Aid and Influence: Do Donors Help or Hinder?

Aid is always a means of influence: political, commercial, military and security-related. Some influence is benign, but much of it is coercive, even 'imperialistic'. Given the nature of aid, its effectiveness should be judged not only in developmental terms, but in terms of international relations. Even donors agree that, on both counts, the returns are meagre. This book, drawing on the author's 30 years of field experience, proposes two kinds of solution: donors should climb down from paternalistic central planning practices and support public goods that are neutral and beneficial—cancellation of debt, fair trade, responsible economic governance, vaccine production, peace-making and peace-keeping. For their part, developing countries should follow the example of the most successful among them: recognize the true costs of 'free' aid, exercise their prerogative to choose their development partners and start paying their own way.

* Exposes the selfish motivations behind the Western international aid regime, uncovers who gives and why and the culture of imperialism, financial control, and globalization
* Authored by Stephen Browne, a Director at the UN and the man who coined the term "Millennium Development Goals"
* Controversial reading for everyone in international aid and development governments, NGOs, to field-workers, donors, and researchers

As the world struggles to come to grips with failure in Africa and to meet the Millennium Development Goals worldwide, the clamor grows for a doubling of development assistance. But it is increasingly clear that aid has fallen woefully short of delivering the necessary help to those who need it.

In this powerful and wide-ranging critique of the Western development assistance paradigm, one of the most experienced development practitioners argues that the debate on development effectiveness is missing the point if it fails to acknowledge that most bilateral aid is driven more by self-interest than altruism.

Aid can work where donor influence coincides with development need. But donors--whose aid bureaucracies are much more powerful than those of their developing country counterparts--make their own assessment of what these needs are, set the development agendas and provide aid on their own terms, while maintaining other obstacles to development progress such as trade protectionism. The challenge, therefore, will be to encourage developing countries to get to the point where they are in a position to say "no."

Stephen Browne a Director at the UN with over twenty-five years' experience in international aid and development, produced the first country progress report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), coining the term. His books include "Developing Capacity through Technical Cooperation" (2002) and "Beyond Aid" (1999).