A Political Economy of Foreign Aid: The Case of India

Abstract

In the Darwinian race for survival and for relevance to government policy that confronts the genus social science, science (the frailest species) has turned to political development as its newest means of adaptation. By using an analogue from economics, many scientists hope that their discipline will thus be able to understand and cope with the new environment of social and economic change. But the adaptation may be too late. In the history of ideas of the twentieth century, science might well go down as a modern equivalent of the saber-toothed tiger. The tendency of the other social sciences has been to preempt the variable and to assume that while politics may be temporarily independent, will make it and us dependent upon the more vigorous specieseconomics and sociology. While some are consoled that public officials are increasingly sensitive to problems in aid-giving, and others see hopeful signs in the titles if not necessarily the content of a series of recent volumes, I suspect that scientists, even with their concept of development, are voices crying in the wilderness, or worse yet, to each other. This wilderness, which exists by virtue of its distance from relevance to public policy, may well be warranted. Let us look at those reasons that make science irrelevant to foreign aid-giving as a factor in social and economic change. Two general models of change and its implications are prevalent. True to their Western intellectual origins they both partake of the prophetic tradition. One, the Jeremiah model, argues that economic and social change, by disturbing the equilibrium of the status quo, unleashes forces that will produce either a traditionalistic reaction or a modernizing military or civil dictatorship.' Foreign assistance, very little of which is real or used for planned social and economic change, the Jeremiah prophets argue, cannot bring about the conditions for its own progressive use; therefore, intention contributes to the destabilizing