ donors
• Scheyvens, Banks, Overton and Murray (2011): the ‘un-making’ of
New Zealand aid:
– NZAID pulled back into MFAT
– Focus on economic growth
– NZ’s economic and political interests at the centre
– Dramatic decreases in funding to some NGOs and a shift away
from working in partnership with them
– Restated focus on the Pacific; but greater growth in funding to
Polynesia
– Aid effectiveness espoused by the Minister (McCully), but with
no reference to international principles on this
– Yet, significant increases in the aid budget: from $472m in 2009
to $600m by 2012/13
Four theoretical approaches
1) Constructivist analyses of changing
international (development) norms
– Hulme and Fukuda-Parr (2009) on how and why
the Millennium Development Goals caught global
policy attention
– Alden, Morphet and Vieira (2010) and Nel (2010)
on ‘Third World’ identities and well as interests in
international politics
2) Modernisation Theory redux?
1950s/60s
• Deeply rooted in US domestic politics and anxieties
• Intellectual lineages in the Enlightenment, 19C economic-political theory,
and early 20C theories of societal change
• Holistic meta-narrative: the interplay of psychological, social, political and
economic transformations
• Eurocentric, arrogant, culturally parochial and oblivious: from biological to
cultural account of ‘backwardness’
• Optimistic, trust in (‘western’) science, technology and know-how
• Narrative of national progress
• Broadly, a period of global growth and declining inequality.
• Geopolitical context: Cold War, decolonization, consolidation of a deeply
uneven post-1945 international order; ‘developmental states’: capitalist,
socialist, democratic, authoritarian; import substitution industrialization,
trades unions
Similarities
• The (eventual) promise of industrial modernity,
material growth, wealth
• Optimistic accounts of the promise of (Southernled)science and technology
– far less ambivalence about the promises of industrial
modernity
• Limited concern environment or subaltern
peoples or cultures
• Hubris?
• Linear model of stages of (economic – but not
cultural) development?
Differences
• Cultural explanations of ‘backwardness’ replaced by geopolitical
narrative: colonialism and neo-imperialism
• Dominated by economic element: notions of psychological, social
and political transformation far less prominent
• Developmental states (liberal, socialist, authoritarian) replaced by
transnational capitalist elites and a more prominent role for private
sector, public-private partnerships
• Context of financial and trade deregulation; massive decline in
trades union power; labour informality, SEZs/spaces of exception
• Far wider set of actors, pluralizing international governance
regimes, declining USA/western hard and soft power (e.g.
legitimacy of Enlightenment-based universal human rights
increasingly strongly resisted)
• Different positioning of different sectors: resources/primary,
manufacturing, services
• Legacy of more inclusive (‘humanistic’) development decades
3) Neo-dependency theory redux?
4) Postcolonial theory
• “Postcolonialism is haunted by the very figure it
seeks to displace as it continues to privilege Europe
as the central subject of history by reorienting the
world around the single axis of the
colonial/postcolonial” (McClintock 1992)
• What do postcolonial perspectives offer to thinking
through these emerging critical cartographies of
development?
• Mawdsley and McEwan (in progress!)
A post-aid world?
• The formal construct of ‘ODA’ relies on some degree of
consensus and respect
– E.g. OECD’s role regarding the line with export credits
• Ongoing concerns about the credibility of aid
• Increasingly strong critiques of the legitimacy of aid
• Mounting pressures from within the ‘traditional’
donors to use aid more explicitly within the national
interest
• Powerful – but also problematic – claims to an
alternative South-South model of partnership
• Growing channels and availability of alternative
development financing
Bibliography
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Alden, C., S. Morphet and M.A. Vieira (2010) The South In World Politics. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Banks, G., Murray, WA. Overton, J. and Scheyvens, R. (2011) Paddling on one side of the
canoe? The changing nature of New Zealand’s development assistance programme. NZADDS
Working Paper. http://nzadds.org.nz/publications/. Last retrieved 22 February 2012.
Hulme, D. and Fukuda-Parr, S. (2009) International Norm Dynamics and the ‘End of Poverty’:
Understanding the Millennium Development Goals. Brooks World Poverty Institute Working
Paper 96.
Mawdsley, E. (2012) From Recipients to Donors: The Emerging Powers and the Changing
Development Landscape. London: Zed.
Mawdsley, E., Savage, L. and Kim, S-M (2013) A ‘Post-Aid World’? Paradigm shift in foreign aid
and development cooperation at the 2011 Busan High Level Forum. Geographical Journal:
early view
Nel, P. (2010) Redistribution and Recognition: what emerging regional powers want. Review
of International Studies 36, 951-974.