”Everyone knows that aid is not working as intended, and that something must change” – Lindsay Whitfield argues in her paper “Reframing the aid debate”. The many attempts by national and international donor agencies to increase the effectiveness of aid document that even the actors of international development cooperation are uneasy about its usefulness. Lindsay points to the following factors undermining aid’s effectiveness:
Aid does not stimulate agricultural productivity and processes of industrialisation. Instead, it focuses on the social sectors without putting these in a broader context of economic transformation. Aid should focus on the key constraints preventing the transformation of economic structures, and this means addressing the inadequate infrastructure, the low agricultural productivity, the insufficient use of modern technology, etc.
Aid relationships produce dependency. Donor agencies press for almost permanent negotiations of policies and their implementation, and institutions for dialogue in many different policy areas complicate governments’ planning procedures. Moreover, aid is an important resource in the struggle for power.
The everyday practices of aid have significant negative implications. These practices include uncoordinated donor projects, project implementation units undermining public institutions, donor driven designs of projects, lavish use of expensive consultants, frequent rotation of donor staff in country offices, and poaching of civil servants to work in aid agencies.
Given this diagnosis, Lindsay proposes five changes of current aid practices:
1. Reduce the intensity of engagement
2. Reduce the numbers of donors in a country
3. Reduce the size of donor organisations and reorient their staff and expertise
4. Ensure that different types of donor agencies give different types of aid
5. Reduce the areas of donor intervention and number of projects in a country
Read her paper here: http://www.diis.dk/sw87889.asp
How bad is aid? Is Lindsay’s diagnosis correct? Will the five proposed changes remedy the situation? Are conditions ripe for a change? How do the changing international relations affect aid? And will the donor agencies themselves be able to reform the system? These are questions that we hope to get debated in this blog.
Lars Engberg-Pedersen
diisaidblog.wordpress.com 
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