Foreign Aid Programs Research Articles

Sustainability Indicators of Foreign Assistance in the Field of Media and Information Literacy: A Case Study on Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan

Media and information literacy (MIL) projects are crucial for a country’s development. They provide citizens with access to vital information and resources. This enables them to learn about their rights and responsibilities, as well as gain access to critical resources to improve their quality of life. For the last decade several international organizations such as UNESCO, Internews, DW-Akademie annually have been providing grants for the training courses, and projects at various levels to increase the MIL level of the population in the Central Asian context. The present study will discuss ensuring the sustainability and efficiency of projects in the field of MIL in this region. The paper investigates the sustainability indicators of foreign aid initiatives in the realm of MIL within Central Asia. It aims to assess the long-term viability of foreign aid programs in fostering MIL across Central Asian nations through a comprehensive analysis of historical trends, policy frameworks, and stakeholder perspectives. As part of the research, face-to-face interviews were conducted with prominent trainers and experts from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Emphasizing the role of public-private partnerships, technological integration, and cultural considerations, the paper explores avenues for promoting enduring change and enhancing the effectiveness of foreign assistance in this critical field. The findings contribute valuable insights to policymakers, practitioners, and scholars interested in optimizing foreign aid strategies for sustainable development in the ever-evolving landscape of media and information literacy in Central Asia.

The gift and the giving: reciprocity in international aid and development in Timor-Leste

Abstract This paper examines the transactional dynamics of participation in foreign aid and development programs by exploring links between Marcel Mauss’ characteristics of gift-giving and Marshall Sahlins’ typology of reciprocal relationships. Grounded in Mauss’ insights, a modified version of Sahlins’ Negative, Generalized and Balanced categories is applied to recipient experiences of donor activities in Timor-Leste. In this context, I look at how the ‘development gift’ positions and defines those involved, from producing uncomfortable hierarchies of power and prestige to enhancing mutual trust and respect. Analysis of interviews with ‘ordinary’ Timorese indicates that in offering, accepting and repaying the gift, significant difficulties arise from misunderstandings about the social obligations structuring the exchange. Sahlins’ Negative and, in some circumstances, Generalized forms predict a breakdown in relationships, although not necessarily in the project itself. By contrast, the Balanced form typically leads to the type of interactions recipients desire. Responding to interviewee comments, I propose a ‘charitable’ mode of the Generalized form and identify a new category, Familial reciprocity. I conclude by recommending this modified typology as a way of understanding how we might give and receive respect, a word frequently used by recipients to describe successful development relationships with outsiders. Importantly, while grounded specifically in Timorese experiences, there is scope to apply the proposed framework to any activity in which one party identifies as a donor and others are presented as beneficiaries of their ‘free’ development gifts.

LESSONS FROM THE MARSHALL PLAN FOR UKRAINE’S POST-WAR RECOVERY

This article presents a comprehensive discourse analysis of the Marshall Plan’s administration, shedding light on a facet of history that has often been overlooked in favor of discussions on aid effectiveness and outcomes. Central to our inquiry is the hypothesis that the institutionalization of U.S. foreign aid, initiated with the Marshall Plan, played a critical role in its success and laid the foundation for future aid initiatives. By focusing on the administrative strategies and decision-making processes, the study offers novel insights into how these elements contributed to the Plan’s effectiveness and the overall evolution of U.S. foreign aid policy. The analysis draws on a variety of primary sources, including historical documents, speeches, and policy papers, to provide a detailed picture of the Plan’s implementation. In doing so, we unveil the complex dynamics and challenges of post-war recovery efforts and the strategic decisions that shaped them. The findings reveal the intricacies of the Marshall Plan’s administration and provide valuable lessons for contemporary policy discourse, particularly in the context of Ukraine’s ongoing recovery and its significance to Kyiv’s international partners. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by offering a nuanced understanding of the Marshall Plan’s legacy and its enduring impact on international development and foreign aid. It serves as a vital resource for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners engaged in shaping effective and sustainable foreign aid programs in the modern era. This study also examines the evolution of U.S. foreign aid from the mid-19th century technical missions to the modern era, highlighting key changes in aid administration and objectives. By tracing this evolution, it contextualizes the Marshall Plan within the broader narrative of U.S. international development policy. The role of the Truman administration in shaping the plan and its broader foreign policy implications, including containment of communism and promotion of democracy, are critically analyzed. This article thus fills a gap in the literature by offering a comprehensive view of the Marshall Plan’s administration and its lasting influence on U.S. foreign aid policy.

Housing low-income populations as a Cold War geostrategic tool. The case of the Instituto de Credito Territorial’s Ciudad Kennedy in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how two different, but related processes converge in the Ciudad Kennedy neighbourhood, built by the Instituto de Credito Territorial (ICT) on the outskirts of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, at the beginning of the 1960s. The ICT, the Colombian state agency responsible for building low-income housing, sought various means of addressing a housing crisis that had been exacerbated since the 1950s by significant rural migration into the country's urban centres. In this context, the ICT collaborated closely with the Inter-American Housing and Planning Center (CINVA). In tandem, the U.S. government approved budgeting for the programme Alliance for Progress. This programme for foreign aid and regional cooperation cemented the U.S. effort to consolidate its influence in Latin America as part of its Cold War geostrategy. Housing being one of the Alliance's primary means of achieving its goals, Ciudad Kennedy represented the measure by which the success of American foreign policy in Latin America could be assessed. By considering housing produced by the ICT in Colombia as a geopolitical tool in the 1960s, Ciudad Kennedy illustrates how the U.S. enhanced its relationships with Latin America through U.S. technicians and foreign aid programmes, such as the Alliance for Progress.

New Universities for a New Nation: American Architects Redesign Higher Education for a Modern Pakistan

Indian Partition in 1947 left Pakistan without an educational infrastructure sufficient to transform itself into a modern nation. Pakistan inherited several universities from the British Raj that had been intended to train civil servants for a colonial territory, not leaders for an independent country. The predominantly Hindu faculty subsequently left for India. Seeking to build new universities on the American model, Pakistan turned to a number of prominent United States-based architects who, in collaboration with their Pakistani colleagues and with funding from US foreign aid programmes and international agencies, designed new universities for science, technology, and medicine. The University of Islamabad (later Quaid-i-Azam University), the East Pakistan Agricultural University (later Bangladesh Agricultural University), five polytechnics in East Pakistan, and the Aga Khan Hospital and Medical College in Karachi were all planned in the 1960s and early 1970s and completed by the 1980s. Each architect sought to design universities appropriate for a post-Partition and post-colonial state that would be at once Muslim and modern in their curricula and in their architectural designs. However, the universities could not heal the rupture that created them, and in some ways contributed to furthering it.

Mining self-interest? Canadian foreign aid and the extractive sector in Mongolia

ABSTRACT In the early 2010s, the Canadian government increasingly integrated commercial self-interest into its foreign aid program. This article analyzes the ostensible motives and impact of the rapid intensification of Canada's support to the extractive sector in Mongolia. It argues that, rather than a reflection of Mongolia’s needs, the decision was donor-driven and resulted in apparently poorly designed projects with limited potential to advance Canadian aid’s objective of reducing poverty, or even to meet the unofficial goal of benefitting Canadian mining companies. A potentially more productive approach would have been to help reduce, not reinforce, Mongolia’s extreme dependence on mining.

Feminist International Assistance Policy Kanada: Studi Kasus Bantuan CFLI untuk Jakarta Feminist 2017–2021

This article aims to analyze the assistance provided by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives to the Jakarta Feminist in the 2017-2021 period as one of the proofs that Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy has so far been running smoothly. In addition, this article also aims to correct the misunderstandings of foreign policy observers regarding FIAP as a feminist foreign policy. FIAP has so far only used elements of Liberal Feminism as a lens of observation to focus on their foreign aid agenda to achieve a safe, inclusive, and prosperous world development. Therefore, this article argues that FIAP does contain elements of Feminism but focuses more on assisting non-profit organizations in developing countries, one of which is Indonesia. By using a descriptive qualitative research method that processes primary and secondary data from personal interviews and literature review, this article finds that CFLI, under the auspices of FIAP, has been successful in assisting the Jakarta Feminist in 2017-2021 and has also managed to reveal that FIAP is not a feminist foreign policy. FIAP oversees several foreign aid programs initiated by Canada for developing countries, one of which is CFLI.

COVID 19 and Taiwan’s Medical Aid to Honduras: The Last Latin American Frontier for the Republic 2020-2021

Republic of China (Taiwan) has a long history of foreign aid policy/programs towards Honduras, one of their most consistent and strategic allies in the Central American region. As shifts in Taiwan’s foreign policy gradually increased participation of civil actors and number of development projects in Honduras, the arrival of COVID-19 pandemic brought changes to the said aid programs. As a result, Taiwan’s foreign aid program to Honduras changed from development projects to the transfer of medical equipment; masks, ventilators, thermal imager, and test kits from Taiwan to Honduras. As per objective of foreign aid in Taiwan’s white paper on foreign aid policy, foreign aid is utilized to ensure closeness with Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, including Honduras. This study hence is aimed to extensively explore the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on Taiwan’s aid to Honduras through qualitative-descriptive means. In the end, uncertainty lingers around the future of Taiwan’s diplomatic relations with Honduras and subsequent foreign aid policy limited by their inability to produce vaccines, perhaps showing the weakness of Taiwan’s previous shift to value-based aid approaches in times of crisis compared to material aid.

Public Opinion on Chinese Foreign Aid Policy: Calculated Opposition or General Discontent?

ABSTRACT The expanding profile of Chinese international development aid has generated strong academic and policy interests. A growing literature has emerged on Chinese foreign aid’s motivations, modalities, and impact. However, a significant lacuna remains in the domestic politics relating to this phenomenon. This gap is especially glaring in public opinion concerning China’s growing foreign aid programs. By analyzing empirical data gathered from a variety of sources, including a well-established online forum, social media sites of two influential media organizations, and multi-year surveys of residents of Beijing, this paper presents a nuanced picture of what the Chinese public thinks of Chinese foreign aid and tests two popular explanations of public opposition to foreign aid—perceived budgetary trade-offs and more general dissatisfaction with government policies.

Foreign Aid, Development, and US Strategic Interests in the Cold War

Abstract Scholars have argued that during the Cold War, the United States gave aid to its allies to reward them for maintaining an anti-Communist foreign policy rather than to promote their economic development. This finding is mostly based on data starting in the 1970s and does not accurately characterize US grand strategy before the 1970s, when the United States used aid to promote development among its allies in order to strengthen them against Communism. Using original data collected from historical editions of USAID's “Greenbook,” this article identifies the amount of unconditional aid in the United States’ foreign-aid programs in the period 1955–1970. This type of aid was designed to be politically attractive rather than to be developmentally effective. This article also develops an original measure of aid recipients’ geopolitical alignment that draws on hand coding of 466 diplomatic documents. Using these data, this article finds that there was more unconditional aid in the United States’ aid programs to neutral and nonaligned countries than in the United States’ aid programs to its allies and security partners—a counterintuitive finding that shows how different the first half of the Cold War was from the second.1

“Puerto Rico Can Teach So Much”: The Hemispheric and Imperial Origins of the Educational War on Poverty

AbstractThrough a focus on liberal academic and policy networks, this article considers how ideas and practices central to an educational “war on poverty” grew through connections between postwar Puerto Rico, Latin America, and New York. In particular, it analyzes how social scientific ideas about education's role in economic development found ample ground in the colonial Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as the island assumed the role of “laboratory” of democracy and development after the Second World War. The narrative then considers how this Cold War programming came to influence education initiatives in both U.S. foreign aid programs in Latin America and New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as the number of Puerto Rican students grew amid the Puerto Rican Great Migration. Ultimately, the article suggests a broader hemispheric and imperial framework in narrating the evolution of postwar education policy in the nation's largest city.

The Case for a Global Marshall Plan

The wealthy nations of the world currently maintain high immigration barriers. These barriers are necessitated by the pressure of billions of people in the poorer nations who seek to migrate to the richer nations. This pressure on the rich nations would be significantly alleviated if the global economic inequality situation were significantly reduced. One way to do this is to consolidate and expand existing foreign aid programs into a Global Marshall Plan (GMP). The author presents evidence that such an approach could be effective.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

The fiscal management of permanent and temporary foreign aid: Evidence from sub‐Saharan Africa

AbstractThis paper argues that whether aid receipts are permanent or temporary is an important yet overlooked determinant of the fiscal management of foreign aid. I present a theoretical framework that shows that permanent aid and temporary aid differently affect the recipient governments' choice between taxes and debt issuance. Empirically, I assess how the fiscal deficit responds to permanent aid and temporary aid in a panel of sub‐Saharan African aid‐recipient countries. Results show that while permanent aid leads to higher deficit, temporary aid reduces the deficit. The different responses of government spending to permanent aid and temporary aid help explain this pattern. Results provide important policy implications for the design of foreign aid programmes to developing countries.

“Send Them a Shipload of Rice”: Australia's Food Aid to Indonesia, 1960s–1970s

This paper asks why it took ten years after a major famine in Indonesia in 1957 for Australia's food aid to increase in greater amounts, and why food aid was so significant in Australia's foreign aid to Indonesia during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indonesia's reluctance to apply for food aid under the Colombo Plan is the reason for the delay. A combination of humanitarian, commercial and international relations interests converged to shape Australia's rapidly growing food aid to Indonesia after 1966. Food aid contributed to alleviating food shortages and famines in Indonesia. It also supported Australian firms in regaining their share in the growing market for wheat‐based products in Indonesia, and in building market share for Australian rice exports, in competition with United States (US) producers and the US PL480 food aid program. Food aid also allowed Australia to expand its foreign aid program to Indonesia rapidly after 1966, in support of the government of new President Soeharto and improved bilateral relations.

Comparing US and Chinese Foreign Aid in the Era of Rising Powers

ABSTRACT China is emerging as a key state actor in international development – a sector that has been dominated by the United States for decades. US and Chinese foreign aid programs can be compared on the basis of several benchmarks: 1) official state definition and accounting of foreign aid programs; 2) historical foundations and origins; 3) sectoral distribution, particularly in terms of the professed goals and objectives of the aid program; 4) nature of targeted recipient actors; 5) institutional mechanisms for delivery in recipient countries. Notwithstanding particular differences, Chinese and US foreign aid portfolios demonstrate their respective strategic political and economic interests in two ways: they shape the domestic politics of recipient countries in ways that accommodate the donor government’s policy preferences, and they enhance the social reputation and legitimacy of the donor state in the international system.

The Rise of Asian Aid Donors: Recipient-to-Donor Transition and Implications for International Aid Regime

The aims of this article are twofold. First, from a historical perspective, it examines the recipient-to-donor transition of five Asian aid donors, namely Japan, Korea, China, India, and Thailand. Specifically, it examines the evolution of their foreign aid programs and practices. Second, it analyzes the effects of Asian aid donors on the international aid regime. We argue that the mix of economic and security goals, which motivated Asian donors to develop their initial economic cooperation programs, have persisted over time. This explains why Asian aid donors have allotted a disproportionate share of their assistance to neighboring countries and their use of foreign aid as a key tool of their commercial and diplomatic policies. Moreover, we contend that the rise and experience of Asian aid donors have created a new dynamic to donor–recipient partnerships and development cooperation like new approaches and modalities. Key findings of this study add to the growing literature on emerging donors and aid effectiveness debate.

Private Enterprise, International Development, and the Cold War

This article sheds light on the role of foreign direct investment as an instrument for economic development and, in turn, for the advancement of U.S. foreign policy goals during the Cold War. From the earliest days of the Cold War, and especially after the U.S.-Soviet competition for influence in the developing world began in the 1950s, the United States sought to promote private enterprise on behalf of U.S. goals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. officials believed that foreign investment would suffice to fuel international development, obviating the need for official development assistance. These hopes, however, were largely disappointed. On the one hand, U.S.-based multinational companies preferred to invest in the industrial world; on the other hand, some Third World governments were uninterested in promoting private enterprise rather than state-led development. In part because foreign investment did not meet expectations, the U.S. government ended up elaborating an official foreign aid program instead.

‘Aid with Chinese characteristics’: competitive and/or complementary?

China’s growing foreign aid program in recent years has sparked many debates on alternative development cooperation approaches and practices. ‘Aid with Chinese characteristics’ is often approached with skepticism in the West and considered as posing challenges to the traditional aid architecture. The more optimistic perspectives see China’s emergence as a major donor in a more positive light because it offers an alternative development cooperation model for aid recipient countries, contesting the hegemony of the neoliberal development model. While analysts have mostly focused on whether ‘aid with Chinese characteristics’ is a good or bad alternative, few have questioned its novelty and its actual potential as an alternative development cooperation model. From a neo-Gramscian perspective, this study investigates to what extend China, as a major donor, differs from the traditional donors and in how far that its aid model can be understood as representing a counter-hegemonic alternative. The core argument of this study is that ‘aid with Chinese characteristics’ serves the overall objectives and interests of the neoliberal historical bloc, while at the same time it also plays a role in the increasing tensions and competitions within it, between China and the Western countries in the context of the global financial crisis.

Cabo Verde and the MCA foreign aid programme

AbstractIn 2005, Cabo Verde became the second African country to receive the new foreign aid programme of the USA, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). It was among the few recipients of a second grant. Foreign aid has always been a controversial and hotly contested issue, and the MCA is no exception. This paper, based partly on personal experience with the programme, provides a critical examination of the nature, process and implementation of the MCA grants in Cabo Verde. The country had campaigned aggressively for the grants. The MCA not only financed important public investments, it was debt-free and without conditionalities. However, even while it allowed more leeway over its use and implementation compared with other aid programmes, it engendered its own challenges.