International Aid Donors Research Articles

Navigating HIV, Pregnancy, and Childbearing in South India: Pragmatics and Constraints in Women's Decision Making

Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2004 and 2002–3, this article examines how poor women living with HIV in Tamilnadu, India navigate decisions about pregnancy and birth, and demonstrates that these decisions are influenced by a complex web of sociocultural factors. I argue that these decisions are informed by: 1) institutional interests of the state, NGOs, and international aid donors; 2). cultural constructions of gender and of the self; 3). Christian-based organizations; and 4). support group organizations, known as “networks” for people living with HIV/AIDS. Childbearing decisions emerged through a synthesis of coexisting structures and discourses which sometimes converged at the same conclusion despite differences in their underlying logics. I argue that the discourse of “positive living” fostered by the networks provided women with a framework for making reproductive decisions that was enabling. The article highlights how women pragmatically negotiated these various factors as they engaged in reproductive decision-making.

Bribes or Bargains? Peace Conditionalities and ‘Post-Conflict’ Reconstruction in Afghanistan

This article focuses on the role of international aid donors in Afghanistan since the signing of the Bonn Agreement in 2001. Specifically, it explores the scope and utility of peace conditionalities as an instrument for peace consolidation in the context of a fragile war-to-peace transition. Geo-strategic and institutional concerns have generally led to an unconditional approach to assistance by international actors. It is argued that large inflows of unconditional aid risk re-creating the structural conditions that led to the outbreak of conflict. Aid conditionalities need to be re-conceptualized as aid-for-peace bargains rather than as bribes for security. Some forms of conditionality are necessary in order to rebuild the social contract in Afghanistan. This finding has wider relevance for aid donors and they should reconsider orthodox development models in ‘fragile state’ settings. Rather than seeing conditionalities and ownership as two ends of a policy spectrum, the former may be a necessary instrument for achieving the latter.

Reforming war's administrative rubble in Lebanon

AbstractAfter 17 years of civil strife in Lebanon, an Office of Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR) was established in 1993 to plan for short‐term rehabilitation and long‐term institutional development within the public sector. Since external technical assistance to public administration was delivered through OMSAR, its role as a host agency for international aid donors' efforts in reform policy‐making and implementation is critical. The article discusses OMSAR's approach to channelling foreign aid for administrative development in post‐war Lebanon. Lessons from the Lebanese experience in post‐war institutional development may interest countries emerging from conflicts and trying to rebuild administrative infrastructure. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

La réforme foncière au Laos. Une politique hasardeuse pour les paysans

Olivier Ducourtieux, Jean-Richard Laffort, Silinthone Sacklokham — Land reform in Laos, an hazardous policy for farmers Lao State launched in 1994 a land reform inspired by international aid donors and neighbouring socialist countries. It aims at increasing land tenure security, encouraging farmer's involvement in intensive farming and eliminating slash-and- burn agriculture so as to protect the forest. The land laws have shortcomings open to various interpretations depending on local social relationships. Since local specificities are not taken into account, the reform is counterproductive for both forest protection and farming modernization, and with regard to marginalizing the poorest farmers.

Corruption, Culture and Transferability: What Can Be Learned From Australia?

The Asian financial crisis is often blamed on ‘corruption’. International banks and aid donors now promote technical assistance and training in corruption prevention, referring to the international best practice of Independent Commissions Against Corruption in Hong Kong or Sydney. However, it is often also argued that what counts as corruption is culturally specific, and that the incidence of petty corruption is related to low salaries. So lessons drawn from corruption prevention in Australia, for example, may not be transferable to other countries with different cultures and levels of income. This paper reflects on the experience of designing and teaching a course on corruption prevention for officials from developing countries in the Asia‐Pacific region. It considers what counts as ‘corruption’, identifies different approaches towards prevention, and draws some conclusions about the transferability of Australian expertise.

Defining and refining international donor support for combating the AIDS pandemic

The international aid effort against AIDS is greatly incommensurate with the severity of the epidemic. Drawing on the data that international aid donors self-reported to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we find that, between 1996 and 1998, finance from all rich countries to sub-Saharan Africa for projects designated as AIDS control averaged US $69 million annually, and, assuming a safe margin for under-reporting and misreporting, we estimate that total donor spending on HIV/AIDS control was perhaps twice that at most. Since the late 1980s, aid levels have dropped relative to the prevalence of HIV infection, and stood recently at about $3 per HIV-infected person. Lack of finance is now the primary constraint on progress against AIDS, notwithstanding the widespread belief that a lack of interest from the goveements of poor countries is limiting. We argue that to produce a meaningful response to the pandemic, international assistance must be based on grants, not loans, for the poorest countries; be increased within the next 3 years to a minimum of $7.5 billion or more; be directed toward funding projects which are proposed and desired by the affected countries themselves, and which are judged as having epidemiological merit against the pandemic by a panel of independent scientific experts; and fund concurrent needs, including prevention, drug treatment (such as highly active antiretroviral therapy), and blocking mother-to-child HIV transmission. An effort of this scope and scale will both radically alter the prospects for intervention against AIDS in poor countries, and together with comparable efforts to control other infectious diseases, is easily afforded by the OECD donor economies, whose aggregate national income recently surpassed $21 trillion annually.

Pre-eclampsia trio

If all cases of pre-eclampsia and its complications could be predicted, prevented, and treated, some 50 000 maternal deaths could be avoided each year. To keep moving towards this ideal the basic pathology of the disorder must be understood and its investigation continued. Inconsistency in classifying the syndrome has confounded much research, and a suggestion for a research definition is included in the trio of reviews on various aspects of preeclampsia starting this week. We thank John Griffin and Shaun Brennecke, University of Melbourne, Australia, for suggesting and coordinating this series of articles. Defining and refining international donor support for combating the AIDS pandemicThe international aid effort against AIDS is greatly incommensurate with the severity of the epidemic. Drawing on the data that international aid donors self-reported to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we find that, between 1996 and 1998, finance from all rich countries to sub-Saharan Africa for projects designated as AIDS control averaged US$69 million annually, and, assuming a safe margin for under-reporting and misreporting, we estimate that total donor spending on HIV/AIDS control was perhaps twice that at most. Full-Text PDF

Between governance & under‐development: accumulation & Africa's ‘catastrophic corruption’

Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum.With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not acrime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated. T J Dunning, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital I (1976:926, fn.). This paper explores aspects of the tension between, on the one hand, international efforts by multilateral and bilateral creditors and aid donors to reduce corruption in developing countries and, on the other, the role played by political corruption in promoting local accumulation of wealth, property and capital in Africa. The process of globalisation includes a concerted effort to reduce the costs and increase the predictability of international business activities. The effort has been particularly directed at countries undergoing economic restructuring and democratic change. The weak bargaining position of African states, where debt and underdevelopment make dependence on international creditors and aid donors especially acute, has led to a variety of direct, unsubtle pressures to force these states to undertake ‘governance’ reforms. While many of these measures address important problems undermining African development, they also misunderstand the nature of corruption as an African problem in two important ways. First, they seek to impose rules and norms of proper public behaviour, developed for and within liberal democracies, in environments where liberal democracy is not established. And, second, they threaten the dependence of the African petty bourgeoisie on access to the state and its resources. In the context of underdevelopment, local accumulation rests heavily on political power and the ability it provides to appropriate public resources. Corruption provides a means of transferring public resources to the new middle class and bourgeois strata which emerged in the post‐colonial order. And underdevelopment ensures that dependence on political power for accumulation is continuous. Africa's development crisis has intensified dependence on the political domain even more and increased conflict as claimants fight over a diminishing pool of resources. Far from arresting the upward spiral of corruption, liberalisation and governance measures imposed by the donors have encouraged the development of new forms of corruption.

EUROPE AND THE PROMOTION OF DEMOCRACY IN POST COLD WAR AFRICA: HOW SERIOUS IS EUROPE AND FOR WHAT REASON?

The ending of the Cold War brought new topics on the agenda of the international aid donors. Questions of democracy and human rights were voiced with rising intensity not least by the European IJnion and by individual European countries. However, when it came to implementing the ambitious principles, both the EU and the bilateral donors lacked a 'serious' commitment. This is indicated by European policies towards South Africa, Kenya, Niger and Algeria. The policies of the Europeans towards Africa in the l99Os have primarily been influenced by security concerns and thus by the narrow national interests of individual donors. This is particularly manifest in the case of France which has a dominating position within the development cooperation of the EU. Thus, only in very few exceptional instances is it in the national interest of European donor states to promote moral issues such as democracy and respect for human rights. In the l990s such themes have become little more than the rhetoric of politicians and treaties, just as it was during the Cold War. THE ENDING OF THE Cold War brought new issues to the development debate. The change from the bipolar international system to multipolarity opened the way for introducing several new themes and instruments into international development aid. After 1989, topics such as democracy and human rights were voiced with rising intensity by the donors.l In June 1990, only half a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd gave a speech in which he maintained that economic development and so-called 'good governance' go hand in hand in developing countries. And Hurd continued, 'economic success depends extensively on the existence of an efficient and honest government, on political pluralism and, I would like to add, respect for the law and free and more open economies'. In the same month, the French president Franvois Mitterrand pointed out at a meeting with African heads of state that in Dr Gorm Rye Olsen is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen. He also teaches international relations and African politics at the University of Copenhagen. 1. O. Stokke ed., Aid and Political Conditionality (Frank Cass, London, 1995), pp. lff. P. Uvin, 'Do as I say, not as I do: The limits of political conditionality', The European 3fournal of De7nelopment Research, 5, 1 (1993), pp. 63ff.

PRINCIPALS, AGENTS AND THE FAILINGS OF CONDITIONALITY

This article examines the effectiveness of policy conditionality by international and other aid donors. The subject is treated within a principal-agent framework and is based on evidence from a sample of 21 developing countries, mainly relating to experiences with World Bank structural adjustment programmes. The evidence provides strong support for the overall hypothesis that conditionality-applying donors (specifically the BWIs) are often unable to put in place a system of rewards and punishments sufficient to overcome the frequent perceived conflicts of interest between themselves and recipient governments. Difficulties which donors experience in punishing non-implementation of policy stipulations are among the chief reasons for this result. In the event of serious donor–recipient disagreements, domestic politics usually dominates. The use of donor financial leverage is not a substitute for weak domestic institutions or ‘political will’. We also find that the conditions necessary for conditionality to provide a ‘technology of precommitment’ are often not satisfied. The BWIs and other donors should recognize that their main contribution to policy reform in developing countries has been through influence on the contemporary intellectual climate, and persuasion of governments through regular contacts. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.