Over the past 60 years high-income countries have invested over 4000 billion euros in development aid. With varying degrees of success, these investments in low-income countries contributed to tackling structural problems such as access to water, health care, and education. Today, however, international development cooperation is no longer restricted to helping by giving. Instead, it is rather about opportunities, mutual interests, risk taking, and an inclusive societal approach. With the arrival of major new actors such as China, India, and Brazil, and the manifestation of private companies and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, development aid is being eclipsed by new forms of international cooperation, increasingly accompanied by investments, trade, and give-and-take exchanges.
The agenda for sustainable development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 and to be realised by 2030, is a case in point of new influential frameworks that usher in a global rather than a traditional North-South perspective.
This book reviews 60 years of international development aid and its relevant actors, outlining today's challenges and opportunities. Richly illustrated with case studies and examples, International Development Cooperation Today maps successes and failures and synthesises visions and discussions from all over the world. By pointing out the radical shift from the traditional North-South perspective to a global paradigm, this book is essential reading for all practitioners, academics, and donors involved in development aid.
Author(s): Patrick Develtere, Huib Huyse, Jan van Van Ongevalle
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 317
City: Leuven
Cover
Contents
List of figures
Figure 1: Trend in official development cooperation of all rich countries combined
Figure 2: Historically, ODA is the most stable external resource for developing countries
Figure 3: ODA grant equivalent for 2019 (30 countries)
Figure 4: ODA grant equivalent as a percentage of GNI for 2019 (30 countries)
Figure 5: The Gavi Alliance
Figure 6: Inflows of external finance to ODA-eligible countries
Figure 7: Towards a new development cooperation model
Figure 8: Visual representation of the Paris Declaration
Figure 9: Sustainable Development Goals (doughnut visualisation)
Figure 10: Countries whose SDG Index score has improved or decreased the most since 2015
Figure 11: Whole-of-Society approach
Figure 12: Bilateral ODA composition: all DAC countries, 2014
Figure 13: Trends in decentralised development cooperation
Figure 14: Trends in official decentralised development cooperation (DDC) financing, net disbursements, USD million, constant 2015 prices
Figure 15: IGOs in the world system, 1816–2014
Figure 16: Step by step towards an Africa-EU alliance
Figure 17: Africa and Europe: a unique and unparalleled strategic proximity
Figure 18: The UN system
Figure 19: Resources beyond ODA funds from DAC countries account for between 12% (for the Global Fund) and 60% (for the International Development Association [IDA])
Figure 20: Non-ODAble contributions make for a large part of financing to the United Nations Development system
Figure 21: TGI growth 1955–2018
Figure 22: ODA to and through CSOs, 2010–18 (USD million, disbursements, constant 2018 prices)
Figure 23: Four types of NGDO strategies to address global challenges
Figure 24: Saferworld’s localisation spectrum
Figure 25: Sustainable Development Goals: distance to target
Figure 26: Distribution of ODA by income group (2017–2018) in millions of USD
List of tables
Table 1: Overview of an expanding community of development actors (examples)
Table 2: Top 10 ODA recipients (2018)
Table 3: The colonial preference (2007–2017)
Table 4: Fragmentation of aid
Table 5: New donors’ development cooperation agencies and their multilateral aid
Table 6: Voting weightings in the World Bank Group (2020)
Table 7: The six largest NGDOs in the US
Table 8: Percentage of Europeans regarding development aid as an important issue
Table 9: ODA by income category, 1990–2018
List of boxes
Box 1. No definition of development cooperation?
Box 2. ODA is the most stable external resource for developing countries
Box 3. How relevant is the 0.7% target?
Box 4. Who owns this well? Partners in problems!
Box 5. Development impact bonds: private investors and conventional donors join forces
Box 6. Colonialists, colonisers, colonists, colonials and the colonised
Box 7. Are colonial attitudes back or are they being magnified by COVID-19?
Box 8. The role of Chinese training and scholarship programmes in Tanzania
Box 9. Yet another Marshall Plan
Box 10. Education aid or how development cooperation is fashion sensitive
Box 11. Debt under COVID-19
Box 12. In the driver’s seat?
Box 13. Findings of the 2018 Monitoring Round of the Global Partnership
Box 14. Making university development cooperation SDG-proof
Box 15. The next Einstein will be African
Box 16. The Trump card
Box 17. Why Burundi receives less aid than Rwanda
Box 18. When cultures meet…
Box 19. Leveraging: the new buzzword
Box 20. The European Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation
Box 21. Between policy and practice: What evaluations reveal
Box 22. Six economic partnership agreements, most of them under negotiation
Box 23. What Juncker literally said: a snippet
Box 24. A preferential relationship becomes a reciprocal, interest-driven partnership
Box 25. Overlap and competition in the UN family
Box 26. The influence of development agencies’ staff
Box 27. NGO or CSO: what’s in a name?
Box 28. Southern NGOs become NGDOs
Box 29. The difficult task of NGDOs
Box 30. Local actors in the driving seat of development
Box 31. Recommendation of the Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors
Box 32. The Banco Nacional de Bolivia’s support of World Vision
Box 33. Novel, unconventional actors in international development
Box 34. Humanitarian jihad
Box 35. Who gets most out of it?
Box 36. The saviour complex
Box 37. International framework agreements
Box 38. Trade unions and NGDOs
Box 39. For the dignity of small farmers
Box 40. The OVOP movement: One Village One Product
Box 41. More than micro for the masses
Box 42. Philip Morris International: the smoke screen of corporate social responsibility
Box 43. From cooperating out of poverty to #coops4dev
Box 44. Fair trade: an exploitation barometer?
Box 45. Three-for-one in Mexico
Box 46. The power of philanthrocapitalism
Box 47. The Aga Khan Development Network
Box 48. Panorama or tunnel vision?
Box 49. Not an island: Cuban health internationalism
Box 50. Reacting to a biblical catastrophe: the 2019–2020 locust crisis
Box 51. Riot games
Box 52. Radi-Aid Award: changing perceptions of poverty and development.
Box 53. Reaching out for knowledge from the Global South
Box 54. Changing minds through systemic thinking
Box 55. Film as a medium for global citizenship education
Box 56. COVID-19: an unexpected window of opportunity for global citizenship education
Box 57. Aid and self-reliance: two sides of the same coin?
Box 58. Evidence-based optimism
Box 59. Evaluation trends
Box 60. Nobel Peace Prize laureates: international norm entrepreneurs
Box 61. Aid helps, but it is not the solution
Box 62. Financial donors and cultural nitwits
Box 63. The Samaritan is trapped … and so is the person he has helped
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Development cooperation in an era of globalisation
More and more new actors on the scene: is the sector still a community?
Big donors, generous donors
More conflicting views and approaches: the arena is getting tough
More transactional interests: market appeal
Do new donors have other interests?
Everybody from payers to players: the emergence of a new paradigm
From colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals
Colonial warm-up exercises
Technical cooperation and knowledge transfer
Faith in development aid
Development cooperation: aid in a global setting
The Washington Consensus and structural adjustments
International cooperation, the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals
Addressing poverty in exchange for debt relief
International development cooperation and Paris: introducing order to the community and the market
The SDGs and the need for a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach
It takes two to tango
Internationally: among specialists
Recipient countries: donor darlings and donor orphans
The first pillar: official bilateral cooperation
Many small players and institutional pluralism
In search of an institutional foundation for development cooperation
Decentralisation: to reach the SDGs or also for other reasons?
The second pillar: multilateral cooperation
Europe’s development cooperation patchwork
Multilateral cooperation: the UN galaxy fans out further
The third pillar:non-governmental development organisations
A movement with many faces, roles, visions and strategies
Several generations of NGDOs
A sector with many different visions and strategies
A movement with a plural support base
The sector breaks free from the NGDOs
Is the new social movement becoming an established network movement?
The fourth pillar: towards a whole-of-society approach
The key players of the fourth pillar
The fourth pillar: the children of globalisation challenge the children of the North-South
Starting from a different field
From a level ‘telling’ field to joint action
The near and distant future of a whole-of-society approach
Humanitarian aid: more dispersed or more networked?
What place for emergency aid?
Overcoming the humanitarian nemesis
Cash-and-carry on the market
The unbearable lightness of the support for development cooperation
The uneasy relationship with the support base
No (more) aid fatigue?
Popular, yet little understood
Something needs to be done: but by whom?
Time for a new narrative: from development education towards education for global citizenship
Sixty years of international development cooperation: where has the bumpy road led us?
Progress, but not for everyone
Is aid future-proof?
Are we really that generous?
Who is receiving aid?
The effectiveness and impact of development cooperation
Development cooperation: a stumbling-block?
Conclusion: the past will not come back but is still there
Notes
Bibliography
