Paper short abstract:

We live in an era of aid precision: results, indicators, risk assessments, and value-for-money calculation. This paper explores the linked cognitive and ethical dissonance that results from mixing quantitative compliance and transformational goals in highly uncertain reform environments.

Paper long abstract:

We live in an era of aid precision. The fiscal crisis of the ealry 21st century ushered in an opportunistic wave of conservative aid hawks who built a development counter-bureaucracy aimed not at improving aid effectiveness, but at reigning in the discretion and autonomy of aid professionals. Interventions are now designed and evaluated on the basis of rigorous results frameworks, risk assessments, baseline indicators, and value-for-money calculations.

But the precision that aid must comply with these days is often a very spurious one. Aid practitioners face the paradox that the most transformational interventions are often the least quantifiable ones. This is coupled with a gradual shift of foreign aid towards the weakest institutional contexts, which are subject to the greatest uncertainty. Thus emerges the cognitive and ethical dissonance of trying to do uncertain good while needing to comply with narrowly precise reporting requirements. The only way to continue to do good is to report success, but sometimes success is easiest to achieve in the interventions that do the least good.

This paper provides a theoretical interpretation of the ethical and cognitive dissonance involved in this new era of aid, building on the work of moral philosophers like Frances Kamm and psychologists like Daniel Kahneman. It then explores the practical implications of dissonance through the case of a DFID-funded anti-corruption intervention in Ghana.