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Ivica Petrikova
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
Melita Lazell
(University of Portsmouth)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Technology & innovation
Sessions:
Thursday 7 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Aid provision and donors’ interests in an urbanising and mobile world increasingly affected by climate change.
Panel P39 at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
This panel explores the role that foreign aid plays and/or could play in a world increasingly affected by climate change and rising migration, with a particular attention paid to the extent to which donors connect their national interests with the aid provided, whether in discourse or in practice.
Long Abstract:
Human society is currently undergoing a profound transformation. People, primarily in lower-income countries, are moving rapidly from rural areas to cities. Even more notably, climate change-induced conflicts as well as internal and international migration are on the rise. While remittances and foreign direct investment have become channels of greater financial exchange between the Global North and the Global South than foreign aid over the past several decades, foreign aid still constitutes a very significant source of income for many countries in the Global South. Just the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries provide about 170 billion USD annually in official development assistance.
While generally dressed up in altruistic language, decisions about the allocation of foreign aid have always been at least partially and often chiefly motivated by donors’ own interests. However, the explicit emphasis on national security and economic interests as a rationale for providing aid to ‘developing’ countries has become particularly pronounced amongst some donors in recent years, in response to the increasing challenges posed by climate change and rising volumes of international migration. For example, when merging the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office in 2020, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson argued that it was time to tie UK development assistance closer with the UK’s national interests given that for “for too long … UK overseas aid ha[d] been treated as some giant cashpoint in the sky that arrive[d] without any reference to UK interest." The US, under Trump’s presidency, also adopted an “America first” development aid strategy in 2018, specifying as its three main goals protecting the US security, renewing its competitive global economic advantage, and promoting its global leadership. However, other donors, such as Germany and Sweden, have continued to invoke more altruistic aims - the principles of common humanity and shared responsibility for the global environment - as the official justification for the provision of development assistance.
Our panel aims to interrogate the role that development assistance/foreign aid plays, can play, or should play in this fast-changing world. Research included could investigate how donor discourse has reacted to the challenges of climate change, conflicts, and migration, particularly from the Global South to the Global North. It could analyse whether and how the discourse has affected donors’ decisions about aid allocation and disbursements, whether the processes of aid provision have evolved accordingly, and what the impact on aid recipients on the ground has been. We would also welcome articles discussing possible paths that foreign aid could take in the future and/or reflecting on the links between donors’ national interests and aid flows.
The proposed panel will be paper-based. We will request that participants share a written paper in advance where possible (to consider submission to a special issue) or a video presentation.
Donors have increased aid to domestic revenue mobilization (DRM). However, such aid tends to emphasize efficiency over tax fairness, progressivity, and gender equality. It frequently fails to link revenues to poverty-reducing public expenditures and often is poorly linked to country ownership.
Paper long abstract:
The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda recognized that expected official development assistance will not fully finance achieving the sustainable development goals. It identifies domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) in low- and middle-income countries as crucial for financing development, and donors have increased aid to DRM. However, they have fallen far short of pledges to double such aid.
This paper synthesizes findings from research in Bangladesh, Haiti, Mali, and Uganda, examining aid from the EU, France, the UK, the US, and the World Bank. Across countries and programs, donors tend to focus on efficiency, administrative ease, and technical improvements to tax collection, e.g., supporting electronic payment systems and enhancing value added taxes (VAT). This emphasis neglects tax fairness, progressivity, and gender equality. Too often, aid to DRM fails to link revenues to poverty-reducing public expenditures, such as health, education, and social protection. The technocratic approach generally avoids addressing exemptions and evasion, and donor self-interest may come into play, as in exemption of extractive industry earnings. Aid to DRM is frequently gender blind, but support for VAT may have disproportionately negative effects on women, who account for the majority of micro- and small-scale entrepreneurs in some countries.
The link to country ownership may be weak. Donors do not engage local project implementers, and inconsistently use country systems. Aid to DRM may be supply-driven, as donors pursue their favored approaches, rather than aligning with national plans and priorities. Many projects avoid strengthening accountability mechanisms, such as audit bodies, parliamentary oversight, and civil-society watchdogs.
Water-induced conflicts in the Nile basin centers at the crossroad of hydro-hegemony, politicization of aid, peacebuilding in conflict areas generating migrants. The study traces how securitization of water governance intertwines with donor's aid leveraging (U.S. aid to disputed areas).
Paper long abstract:
Water-induced migration generally stems from climate change effects including, water shortage from droughts or changing landscapes that hinder irrigation channels. However, the issue is not necessarily confined to climate-driven causes. Instead, water migration can be securitized; placed in the midst of crossroads that intersect hydro-hegemony, politicization of aid, peacebuilding in conflict areas that stems from struggles over resources generated from water and entailing migrants. Countries around the Nile river basin are facing such challenges for the past decades with the development of the Aswan High Dams in Egypt, Kajbar and Dal Dams in Sudan, Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Politics circle around the transboundary water management, and the most recent dispute is among Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan as key stakeholders of GERD. However, withdrawal or restoration of U.S. foreign aid is being used as a tool to pressure Ethiopia for its arbitrary decisions toward Phase 1 filling of the dam (from July 2020), while negotiations with Egypt and Sudan are still ongoing. Using Copenhagen School's securitization theory, the study intends to show how the politicization of aid and water-induced migration can be securitized, and to discern how this reflects into the current Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus emphasized in international development. Implications are expected to be given on how tensions intertwine with donors' signaling aid nationalism, and infiltration of governance disputes over water resources that result in water-induced migration in disputed areas in disputed areas.
This paper explores the way in which the UK's aid and development policy is increasingly justified on the basis on the 'national interest' and offers a new framework for understanding this shift.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on fresh qualitative research, this paper argues that aid as an act of solidarity, economic justice or redistribution, which has always been undermined by donor interest and colonialism, has now been eroded by the securitisation of development. Using data from the thematic analsysis of over 50 policy documents spanning 1997-2021 and new interview data from interviews with FCDO personel, this paper proposes that the process of securitisation has so escalated that the theory of securitisation, used to understand development aid since the late 1990s, no longer provides a suitable framework to understand the aid policy of donors. As such this paper develops a new framework based on the 'nationalisation' of development aid to understand both the current state of donor-recipient relationship and the assess the potential futures of aid.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
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Melita Lazell (University of Portsmouth)
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the role that foreign aid plays and/or could play in a world increasingly affected by climate change and rising migration, with a particular attention paid to the extent to which donors connect their national interests with the aid provided, whether in discourse or in practice.
Long Abstract:
Human society is currently undergoing a profound transformation. People, primarily in lower-income countries, are moving rapidly from rural areas to cities. Even more notably, climate change-induced conflicts as well as internal and international migration are on the rise. While remittances and foreign direct investment have become channels of greater financial exchange between the Global North and the Global South than foreign aid over the past several decades, foreign aid still constitutes a very significant source of income for many countries in the Global South. Just the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries provide about 170 billion USD annually in official development assistance.
While generally dressed up in altruistic language, decisions about the allocation of foreign aid have always been at least partially and often chiefly motivated by donors’ own interests. However, the explicit emphasis on national security and economic interests as a rationale for providing aid to ‘developing’ countries has become particularly pronounced amongst some donors in recent years, in response to the increasing challenges posed by climate change and rising volumes of international migration. For example, when merging the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office in 2020, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson argued that it was time to tie UK development assistance closer with the UK’s national interests given that for “for too long … UK overseas aid ha[d] been treated as some giant cashpoint in the sky that arrive[d] without any reference to UK interest." The US, under Trump’s presidency, also adopted an “America first” development aid strategy in 2018, specifying as its three main goals protecting the US security, renewing its competitive global economic advantage, and promoting its global leadership. However, other donors, such as Germany and Sweden, have continued to invoke more altruistic aims - the principles of common humanity and shared responsibility for the global environment - as the official justification for the provision of development assistance.
Our panel aims to interrogate the role that development assistance/foreign aid plays, can play, or should play in this fast-changing world. Research included could investigate how donor discourse has reacted to the challenges of climate change, conflicts, and migration, particularly from the Global South to the Global North. It could analyse whether and how the discourse has affected donors’ decisions about aid allocation and disbursements, whether the processes of aid provision have evolved accordingly, and what the impact on aid recipients on the ground has been. We would also welcome articles discussing possible paths that foreign aid could take in the future and/or reflecting on the links between donors’ national interests and aid flows.
The proposed panel will be paper-based. We will request that participants share a written paper in advance where possible (to consider submission to a special issue) or a video presentation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -Marc Cohen (Oxfam America) Nathan Coplin (Oxfam)
Bo Kyung Kim (Jeonbuk National University)
Melita Lazell (University of Portsmouth)