Some inconvenient truth about international development policy

When complaining about the West losing global influence, no one dares to talk about another big elephant in the room of international relations – development cooperation, writes Peter Hefele.

Peter Hefele is Policy Director at the Wilfried Martens Centre in Brussels.

In recent years, many observers have bemoaned the decline of the Western democratic model. But any self-reflection on this deplorable development was never truly profound and honestly conducted, as it was always much easier to blame autocratic competitors as the culprits.

The retreat of Western forces from Afghanistan, and most recently, Mali and Niger, sparked only rather short-lived moments of self-reflection on the modes and limits of Western engagement outside the wider North-Atlantic hemisphere.

While everywhere, “Zeitenwenden” is called for in the field of security and defence policy, the field of international development cooperation — though second in terms of foreign spending of national budgets of the large Western democratic nations! — has somehow managed to elude a critical and honest debate within the wider public.

To better understand this striking phenomenon, one must lift the veil of this multi-billion dollar business while starting with an important caveat: there is nothing to be said against immediate disaster relief, which is politically and ethically self-evident, and mostly conducted in a professional and efficient manner by national and international organisations. Nor are there any doubts about the motivations of many in this business.

This piece discusses long-term international development policy as defined as Official development assistance (ODA) by the OECD. Any improvement starts by naming things correctly. The problem of perception – and (self-)deception – begins with the oft-used terms: “development aid (DA)”, or even worse “development cooperation”. We should simply get rid of those expressions as they don’t reflect geopolitical realities any longer.

Let’s open with a look back into 60 years of Western development aid. Hardly any other policy field is so well protected behind an almost impenetrable wall of morality and promises of a better world. It is rather comfortable for those living in this world, fed with around 300 billion USD per annum globally, mostly from public sources, with 70% of that money being provided by democratic countries!

Given that amount of money, debates on the national and EU level about effectiveness, objectives, and obvious contradictions of existing concepts and instruments remain almost unnoticeable amid the sheer volume — the EU and its member states alone spent 50 billion per year.

Don’t expect any changes from the supplier side. As we are talking about political markets, providers are quickly adapting new political narratives, such as climate change, and rebranding their services and political lobbying accordingly — which is mostly old wine in new bottles — if you look at the substance and instruments.

Everyone with even superficial knowledge of the long history of development cooperation must acknowledge that none of the major problems of DA have fundamentally changed or been adequately solved since they were first addressed in the 1960s (or in some cases even in colonial times).

And don’t be distracted by buzzwords such as “sustainable” or “integrative” concepts, to name only two: they aren’t as new as you are made to believe.

Despite millions spent on so-called monitoring and evaluations — besides being a huge market of its own — the lessons of improved effectiveness and inventing ground-breaking new instruments in DA remain limited.

As we painfully know from domestic policies, complex social dynamics always elude political control. The famous attribution problem didn’t begin with climate change but with development policy!

This also explains why Western DA can best be described as a huge convenience store. To borrow from military terminology, it sometimes seems donor countries and organisations often resort to ‘spray and pray’; shooting indiscriminately, hoping to hit at least — and sometimes accidentally — some targets.

From the point of policy strategy, hardly anyone dares to speak of gaining political leverage through DA. There is for instance no proof that Germany, as the second largest DA donor globally, has in any way enhanced its global influence in recent years.

There are two main reasons for this. First, even thinking of DA through a more realpolitik lens could, in the eyes of the DA community, taint the higher moral grounds that DA claims to stand for — in contrast to other policy fields—such as trade policy.

Secondly, an unbiased, cold view of the current DA would immediately unveil contradictions and missing links with other foreign and even domestic policies. The intricacies of the current European migration policies are just one very speaking example of how the public debate shies away from facing unintended consequences and doesn’t recognise complex and sometimes unsolvable ethical problems.

Politics rarely acknowledge unsurmountable limitations, which typically stem from cultural and governance structures, as the aforementioned examples of failed Western engagement have shown. The usual modus operandi here is to pour an increasing amount of money into a bottomless pit.

The difference these days is, that this behaviour is justified by a geopolitical argument, revitalised from Cold War times: the horror vacui of other powers filling the disengagement and withdrawal of Western countries. In reality, it means giving up any conditionality in DA, being blackmailed, and continuously being pushed around by other, often much weaker forces. So much about strategic autonomy and global influence!

Overcoming this miserable situation of Western development cooperation is an uphill battle against massive vested interests in Europe, in international institutions and on the ground. As difficult as it is to break up those “unholy alliances”, there are still some first steps to be taken.

Leave antiquated concepts of development cooperation where they belong, in the ash heap of history. It was no accident that DA emerged in the era of decolonisation. Shame upon those who think that this was (also) meant to maintain a hierarchical, colonial-like relationship between donors and recipients!

Isn’t it quite telling that the only successful development models after World War II happened in East Asia with the so-called “tigers”, who never received any development aid in classical terms?

The most recent debate of once again surrendering DA conditionality to not lose “influence” towards China or Russia is just another manifestation of naive Western thinking.

Do we really believe in being able to maintain any influence on local elites and societal dynamics in the so-called Global South, which, by the way, doesn’t exist at all?

Other than creating short-term, opportunistic behaviour by local elites and incentivising the exploitation of public and private funds, “we” can’t buy into those societies in the sense of a “sustainable” cooperation on equal footing.

What the West must learn is strategic patience, which first of all requires trust and constant reform of its own model. No state-governed development policy can imitate the myriads of channels of “contagion”, which successful development models can “spread”.