{"id":16881,"date":"2014-11-14T06:00:51","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T19:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=16881"},"modified":"2014-11-17T09:47:01","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T22:47:01","slug":"reader-response-foreign-aid-geopolitics-and-perverse-incentives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reader-response-foreign-aid-geopolitics-and-perverse-incentives\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader response: foreign aid, geopolitics and perverse incentives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Money<\/a>I commend Charles Miller for writing<\/a> on the important and under-examined relationship between our development assistance and broader international goals and settings. I\u2019m puzzled, however, by his leap from the imperfectability of foreign aid to a declaration that it doesn\u2019t work, especially when donated for strategic reasons.<\/p>\n

Almost all aid offered by OECD donors such as ourselves is ultimately provided for some mix of both humanitarian and strategic motives. In Australia, a third purpose\u2014supporting domestic commercial interests\u2014was formally removed in 1997. But even at the height of the subsequent \u2018One Clear Objective<\/a>\u2019 phase of our aid approach, a key reason for focusing on poverty reduction was to break the link between underdevelopment, insecurity, and instability in countries that are important to us.<\/p>\n

Of course that argument might seem like a self-licking ice-cream if you accept the proposition that foreign aid doesn\u2019t assist, and may even harm, poverty alleviation. But few experts believe that. Divining whether development assistance helped pull some countries out of poverty or made life in other poor countries less abject than it might have been is notoriously difficult and not illuminated much by the absence<\/em> of aid in a few unusual cases such as Somaliland. True, some scholars such as William Easterly suggest foreign aid has little or no net positive effect. Still, others<\/a> claim it has near-miraculous transformative powers. Most experts can be found in the middle of that spectrum<\/a>, arguing for good aid<\/a> and against bad aid<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even if our assistance didn\u2019t work to improve health, education, infrastructure, and governance outcomes\u2014so failing to promote regional growth and stability or peace and prosperity\u2014it could still work instrumentally to advance our national interest in strategic access, influence, and soft power sway. While Joseph Nye feels the strongest form of his concept of soft power is what makes a country attractive when it isn\u2019t trying<\/a>, he suggests deliberate charm-offensives (\u2018smart power<\/a>\u2019) involving all the levers of government, including public diplomacy and aid can be powerful too.<\/p>\n

What then of Charles\u2019 specific worries that recipient country politicians will steal, waste, or not bother to raise tax revenue that would have been used to acquire services provided by donors; that they\u2019ve an interest in keeping their nations poor to keep the aid flowing; or that they\u2019ll tell us where to shove our governance principles if they know their cooperation or stability is important to us? Well, in practice none of those concerns are as simple as that. Most developing world leaders, like their Western counterparts, are driven by a complex range of noble, venal, nationalistic, and self-serving impulses\u2014inadequately explained by sweeping generalisations that all are kleptocrats<\/a>. Once-inspiring leaders like Mugabe can go rotten while others who\u2019d be turned away from Transparency International (if only they weren\u2019t treasurer of the local branch) may pursue national, as well as their own, interests more energetically and imaginatively than purer technocrats. And even where some worry our national objectives could put us over a barrel if we wanted to say no to a dubious aid project in a country we want to do well for strategic as well as sentimental and altruistic reasons, donors retain considerable clout. A degree of mutual dependence<\/a> can also promote a more genuine and equal partnership; we don\u2019t have all the answers. In PNG, for example, our influence is still significant. True, it plunged around 16 September 1975\u2014that was the point of Independence\u2014but it has been up and down since then, rather than steadily downward.<\/p>\n

I hope Charles contributes further in this area where much thinking remains to be done, especially in relation to regional shaping and conflict prevention. While he mentions the poverty-busting power of remittances (which now generate a greater proportion of the financial flows<\/a> to developing countries than foreign aid) no one, to my knowledge, has made the strong security case that surely exists for greater Pacific labour mobility into Australia, for example. But it\u2019ll take more than abstract thought experiments if we want to get beyond let-them-eat-theory prescriptions for helping the region\u2019s poor and safeguarding our own regional interests.<\/p>\n

Karl Claxton<\/em><\/a> is an analyst at ASPI. Image courtesy of Flickr user Tax Credits<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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