Foreign Aid And Its Unintended Consequences

Foreign aid and international development frequently bring with it a range of unintended consequences, both negative and positive. This book delves into these consequences, providing a fresh and comprehensive guide to understanding and addressing them. The book starts by laying out a theoretical framework based on complexity thinking, before going on to explore the ten most prevalent kinds of unintended effects of foreign aid: backlash effects, conflict effects, migration and resettlement effects, price effects, marginalization effects, behavioural effects, negative spillover effects, governance effects, environmental effects, and ripple effects. Each chapter revolves around a set of concrete case studies, analysing the mechanisms underpinning the unintended effects and proposing ways in which policymakers, practitioners, and evaluators can tackle negative side effects and maximize positive side effects. The book also includes personal testimonies, a succinct overview of unintended effects, and suggestions for further reading. Providing a clear overview of what side effects to anticipate when planning, executing, and evaluating aid, this book will be an important resource for students, development practitioners, and policymakers alike.

The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Drawing on four decades of data on U.S. economic and military aid, Aiding and Abetting explores whether foreign aid does more harm than good. Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the U.S. faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to U.S. interests, remain salient today. Historical case studies of Indonesia, El Salvador, and South Korea illustrate how aid can uphold human freedoms or propagate human rights abuses. Aiding and Abetting encourages both advocates and critics of foreign assistance to reconsider its political and social consequences by focusing international aid efforts on the expansion of human freedom.

What do we mean by 'gifts' in International Relations? Can foreign aid be conceptualized as a gift? Most foreign aid transactions are unilateral and financially unreciprocated, yet donors expect to benefit from them.Previous research dealing with foreign aid has analyzed the main donor motives and interests in providing financial support. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the invisible political or social 'exchange' taking place between recipient countries and donors when a grant agreement is signed. Focusing on Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel - the main beneficiaries of Western foreign aid – the book uses gift theories and theories of social exchange to show how international social bonds are shaped by foreign aid and in what ways recipient countries are obliged to return the 'gift' they receive. Foreign aid is a means of buying 'stability' or 'democracy' in the region but Beata Paragi is interested here to understand the actual feasibility of Western assistance. Looking at the context of the Arab Spring, the book examines how aid impacts on a recipient country's domestic political events such as war, the quest for self-determination, the struggle against occupation and the fight for dignity. An original contribution to Middle East Studies and International Relations, the research presents an alternative interpretation of foreign aid and show how external funds interact with local developments and realities.

Assessing Aid determines that the effectiveness of aid is not decided by the amount received but rather the institutional and policy environment into which it is accepted. It examines how development assistance can be more effective at reducing global poverty and gives five mainrecommendations for making aid more effective: targeting financial aid to poor countries with good policies and strong economic management; providing policy-based aid to demonstrated reformers; using simpler instruments to transfer resources to countries with sound management; focusing projects oncreating and transmitting knowledge and capacity; and rethinking the internal incentives of aid agencies.

"Dr. Ear argues that the international community has chosen to prioritize political stability above all other governance dimensions, and in so doing has traded a modicum of democracy for an ounce of security. Focusing on post-1993 Cambodia, Ear explores the unintended consequences in post-conflict environments of foreign aid. He chooses Cambodia both for personal reasons--which infuses an academic analysis with a compelling sense of urgency--and because it is one of the most aid-drenched countries in modern history. He tries to explain the relationship between Cambodia's aid dependence and its appallingly poor governance. He concludes that despite decades of aid, technical cooperation, four national elections, no open warfare, and some progress in some parts of the economy, Cambodia is one broken government away from disaster."--Publisher's description.

Top experts in the field discuss how to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid, proposing practical solutions to specific problems rather than a utopian master plan. The urgency of reducing poverty in the developing world has been the subject of a public campaign by such unlikely policy experts as George Clooney, Alicia Keyes, Elton John, Angelina Jolie, and Bono. And yet accompanying the call for more foreign aid is an almost universal discontent with the effectiveness of the existing aid system. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, development expert William Easterly has gathered top scholars in the field to discuss how to improve foreign aid. These authors, Easterly points out, are not claiming that their ideas will (to invoke a current slogan) Make Poverty History. Rather, they take on specific problems and propose some hard-headed solutions. Easterly himself, in an expansive and impassioned introductory chapter, makes a case for the “searchers”—who explore solutions by trial and error and learn from feedback—over the “planners”—who throw an endless supply of resources at a big goal—as the most likely to reduce poverty. Other writers look at scientific evaluation of aid projects (including randomized trials) and describe projects found to be cost-effective, including vaccine delivery and HIV education; consider how to deal with the government of the recipient state (work through it or bypass a possibly dysfunctional government?); examine the roles of the International Monetary Fund (a de-facto aid provider) and the World Bank; and analyze some new and innovative proposals for distributing aid. Contributors Abhijit Banerjee, Nancy Birdsall, Craig Burnside, Esther Duflo, Domenico Fanizza, William Easterly, Ruimin He, Kurt Hoffman, Stephen Knack, Michael Kremer, Mari Kuraishi, Ruth Levine, Bertin Martens, John McMillan, Edward Miguel, Jonathan Morduch, Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson, Lant Pritchett, Steven Radelet, Aminur Rahman, Ritva Reinikka, Jakob Svensson, Nicolas van de Walle, James Vreeland, Dennis Whittle, Michael Woolcock

A stunning personal narrative of best intentions gone awry, Michael Maren, at one time an aid worker and journalist in Somalia, writes of the failure of international charities. Michael Maren spent years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist, where he witnessed at a harrowing series of wars, famines, and natural disasters. In this book, he claims that charities, such as CARE and Save the Children, are less concerned with relief than we think. Maren also attacks the United Nation's "humanitarian" missions are controlled by agribusinesses and infighting bureaucrats.