Review: Struggling for Effectiveness

Abstract

STRUGGLING FOR EFFECTIVENESS CID A and Canadian Foreign Aid Stephen Brown, ed. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queeris University Press, 2012. 384 pp, $32.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-4057-6Canadians - and scholars of Canada - have made a national pastime of assessing Canada's relative position in the world. Is Canada a power? Is Canada a major foreign policy (or development) actor? What is the future of Canada's place in the world? Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid, edited by Stephen Brown, fits with this mode of questioning. Several of the volume's fifteen authors seek to understand Canada's relative ranking in the global foreign aid hierarchy through comparisons to donors such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Surprisingly absent from the volume are comparisons to the United States or other donors, such as Japan, who deviate from some of the standards of the international aid donor community that this volume stresses.A less-than-complete understanding of Canada as a foreign aid donor emerges from the comparative approach thatmarks the book's early chapters. While these chapters highlight the positive aspects of other countries' aid programs, the reader learns that on many indicators Canada is simply a middle of the pack country. In multiple rankings in areas ranging from donor size to generosity, Canada sits squarely in the of developed country aid donors, if not ranking slightly above the average for donor performance (53, 89, and Chapter 1). While this situation is clearly a concern for those who see foreign aid as an integral part of Canada's humanitarian ethos and believe that this ethos should define our foreign relations, it may not be a concern for most Canadians: the book provides evidence that prior to the 2000 elections only a minority of Canadians favoured increased foreign aid spending (251). This volume therefore reflects a perpetual tension between how Canadians see themselves and their country and the policies they and their government support. The domestic political context for the recent changes in Canadian foreign aid policy that form the key interest of the volume is laid out well in the chapters by David Black and Adam Chapnick.The overarching message of Struggling for Effectiveness is that Canada's foreign aid policy has lacked a clear and inspiring vision for quite some time. The result of this absence of vision has been policy incoherence, which implies that Canada will remain a middle of the pack country in the area of foreign aid for the foreseeable future. The objective of the book is twofold: to identify precisely where Canada's shortcomings lie and to offer advice and potential solutions for raising Canada from its status. While the authors largely succeed in the former task, their ability to make progress on the latter is limited by the overly critical focus of much of the volume. Indeed, the vast majority of contributors focus on policy failings since Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party came to (minority) power. Rare exceptions to this focus on Harper's failings are found in Stephen Brown's critique of the contraction of Canada's aid budget under Prime Minister Jean Chretien (95) and David Black's acknowledgement in a chapter titled Between Indifference and Idiosyncrasy: The Conservatives and Canadian Foreign Aid to Africa that the Liberals presided over the deepest cuts in the history of the Canadian aid program (248). While this book may not have been edited according to a political agenda, it certainly reflects the contentious domestic politics of Canada of the past decade.Tensions also exist between the consensus of the international aid donor community (which many of the authors in this volume use as a foil to Canada's policies) and some of the prescriptions offered in the volume. The Harper government's focus on Latin America actually reflects the current aid donor consensus that Canada should have greater geographic or sectoral concentration in its foreign aid program (53 and 90). …