Foreign Aid Dependency Dilemmas

Abstract

Humanitarian relief and economic development, largely financed by external aid, are the two largest areas of peacebuilding. Poverty and underdevelopment are common sources of conflict, just as economic growth can also increase ethnic tensions. Even India, despite a booming economy, rather than a failed state or basket case economy, as IMF officials used to refer to very poor countries, presents many challenges for peace, particularly communal conflict involving its deep pockets of poverty.1 They are separate and even conflicting activities, though NGOs can monitor, train, and provide both types of services. NGOs can provide goods and services when states need them and accept either emergency help or longer-term development. UN-NGO collaboration is designed to manage coordination challenges, since each peacebuilding situation poses singular political challenges. Saving lives is the clearest mandate, leading to logistical imperatives, but which may contradict longer-term development. The dilemma for HINGOs is whether to seek funding for minimalist humanitarian relief or a broader range of maximalist roles that overlap with economic reconstruction and development.2