Dan Banik speaks with Liam Swiss on what motivates wealthy donor countries to provide aid, the influence of international conferences and civil society organizations on the aid policies of donor countries and the role of individual agency, including that of bureaucratic activism and bureaucratic entrepreneurialism.
Why do aid agencies from wealthy donor countries with diverse domestic political and economic contexts arrive at very similar positions on certain foreign aid policies and priorities?
In his book, The Globalization of Foreign Aid: Developing Consensus, Liam Swiss examines how certain ideas and practices influence the work of aid agencies in Canada, the United States and Sweden and how aid agencies end up adopting common policy priorities such as in the fields of gender and security. He argues that the so-called ‘emerging global consensus’ that constitutes the globalization of aid can be explained by both macro-level globalizing influences as well as micro-level social processes that take place within aid agencies.
Liam Swiss is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada.Â
(by Ingrid Ågren Høegh)
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Theme music    You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Banik.Â
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Banik              I've been highly impressed with your scholarship, Liam, and I've particularly enjoyed reading your work related to foreign aid. I'm delighted to have you on the show. Welcome.Â
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Swiss              Thanks Dan, thanks for having me. I look forward to chatting with you today.
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Banik              Let's begin with the concept of foreign aid, or this animal that is called aid. Because there is often this confusion as to what it is and what it is not. Some would say this is too complex, there are all kinds of different aid worlds, official development aid or ODA, development aid provided by NGOs or civil society, humanitarian and emergency aid by official donors and UN agencies, NGOs, Red Cross. And even though there has been historically a lot of focus on official development assistance, not everybody seems to be on board, in terms of what aid is. So, could you take us through the evolution of the concept of foreign aid or development assistance? And how you think understandings of this concept has changed over the years and what it means today?
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Swiss              It's a big question. From my perspective as a sociologist studying foreign aid, but as someone who worked in the foreign aid field for the Canadian International Development Agency for a couple of years, aid to me for a long time had been pigeon-holed as simply a financial transfer. And I think if you look at a lot of the foreign aid literature, there's been a lot of focus just on that question. As someone who does a mix of quantitative and qualitative research, it's very easy to just focus on the money, look at where and how the money flows, what that buys. I think in my mind there's a bigger piece we need to consider beyond that money. I don't know if it's an evolution in terms of how aid is being perceived over time, because I think it's maybe always done some of this, but I do think that it requires us to go beyond just thinking about official development assistance as a transfer of money from A to B and that's the be all and end all of that. So, it's in more recent years, there's a need to understand not just where and how that money flows, but what that does, what ideas, what discourses, what policies and institutions are part and parcel of that. In the big picture now, I think that from one perspective you can think about aid resources being about trying to help various communities etc. to achieve their immediate aims and objectives, in terms of improving people's lives, responding to humanitarian crises, but it is important to realise that a big part of that is about the relationships it builds and the connections that it builds in the global context. So, my research in this area is largely tried to focus on aid as both existing within and also building perhaps connection within society such that we think of aid not just as this financial transfer but something that builds relationships. Obviously, there's so much more we can talk about here in terms of power imbalances and various problems identified with aid, I don't want to lose sight of that, but from my perspective, I think I see over time this broader understanding of aid and all its multiplicities kind of emerge in the research context, I think in the donor agencies themselves they realise that aid is more than a financial transfer that it might have been perceived as, but in all of that it’s a transnational process that is rife with politics, power and the ability to sustain change, I think, and move processes of change, that might not always be change for the better, I think you can look at the history of aid and see all sorts of missteps and unintended consequences.Â
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Banik              I was thinking about also the fact that maybe it isn't, some would say it isn't politically correct to use the term aid anymore, some say it's development assistance, a lot of emerging countries avoid using the term aid, it would be perhaps more convenient to say investments or solidarity.Â
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Swiss              I think that's a really valid point.Â
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Banik              So, is it politically incorrect to say that it is foreign aid that we are talking about?Â
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Swiss              I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's politically incorrect, but I think it has been a common parlance to discuss it in those terms, so I think people recognise that as a catch-all for that process, but when it comes down to it, there is maybe some loaded baggage that comes with the term aid and this notion of 'helping', when in actual fact if you look across a lot of contexts, it's much more partnership or solidarity, or assistance. So, it might be a sloppy shorthand for all of that parcel of relationships and transfers and collaboration that does take place in that place. I can be convinced of that. I don't want to get lost in debating the different terms, but you're right, I think there is a case to be made that there is something patronising about the term 'aid' versus some of these other ways we might refer to it. Whether, if you're talking to people outside the field of study, that they recognise that's what you're talking about if you don't call it aid, might be another thing. Here in Canada there's a common thing when you're talking to academics and policymakers and politicians and they ask you if it passes the 'Tim's test' and Tim Hortons is this very popular, unexplainedly so, popular coffee and doughnut shop here in Canada, and the Tim’s test is whether what you're talking about would actually ring true to your average neighbourhood grandmother down the corner at Tim's. So, I think that question of what people recognise as that thing or that constellation of things that has been called foreign aid is still an important thing to ask.Â
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Banik              So let's move on to understanding the motivations behind aid. There's been considerable academic interest in trying to better understand what actually motivates donor countries to provide aid. One dominant explanation is altruism, that there are humanitarian concerns based on the extent of poverty, inequality, some sort of need. And, some would say it's also this recognition in donor countries that we are lucky, 'we've won the lottery' as we say in Norway, and others may not have been as lucky, so we have a moral obligation to help. Another set of major explanations is of course related to the national interest, and we see this much more now in countries like the UK, aid agencies have been affected, DFID, there's been a lot of focus on national interest, that by providing some form of assistance, a donor state expects to achieve some goal. It could be political ideology, foreign policy, commercial interest, security, in addition to perhaps economic development. And then you have smaller countries like Norway, and Sweden, where it is more about soft power, branding. So, what are your thoughts there, in terms of the motivations behind foreign aid?
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Swiss              I think you captured the two prevailing and contrasting motivations that are often talked about. This form of humanitarian or solidaristic support of fighting poverty and improving well-being versus that national self-interest in a range of fields, security, investment, commercial interests, and I think us academics have had a tendency to focus on contrasting and categorising these motivations and trying to fit different donor countries in different boxes, or along different spectrums when it comes to moral altruistic to more self-interested, and I think to some extent that is not that helpful, because I'm convinced that in all development assistance we can see aspects of both motivations. You can find ideal types or examples that are more purely self-interested or altruistic, but if you look at the approach to aid of any given donor country, it won't be hard to find some examples within that of both motivations coexisting, feeding into one another, politicians and interested actors within the industry to justify or rationalise their actions, so my assessment, at least now, is that as much as we might slot certain countries on that spectrum, I don't think there is such a thing as a purely altruistic donor or purely self-interested donor when it comes to development assistance. A bigger question that I've done a bit of work on, why given these motivations do new countries want to become donors and what is it about that motivation that exists? One of the things that I find quite interesting as a motivation that would be part of self-interest because it is reputational concern, but there is seemingly this expectation that states when they reach a certain level of power or importance globally, that they are expected to have some form of development assistance mechanism or agency. And obviously we see the emergence of different ways of providing development assistance or cooperation in a range of countries, beyond the conventional Western high-income donor countries, that I think is troubling to just fit into a self-interest mould. That there is this reputational or legitimacy-oriented motive there that maybe wasn't as present early on in the growth or evolution of development assistance as an international institution. But even in that, I think there is still both an overlapping coexisting aspect of altruistic motives linked with self-interest motives. So, I'm always puzzled by it, and it's always interesting to see some of that proliferation of that institution as troubled and questioned as it has been over the last 60-70 years, still taking hold for these various reasons.Â
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Banik              I think you're absolutely right about the combination of everything, and I've been studying China in Africa and increasingly also India in Africa. One area I feel that these emerging donors tend to distinguish themselves is by telling recipient countries that unlike Western donors who never really told you what their self-interest was, we are pretty open about it. This is maybe more the Chinese case than the Indian case, we need this from you: either natural resources or you may not have something now but maybe you can help us in the future, so it appears to me that the emerging donors are, and I've been making this argument maybe people are tired of hearing it, that the emerging donors are much more sophisticated in their communication of what they expect in return, whereas the Western donors tends to couch self-interest or sometimes doesn't make it very clear what they want in return, so that relationship in terms of the donor-recipient relationship becomes a bit more clouded. It isn't clear to the recipient what it is the donor expects in return. Whereas emerging donors often tend to communicate that expectation much more clearly.
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Swiss              I'd agree with that, Dan. It has seemed to be the case, especially with Chinese assistance in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. I'm not certain I have an answer as to why it has been easier for those donors, like China, to be more direct about what that self-interest aspect is. Maybe that is more of a perception of that relationship between China and the partner country as being more of an investment or something that will lead to some sort of mutual benefit, whereas perhaps in the past, where the origins of development assistance emerged from, there was this charade of altruism that was layered on top of everything, so maybe it was less acceptable for a donor to say 'we want to help you build this dam, and the thing that's in it for us is that we're going to get you to work with our engineering firms, buy our turbines,' all that tied-aid that fed back to the donor country, that aspect maybe was downplayed or less direct and so the publicity of it, the public motivation of it all was really about helping a country improve its electrification processes or something like that. But, in the grand scheme of things, there was this interest there, commercial interest of donor seeing its engineering sector and building ties overseas. In the first decades of the 2000s, and the Paris Agenda for Aid Effectiveness, having that specific commercial self-interest built into programmes was viewed as being less acceptable among donors. Even though it never stopped and there are all these claims around untying that were made at the time, there is a lot of evidence that there was a lot of aid flows that were returning back to donor economies. That rhetoric of saying we're trying to lessen that interest. But I do appreciate the directness of the Chinese approach in being more willing to say this is what's in it for us.
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Banik              Yeah, and I also think it helps that they couch this as a part of South-South Cooperation. It is much more appealing coming from another country in the South than a country in the North, where, again I think some of the emerging donors tend to not maybe explicitly but implicitly make the claim that their assistance is more relevant than irrelevant Western models that have worked in a totally different context. In terms of say agriculture or another problem you want to solve, the Chinese, Indian, South Korean example is more appealing or relevant for these countries than Western experiences.Â
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Swiss              I think that is a really valid argument and something that Western donor countries are having to struggle with and rationalise. Because I think if you earn a position of being a recipient country government and you look at where is the relevance here, what are we getting out of this relationship, and what are the expectations in return, if you're gaining insights and expertise and investment from partners that have been in situations much more recently that are close to where you're at or dealt with issues that are more relevant to your economy or society in that specific matter, then it's hard to see why countries wouldn't want to work with a South-South partner like that over a donor that is also imposing some other conditions on that assistance, whether it's something to do with human rights or other standards that may not be seen to be directly related to whatever that investment is. Definitely, I think it's obviously a preoccupation of some of the more traditional donor countries about this increased competition from emerging donors, like China, India and others, and I think they have reason to be concerned in some ways, because it kind of shows the real failings of the conventional donors. Not to say that those sorts of investments don't also have their own problems too.Â
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Banik              Liam, let's move on to this superb book that you wrote a couple of years ago, The Globalization of Foreign Aid, where you argue that there is considerable donor rhetoric often emerging consensus, as you put it, and that there is a striking similarity in aid policies among some of these Western donor states. You were looking mainly at Canada, the US and Sweden. What types of similarities are we talking about here in this emerging consensus? Is it in relation to the types of projects that these donors want to support? Or, does this consensus also apply to say the type of domestic institutions in these countries that are in charge of aid policies?Â
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Swiss              It's a book that took shape over a long period, so I think things have evolved and changed in that context, but what struck me as interesting and inspiring this study was the fact that when I was a young, straight out of my Master's programme, naive development officer working for the Canadian International Development Agency, which doesn't really exist anymore, it's been absorbed into our Ministry of Foreign Affairs here…Â
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Banik              Just like in the UK…
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Swiss              Just like in the UK and Australia. I witnessed a lot of rhetoric pushing Canadian aid policies in certain directions that seemed to be the same sorts of things that other donors were doing in that space, right, so one of the key things that I noted was this frequent reference at the time to this term of 'emerging global consensus' on these issues. And, in the context, this is when the study started, pre-SDGs, in the MDG-context, this notion that there was a group-think kind of approach to what issues matter in aid and how we go about that. So, you can talk about that in terms of aid priorities, so what sorts of things were being funded. You could talk about that in terms of aid modalities, so under the Paris Agenda and aid effectiveness approaches that proliferated in that time, how assistance was being delivered, and arguably the question you raised, I think you could now fruitfully talk about that in terms of institutional set-up as you suggested, right? You look at for instance the Canadian, Australian and British cases recently of going to this no longer having a stand-alone aid agency model, that to me also speaks to this notion of there being some common models to these things that circulate amongst donors and are taken on to greater or lesser extents among donors. So, the study really was driven out of this idea that I saw this move towards at least tacit homogenization of ideas and approaches to certain things, but then as the study progressed, I realised that what I was interested in was what was driving that and how that could be seen working within the donor country context in terms of the interface or global models that were being institutionalised or adapted to whatever the specific donor context is, and the reality being that even this rhetoric of global consensus was really mediated by a lot of other kind of micro-level processes going on within the donor agency, within domestic governments that led to maybe a rhetorical commitment to some of this consensus, but necessarily a practical commitment in terms of what it meant, in terms of implementation. So, reading the book, you can see that I took on theoretical perspective inspired by John Meyer and his colleagues at Stanford, I was trying to tease out how we see that global influence mediated by the work of bureaucrats, by the work of other international actors, and things like that. So, I try to tease that out throughout the book, looking at these notions of an emerging global consensus in two areas, around gender equality and around securitization of aid. Arguably, I think as a good sociologist who wants generalisable work, you can apply that theory and try to test out that sort of model with any range of aid priorities over time. Whether that's support to climate change adaptation or whether that's, even in ways that donors react to the pandemic and things like that, that process of norm setting or agenda setting and then how that is instituted within the domestic context and the give and take, how the people within the aid agencies mediate that, is what I was after in the book. And by the end of it all, I think that I try to demonstrate that there are some of these common processes going on in all of these donor agencies, where you have these selective uptakes of these global agendas, which leads the appearance of maybe a global consensus, but that the implementation of it will maybe vary considerably depending on a range of factors domestically.Â
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Banik              For many years I've been bugging a lot our politicians, ambassadors and bureaucrats by saying that a country like Norway, we should be having our own ideas and maybe suggesting a way forward, some innovative solutions and not just simply adopting what others are adopting. I got this feeling, and that's why I really liked your book, Liam, I got this feeling that there is this domino effect, that somebody starts something and others follow, as you were saying about Australia, the UK and Canada in terms of how they are restructuring their aid agencies, it could be whatever is trendy at that moment, some sort of a conceptual framework, be it human rights based approach, or good governance, anti-corruption, I remember there was for a while this concept of recipient responsibility, you name it. Whatever is in vogue, somehow it seeps through, filters and arrives through different layers, and what I really liked about your book, and you make a very persuasive case, that this kind of globalisation of aid has taken place through all kinds of levels, but one level is this influence of international conferences, all those things that we attended before the pandemic struck, treaties, hanging out with people, visiting organisations, looking at how one donor is doing certain things and can we imitate that in our country, and I do think you have a very important point there, in terms of how this diffusion of aid priorities take place, right? That it is often about whatever is attractive out there, let's adopt it. And maybe, and I'm wondering whether you could reflect on that, maybe it is a way of legitimising one's own activities, one's own generosity and maybe even in the process, telling other countries you should be more like us.Â
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Swiss              I think you hit the nail on the head there, Dan, I think there's definitely, I guess all policy agreements are like this in some way, that there is a tendency to follow the trend, but in the case of development assistance donors, I think that's exactly it. It is this constant, shifting target of what the newest vogue or trendy approach is, that then gets layered on top of those previous vogues and priorities and trends, and one of the things that is interesting to me is that your donors may always be chasing some new approach or modality or priority…
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Banik              Some new magic bullet…
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Swiss              Some new magic bullet, that then is tried for a while and then maybe falls out of favour. It doesn't take long to go from all the major donors in the world being wrapped in the ideas of aid effectiveness and the Paris Declaration in the early 2000s, to having a lot of that fall by the wayside. Here we are, 15 years later. That part of chasing these common aims and priorities was part of what I wanted to look at there. And to me, talking about motivations at the start, part of it is also about donors seeking legitimacy. Nobody wants to be viewed that donor that is doing their entirely own thing or viewed as backward or not productive or not effective. There's always going to be trailing organisations. You can't all be a leader, that's one thing. But donors often aspire to emulate who they perceive as leaders. So that emulation piece is part of what I found in my research and I still think happens. In Canada, for a long time, there was definitely a desire to always be looking to DFID and seeing what DFID was doing, looking to the Nordics and seeing what they were doing, and aspiring to maybe be more like those donors, because of the view that they were leading on certain issues. At the same time, within donor agencies there's also, especially when you have your representatives on the ground in certain countries, there is a perception of which donors are more effective, have more influence, are not really worth working with, or emulating because they are not on the same track. And when I was a young development officer, I was thinking about these things, trying to tease out how does what our domestic agenda would seem to suggest for what we want to do here, butt up against these global influences. So, like you say, the conferences, treaties, networks, and my feeling when I started writing this was that some of that domestic agenda was subjugated to trying to buy into this set of global donor norms or models or institutions, rather than trying to set a distinctly, in my case, Canadian course that would help to achieve whatever aims Canada decided it wanted in this regard. Like you say with your discussions with Norwegian ministers, why not go outside the box and do something distinctly Norwegian in this approach? I think that's not a position that many countries can afford to take, and part of that in my mind is always being worried about justifying or legitimising the approach that is taken to appease some other audience.Â
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Banik              I think that is a great point, Liam, because I was thinking about that right away when you started mentioning this tendency of legitimising, and I remember this concept of like-minded donors. In Norway, we tend to compare ourselves with Sweden and Denmark and maybe even the UK. You don't want to stick out. And you're right, it's also about making sure that you can tell your voters that we are not so different, everybody else is doing it, and thereby it is safer and effective. We're pooling our resources together. There's some sort of consensus. We finally found the answer. But, I don't want to be too harsh on our politicians, because as academics we also keep changing our minds, writing books, saying we were wrong maybe, there is a new way, and so there are always these new ideas being generated. But, there is also this political angle, because we have changes in government and new politicians want to somehow highlight one area where they want to make an impression, so all of this tension leads to, and I think you also write about it in the book, this kind of policy inconsistency, that one tends to change course quite often, and I suppose that is inevitable. I wanted to ask you about this other aspect that you've studied, and I found this to be particularly interesting, is the role of individual agency. That in addition to all these conferences, treaties, organisations, you also have champions, individuals championing gender, or some sector. You have bureaucrats being very entrepreneurial, you have this exchange between civil society organisations and the aid agencies, or even between academic and aid agencies. In Norway, a lot of the people working at Norad have studied at our university, so how do you see the impact of individual agency, Liam? Because one of the surprising findings in your studies, is that civil society organisations and their lobbying and advocacy hasn't had that kind of effect, at least in your three case studies, but individuals have, right?
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Swiss              To my mind, that was part of what I wanted to look at in the book and associated studies, is that as a sociologies who is sometimes wearing a development studies hat and sometimes engaging with more international relations community, there oftentimes seems to be a tendency to just ascribe donor approaches, decisions, policy positions to a country. Canada does this. Norway does that. And when we all know in fact that there is an entire micro process going on underneath whatever that national position ends up being. There is somebody writing a memo to the minister, somebody representing that organisation at a meeting with other donors, there's somebody tasked with figuring out how the organisation should speak and act and react on any number of given issues, so part of what I wanted to get at in the book was to understand some of that individual agency. The notion of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, or champions of certain issues, that's not really new. Even in universities we see the same thing happening. It comes down to getting the right people in the room to do a certain thing. That came out pretty clearly in the study, particularly in the case of prioritisation of women's rights and gender equality, in the Canadian and Swedish cases, especially in terms of the early development of that. But I do think too that individual aspect is overlooked. We still think about the formal negotiations that are happening at a UN meeting or international venues as the things we need to take at face value, when in actual fact it's kind of all this micro interactions and reactions that have taken place before that, that maybe sets the stage for that more performative, formal international presence on the formal stage. So, having been a nobody, desk officer who was planning documents and budgets, it makes you realise that there are any number of those sorts of people working in this industry across the entire development assistance context that are actually driving some of these things. That exchange piece I thought was interesting. I naively went into the study thing there are these very active civil society groups that are going to shape the way donors think and act on these things, and when it came to talking to bureaucrats and members of these organisations, the common refrain was that formal lobbying or advocacy wasn't perceived as shaping these things in the way that I thought it would.Â
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Banik              Was this also the case in Sweden?
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Swiss              In the Swedish case, there was still that perception at that point in time that the lobbying per say wasn't an issue, but it was in the Swedish case in particular, very common to have people who were then in Swedish SIDA who had these long histories of working in civil society context. So, it was this personnel exchange that I focus on in the book as being maybe a more subtle way that that influence is had, rather than a formal lobbying piece. That may have changed too over the times since I was conducting these interviews in Sweden, but the Swedish case, in contrast to the US and Canadian case at the time, the Swedish donor had very strong connections to quite a small number of very big influential civil society groups in Sweden who were involved in delivering on this development assistance. Whereas the Canadian case had many more small organisations. So, the Swedish case you might have seen a bit more of that formal influence, but even there I was being told that part of the reasons that we saw Sweden being perceived as a leader on gender equality at the time was that some of the strongest advocates for gender equality within SIDA were former civil society, NGO types that had cut their teeth and developed their perspectives and expertise on this in the NGO world. So, that interface of people moving in and out of these donor roles was something to focus on that I hadn't come across before.Â
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Banik              I really did like that discussion on how major aid agencies came to adopt policies that address issues of women and gender in their programming. And I was thinking how that is a very good example of how our societies have developed certain values that we have, and we want that to be a part of aid policies. And, you're right, in terms of this whole thing of gender champions or bureaucratic entrepreneurialism, this could apply to any other sector, what I quite liked is how you emphasised that not everybody perhaps has that kind of influence. You could also have these guerrilla bureaucrats that go against the general consensus. They are offering maybe a different perspective. And I was thinking that maybe it's all about getting the timing right, having the right networks, what makes you get that attention that others aren't getting, so somehow that combination I suppose is important, being in the right place at the right time, and maybe as you were saying about having others like civil society organisations could be a media report, somehow boosting or supporting your idea, that suddenly gets a lot of attention and then you are there coming up with this wonderful solution. But, continuing on this civil society point, Liam, for many years I have been fascinated with how certain civil society organisations, the major ones that get a large part of the aid budget, their interactions with the aid agency, with the government, I was of course in the first season of this show, last year, I had a conversation with Degan Ali, one of these well-known civil society activists, and she has been for many years complaining that civil society organisations in the global South, that do most of the work, take most of the risk, often get very little of the aid funds, whereas the civil society organisations in rich donor countries get a large chunk. She thought that was unfair and that there should be a greater distribution of resources. I was wondering if you could reflect a bit on how you see these civil society organisations, in Canada or the US, is it about the money and what characterises their relationship with their own governments? Are they willing to be critical or is it more about just saying give us the money and we'll do it? We may criticise you in private, but we won't do it in public.Â
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Swiss              I think that question raises some really thorny issues for actors in that space. Different donor countries have a different degree to which they deliver their assistance through civil society channels. Canada is a country where that has been quite common and it's, for a long time, viewed as relatively apolitical or not heavily politicised, so people working in that space could still be somewhat critical of government or priorities and still survive. And then in the period from 2006 to 2015, we had a Conservative government in power in Canada, and there was a really strong association between civil society groups that maybe supported issues or approaches that maybe countered the priorities of that government, of losing their funding from CIDA at the time. It really put a chill on advocacy and NGOs speaking out, those that did really suffered as a result and so it became much more heavily politicised. But, it had a twofold, it caused some organisations to shut up and not criticise the government because they were worried about their existence and it pushed others to be more vocal and more critical, and in the longer term has led to a change, because there was a rule in Canada that any organisation with charitable status, which a number of these NGOs had, couldn't dedicate more than 10% of their resources for anything that was deemed advocacy, but the interpretation of that rule in that period came to be viewed as a very broad term, so there was an argument at one point that the Canadian Oxfam, about whether or not Oxfam advocating for the end of poverty was viewed as political advocacy and therefore would trigger that 10% rule or whatever. And so, an extremely almost insane position that if you're working to combat poverty that you're somehow being overtly political, obviously combating poverty is a political thing, but overtly political in a way that could be viewed as something that could lose your charitable status. So, obviously these organisations walk a fine line, and with a change in government there was a real shift in that approach, but I think people came to realise that something that had been viewed as somewhat politically neutral in the past could be quite easily politicised. The second part of your question, I think that it's totally a fair criticism about what proportion of development assistance funds that are delivered through NGOs based in the West, actually make it into supporting the communities and organisations they partner with in partner countries. If you think through some of the tenants of aid effectiveness, or if you want to come at it from more of a post-development perspective of wanting to support local grassroots activism and movements and things, the argument for why any proportion of development assistance money should really end up in paying experts in the West versus being used more fruitfully in the immediate communities and societies is a hard one to sustain, so I'm torn about how to think about that. Because I know a lot of people that work in that space, I know a lot of people that do good work and help advance thinking and ideas and build relationships and partnerships. But, arguably, if you are really wanting to build solidarity and support for local work and activism and priorities on these issues, then doing something where you are directly funding that, rather than dealing with an entire series of middle-men, for lack of a better word, is something that bears more thinking I guess.Â
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Banik              I was thinking that civil society organisations in our parts of the world, it isn't as if they are bad or anything, it is just a question of how fair the distribution of resources is, and we do need these Northern NGOs. They have good ideas and I think they are also very important to make sure, they play a key role in ensuring that funds are well spent, all of that. And that in turn is important for our politicians, I suppose, because that's one way of saying to the domestic public: look, your tax money is being well-spent, and we are making sure of it. I think politicians also tend to take the advice of civil society organisations, even if it is critical, because then they feel that they can legitimise new initiatives. They can even build on that criticism to launch new initiatives. But, we are running out of time, so I just wanted to ask you a final question, Liam, which has to do with something that you also address in the book, this sort of a generosity paradox, that you characterise at least the US development assistance to be. But, my question is a bit more general, I think, we began this conversation talking about DFID and UK and how there are all of these different interests at play, motivations for providing assistance is changing, even in traditionally generous countries now there is more of an inward-looking policy, 'we also have problems, we can't just be generous', so how do you see generosity playing out in the near future? Do you think aid will become more explicitly about promoting self-interest and less about solidarity and altruism?
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Swiss              I do feel like we're in a period where the pendulum of altruism versus self-interest, in terms of what is the dominant narrative around these things, is shifting more towards the self-interest, even if it is an enlightened self-interest that a lot of donors claim: 'by us doing this, it will save us from further spread of disease' or any range of different things that are used as justifications for these things. So, I do think that there is that move right now. And part of that is about domestic political approaches, so you look at what the Trump administration did to already what was a less generous American approach to aid, if you look at what the Tories have done in the UK recently, the willingness to step back from their commitment and the folding of DFID into the FCO. It speaks to a period of more overt alignment of assistance with self-interest. And maybe that goes back to what we were talking about earlier on, if everyone is looking at China and saying: look, China is doing it this way and is very clear about the fact that they are making this investment because they want that railway in place so that they can get this resource more effectively, maybe there is more of a willingness to be overt about that self-interest, which maybe if it's being more honest about what's going on is not necessarily a bad thing, but then when it translates into arguments about what about us first, that dynamic seems to be gaining ground in certain countries in the West, certainly in the US context, we get that rhetoric in Canada too, we have a strange dynamic in Canada where we maybe aspire ideologically to follow Nordic or British past practices around aid and be seen as cutting-edge, middle-power donor kind of thing, even Canada's recent feminist international assistance policy does that to some extent, but then we always have the easy comparison to the US and say, well we give more than them in terms of generosity, so we're alright, even though Canada is abysmal in terms of overall aid to GNI ratios, so I do feel like we're in a period, especially with the pandemic, it will be really interesting to see what happens with overall levels of aid generosity across the spectrum, but I don't think the combination of pulling back on generosity and being willing to accept more self-interest is necessarily going to be a positive thing long-term for development assistance as it evolves.Â
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Banik              Liam, it was great fun to chat with you today. Thank you so much for coming on my show.Â
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Swiss              Thanks very much, Dan. I really appreciate it and really enjoyed our discussion.Â
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Banik              If you enjoyed this podcast, please spread the news among your friends and share it on social media. The Twitter handle for this podcast is @GlobalDevPod.
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Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banik from the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment@gmail.com.Â
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