PabloYanguasWhy We Lie About AidLondon: Zed Books, 2018. 275 p.

Abstract

Development aid is so riddled with contradictions, controversies, equivocation, and hypocrisy that almost any critique, left or right, is welcome—as is this one. The basic argument presented here is that development is a transformational process that requires institutional change. As such, it creates winners and losers. Therefore, only a political understanding of the development process and an approach to supporting it rooted in political analysis can achieve desired change. The author offers his own understanding of how such an approach, which he styles “contentious development politics,” should be designed. Foreign aid is a political football in donor countries, instrumentalized by political forces to project their values and priorities. The usual fracture is between a conservative view that aid is a disincentivizing boondoggle and a progressive one that it is a moral imperative that can deliver tangible results for both donor and beneficiary. Some implications are straightforward and obvious: the Americans are big on private sector development and civil society, the Swedes on gender equality, the Danes on human rights, for example. But there are aberrations: on the right, for example, President George W. Bush's PEPFAR (President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief) and the catalyst that that conservative president provided for the Millennium Development Goals in Monterrey in 1999. Caught up in the political winds of development assistance is the aid establishment, whose members depend for a living on the fiscal largesse and ideological stance of donor governments. But the fact that aid is used to pursue favored political objectives or please selected political constituencies is not the main point of the book. The main point is that the implementation of aid programs and projects has become dominated by (Tony) Blairite New Public Management or, to use the author's preferred term, Value for Money (VfM). The VfM hydra has many heads, but prominent among them are logical frameworks (“logframes”), theories of change, SMART (Specific Measurable Assignable Realistic Time-related) indicators, Results-oriented Monitoring (RoM), randomized control trials (RCTs), “lessons learnt,” etc. Taken as a whole, these are supposed to promote a culture of tracking whether and why assistance, translated into actions, translated into results, translated into tangible beneficial impacts on target populations—or did not, as the case may be. The problem, the author argues, is that fetishization of efficiency along these lines— John Foster Dulles called it “bang for the buck” in the nuclear strategic context, and the phrase travels well—distorts aid in the direction of interventions with quantifiable bang (and, the author might have added, good photo ops for the Ambassador and funding agency representatives). More transformational, long-term, long-shot, interventions—say in rule of law or democratic governance or conflict prevention or gender or civil society strengthening; where an entire way of life is being interrogated—are underfunded unless there is a tight security sector link. The argument is supported by credible, in-depth case studies on Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Honduras. The symbiotic relationship between aid providers and recipients is analyzed, yet somehow lacking in the analysis is global realpolitik: the money has to flow. It has to flow to strengthen strategic relations between donor and recipient countries. It has to flow to support an important client class. The theme of subalternity is never pursued in depth and that most overused word in the aid world, “partnership,” is never really queried, although the author is well positioned to do both. Despite his experience treading the halls of major development agencies, the author never quite comes to grips with the micro-experience of the program officer, tasked with pushing massive amounts of money out the door under time pressure and the exquisite scrutiny of auditors, evaluators, politicians, and civil society organizations. It is only at the level of individual incentives that the question why we lie about aid is best engaged. So, some critical opportunities were missed. But that said, the book is well written, informative, and entertaining. Its strongest point is that the author, a researcher at the University of Manchester, is also an experienced consultant to aid agencies, giving him a perceptive combined town-and-gown perspective. Bibliography; index.