The Development Of Aid

Foreign aid is one of the few topics in the development discourse with such an uninterrupted, yet volatile history in terms of interest and attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Does aid work in promoting growth and reducing poverty in the developing world? Will a new 'big push' approach accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals or will another opportunity be missed? Can the lessons of almost half a century of aid giving be learnt? These are truly important questions in view of the emerging new landscape in foreign aid and recent developments related to the global financial crisis, which are expected to have far reaching implications for both donors and recipients engaged in this area. Against this shifting aid landscape, there is a pressing need to evaluate progress to date and shed new light on emerging issues and agendas. This volume brings together leading aid experts to review the progress achieved so far, identify the challenges ahead, and discuss the emerging policy agenda in foreign aid. A central conclusion of this important and timely volume is that, since development aid remains crucial for many developing countries, a huge effort is needed from both donors and aid recipients to overcome the inefficiencies and make aid work better for poor people. After all, as global citizens, we have a moral obligation to do the best we can to lift people out of poverty in the developing world. The findings of this book will be of considerable interest to professionals and policymakers engaged in policy reforms in foreign aid, and provide an essential one-stop reference for students of development, international finance, and economics.

What is development -- How does development happen? -- Why are some countries rich and others poor? -- What can be done to accelerate development? -- The evolution of development aid -- Sustainable development -- Globalization and development -- The future of development.

A new lens on development is changing the world of international aid. The overdue recognition that development in all sectors is an inherently political process is driving aid providers to try to learn how to think and act politically. Major donors are pursuing explicitly political goals alongside their traditional socioeconomic aims and introducing more politically informed methods throughout their work. Yet these changes face an array of external and internal obstacles, from heightened sensitivity on the part of many aid-receiving governments about foreign political interventionism to inflexible aid delivery mechanisms and entrenched technocratic preferences within many aid organizations. This pathbreaking book assesses the progress and pitfalls of the attempted politics revolution in development aid and charts a constructive way forward. Contents: Introduction 1. The New Politics Agenda The Original Framework: 1960s-1980s 2. Apolitical Roots Breaking the Political Taboo: 1990s-2000s 3. The Door Opens to Politics 4. Advancing Political Goals 5. Toward Politically Informed Methods The Way Forward 6. Politically Smart Development Aid 7. The Unresolved Debate on Political Goals 8. The Integration Frontier Conclusion 9. The Long Road to Politics

This edited volume provides an assessment of an increasingly fragmented aid system. Development cooperation is fundamentally changing its character in the wake of global economic and political transformations and an ongoing debate about what constitutes, and how best to achieve, global development. This also has important implications for the setup of the aid architecture. The increasing number of donors and other actors as well as goals and instruments has created an environment that is increasingly difficult to manoeuvre. Critics describe today's aid architecture as 'fragmented': inefficient, overly complex and rigid in adapting to the dynamic landscape of international cooperation. By analysing the actions of donors and new development actors, this book gives important insights into how and why the aid architecture has moved in this direction. The contributors also discuss the associated costs, but also potential benefits of a diverse aid system, and provide some concrete options for the way forward.

Peter Hjertholm, Editorial Assistant Aid has worked in the past but can be made to work better in the future. In this important new book, leading economists and political scientists, including experienced aid practitioners, re-examine foreign aid. The evolution of development doctrine over the past fifty years is critically investigated, and conventional wisdom and current practice is challenged. As well as offering important new research material, the book opens up new directions for future practice and policy. It will be of vital interest to those working in economics, politics and development studies, as well as to governmental and aid professionals.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) allocates vast sums of money each year, providing vital assistance to countless individuals across the developing world. Yet many observers and insiders have sharply criticized CIDA for its lack of concrete results. Presenting a range of work by scholars and practitioners, this collection offers the most comprehensive examination of CIDA's efforts in over a decade. Contributors explore recent trends in Canadian foreign aid, including topics such as its place in Canadian politics, gender and security concerns, advocacy and public engagement, the complexity of CIDA policies, and CIDA's relationship with non-governmental organizations. The perspectives assembled in Struggling for Effectiveness bring clarity to the issue of foreign aid while judiciously gauging Canada's record and offering concrete suggestions for strengthening CIDA's efforts to help people living in poverty. Extensively researched and comprehensive in scope, Struggling for Effectiveness will be indispensable to anyone interested in Canadian assistance abroad and Canada's place in a rapidly changing world. Contributors include Stephen Baranyi (University of Ottawa), David Black (Dalhousie University), Elizabeth Blackwood (Simon Fraser University), Stephen Brown (University of Ottawa), Dominique Caouette (Université de Montréal), Adam Chapnick (Canadian Forces College), Denis Côté (Canadian Council for International Cooperation), Molly den Heyer (Dalhousie University), Nilima Gulrajani (Oxford University), Hunter McGill (University of Ottawa), Anca Paducel (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), Rosalind Raddatz (University of Ottawa), Ian Smillie (independent scholar and consultant), Veronika Stewart (Simon Fraser University), and Liam Swiss (Memorial University of Newfoundland).

A response to the pressing need to address and clarify the substantial ambiguity within current literature, this edited volume aims to deepen readers’ understanding of the impact of foreign aid on development outcomes based on the latest findings in research over the past decade. Foreign aid has long been seen as one of two extremes: either beneficial or damaging, a blessing or a curse. Consequently, many readers perceive aid’s effectiveness based on the work of scholars who are assessing the impact of aid from one of two antithetical perspectives. This book takes a different approach, shedding light on recent research that can deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between aid and its aftereffects. Drawing from an extensive set of studies that have explored micro and macro impacts of foreign aid for recipient nations, chapter authors highlight more layered and nuanced findings, with a focus on donor characteristics, political motives, and an evaluation of aid projects and their effectiveness, including the differential impact based on type of aid. This volume is the first of its kind to unpack aid as a complex rather than a unitary concept and explore the wide areas of grey that have long enshrouded foreign aid.

As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3, and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.