International Aid and the Making of a Better World

Reflexive Practice

Rosalind Eyben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135132743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

How can international aid professionals manage to deal with the daily dilemmas of working for the wellbeing of people in countries other than their own? A scholar-activist and lifelong development practitioner seeks to answer that question in a book that provides a vivid and accessible insight into the world of aid – its people, ideas and values against the backdrop of a broader historical analysis of the contested ideals and politics of aid operations from the 1960s to the present day.

Moving between aid-recipient countries, head office and global policy spaces, Rosalind Eyben critically examines her own behaviour to explore what happens when trying to improve people's lives in far-away countries and warns how self-deception may construct obstacles to the very change desired, considering the challenge to traditional aid practices posed by new donors like Brazil who speak of history and relationships. The book proposes that to help make this a better world, individuals and organisations working in international development must respond self-critically to the dilemmas of power and knowledge that shape aid's messy relations.

Written in an accessible way with vignettes, stories and dialogue, this critical history of aid provides practical tools and methodology for students in development studies, anthropology and international studies and for development practitioners to adopt the habit of reflexivity when helping to make a better world.

1INTRODUCTION

Reflexive practice

DOI: 10.4324/9780203077610-1

Reflexive practice, surprisingly, is still relatively rare among development professionals. Nevertheless, the challenges that new donors — erstwhile aid recipients — are currently posing to international aid’s historical identity, ways of working, relationships and values make this an opportune moment to review the past five decades through a reflexive lens. An autobiographical life history approach permits interrogating the links between the personal and the systemic, enquiring into how and why I understood the world in a certain fashion and what I hid from myself. I encourage my readers to do likewise.

It was a pivotal moment when, towards the end of 2011, three thousand people travelled to Busan, South Korea, to discuss the future of international development assistance. Erstwhile aid recipients had become donors and were challenging the old order. That old order of rich countries financing planned development interventions in poor ones had begun in the latter years of colonial rule; it was well established when, as a PhD student, I first travelled to central Africa in 1967. By then the United States,Canada and the countries of north-west Europe had set up official aid structures; these were complemented by a burgeoning number of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), some of whom, like Oxfam and CARE, had originated in providing relief to the victims of the Second World War. The World Bank had already created its soft loan facility for ‘under-developed countries’ and the United Nations was giving birth to an ever-growing number of specialised agencies — the World Food Programme, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the International Labour Organisation were among those that I was later to become personally acquainted with.

The first twenty-five years or so of international development assistance were shaped by the Cold War, during which First and Second World countries used their aid to compete for political and commercial influence in the Third World. In the late 1980s,when the Berlin Wall came down, geographical imaginaries that defined the circulation of money, ideas and people re-divided into North and South rather than East and West. By 2011 a web of organisational relationships had developed, involving governments, both donors and recipients, as well as Southern civil society organisations, multilateral institutions, international NGOs and philanthro-capitalists such as the Gates Foundation. Representatives from all of these, along with development studies institutes like my own, joined the conversation at Busan. There, all eyes were on that group of donors that were themselves still aid recipients — such as India, Brazil, Indonesia and China — now challenging the paradigm in which the ‘North’ determined what was development and how it should take place. They offered an alternative in which what they called ‘South-South’ cooperation would call the shots. They distinguished themselves from the ‘traditional’ donors by their identity as developing country governments who knew from first-hand experience what it was like to receive aid from the North. They claimed to enjoy an egalitarian relationship with the governments of the poorer countries in Asia and Africa that they were assisting, based on the principles of mutual self-interest and autonomy. This they contrasted with the vertical relationship between the old colonial powers and their erstwhile subjects that was based on charity and dependency. ‘South-South cooperation is very friendly. There are no pre-conditions’, said Lu Feng, a Chinese government official interviewed about Busan.¹

Some Northern academics, like Emma Mawdsley,² argued that behind the solidarity language of South-South cooperation,many of the new donors’ practices were similar to those of the old donors whose own aid programmes, like those of the new donors, had always had a strong vein of realpolitik self interest. And in the run-up to Busan low-income countries, still heavily dependent on the traditional donors for their health, education and other services, feared that Europe’s governments, hard-pressed to justify their aid budgets at a time of financial austerity, might be using the competition from the South to wriggle out of their commitments. Aid professionals were equally sceptical. One professional, committed to making a better world by supporting changes to power relations in favour of people in poverty, and who was closely involved in the Busan negotiations, emailed me that these new actors in the world of aid were no different from the old ones. Poor people still had no voice:

Within this new global jet set, there are more convergences than divergences. The real issue is that poor and discriminated people’s voice has NOT been enhanced in the process; rather to the contrary: they still GET participated.

Civil society activists in the South, particularly in countries where Chinese influence has been growing, expressed alarm about the deleterious effect of this influence on human rights. And, apart from the more radical sections of civil society, everyone at Busan agreed it was capitalist investment that mattered above all for a country’s development and that aid should play only a minor catalytic role. ‘We were moving towards the end of aid as we know it’, as stated a former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was well-known for declaring pivotal moments in history.³

Was it not only the end of aid but also of the world as those of my generation had known it? 2011 was the year when people began to wonder whether the severe economic downturn for the North was irreversible. Marco Faroni, Minister for Brazilian development cooperation, drove home that point when he spoke before the Busan conference at my place of work, the Institute of Development Studies. Referring to the economic crisis in Europe, he remarked that some countries in the North were now becoming the new South and that the old South might soon be sending aid to them. He also said that because Brazil had no past, their partners had no preconceptions about Brazil’s intentions. ‘Africa looks at Brazil as a cousin who’s doing well’, he said, ignoring the irony that Brazil’s historic links with Africa derive from its past economic dependence on the slave trade and that in Brazil race is still today a significant arbiter of status and privilege.⁴ These remarks may have been political positioning but nevertheless, Faroni’s emphasis on development cooperation as a matter of relationships struck a chord. I had never heard a British development minister reflect on my country’s past as shaping our identity in the eyes of aid recipients, nor did I ever hear any one mention relationships and emotions as central to development aid, in the way Faroni had.

I entered the world of development aid in the late 1960s and it took me thirty years to recognise, like Faroni, that relationships and history are central matters for good development practice, a realisation that led to writing this book. Born in Britain to radical parents, founding members of the Movement for Colonial Freedom,⁵ I never considered how my country’s imperialist past might also be part of my personal identity, nor that others might attribute neo-colonial motives to my work as a development practitioner — until one day in 1999 when a friendly Arab diplomat at the United Nations told me so to my face.My commitment to making the world a better place had blinded me to how others might think of me. Two years later, when working in Bolivia for Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), I received the lesson again.‘You may think that we Bolivians see DFID as working for social justice and poverty reduction. I appreciate that’s what you think and are trying to do’, said a Bolivian researcher,Diego Muñoz,‘but we know DFID as a donor that for years and years financed rich farmers to exploit the poor.’

I cannot shrug off my country’s past. History not only shapes our motives but influences others’ perceptions of these. Chinese commentators on development criticise Northern aid for its charitable ethos,⁶ arguing that a better world comes about through the mutual self-interest of investment and trade (a view shared by some Northern critics of aid on the political right).Although some, including me, have struggled for aid to further social justice rather than to serve as a welfare handout, nevertheless in the eyes of others our practice is driven by a moral imperative that might be termed ‘charitable’. Altruism alone will not make the world a better place, runs the Chinese argument; framing aid as a gift serves to obscure the relations of power between donor and recipient. Chinese aid relations, they say, are horizontal; yours are vertical. I would reply to the Chinese that power is equally at work in investment and trade relations as it is in aid, but I agree that the moral dimensions of aid from the North are problematic. This is partly because of the vertical power relations associated with non-reciprocated gifts,⁷ but also because of the effect our moral positioning may have on our aid practice, making us feel that we know best, disregarding what others might be telling us.

In writing this book, I have drawn on Stanley Cohen’s concept of ‘states of denial’⁸ — of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. I have learned, yet again and more profoundly, that not owning up to what I know from what others have told me — and therefore failing to ask myself what I should do about that knowledge — has limited what I could do. I have learnt that working for social justice — in development or any other domain of practice — requires a constant and critical interrogation of my tacit values, patterns of thought and deeply embedded theories of change that I acquired in my early years.

Childhood influences: the dialectics of scrambling eggs

My left-wing working-class parents, largely self-taught, used a variety of intellectual and emotional stratagems to encourage me to learn how change happened. I was ten years old — tall enough to stir with ease the enamel saucepan that my mother fetched down from the shelf above our ‘New World’ gas stove. First, three tablespoons of milk would have to go into the pan. My mother passed me the bottle with the gold foil cap — the creamiest kind, which she liked in her morning coffee (my father sai...