Development Without Aid: The Decline Of Development Aid And The Rise Of The Diaspora (Anthem Studies In Development And Globalization) - Softcover

Phillips, David A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857286234 ISBN 13: 9780857286239

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

"Development Without Aid" aims to opens up perspectives about foreign aid to the world's poorest countries. Growing up in Africa the author developed a sense of the limitations of foreign assistance and from this evolves a critique of aid as an alien resource unable to provide the dynamism that could propel the poorest countries out of poverty. The book aims to help move the discussion beyond foreign aid. It examines the rapid growth of the world's diasporas as a resource of increasing strength in terms of both financial and human capital, and considers how far such a resource might supersede aid. The key point is that diaspora initiatives are a type of indigenous resource flowing through private initiative, not an alien resource flowing through public bureaucratic organizations. The book uses extensive research evidence to explore the possibilities for a resumption of sovereignty by poor states, especially in Africa, over their own development with the assistance of the world's diasporas.

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David A. Phillips

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Development without Aid

The Decline of Development Aid and the Rise of the Diaspora

By David A. Phillips

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 David A. Phillips
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-623-9

Contents

List of Acronyms, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. Introduction: Motivation and Perspective, 
2. What Is Foreign Aid, Who Does It, Why and How Much Is There?, 
3. How Far Has Development Aid Been Effective?, 
4. Why Has Development Aid Done So Little?, 
5. Changing the Dynamics of Development, 
6. "New Aid": New Ways to Promote and Finance Development?, 
7. Another Pathway Out of Poverty?, 
8. Exit Strategy – Replacing Foreign Assistance, 
9. Postscript, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: MOTIVATION AND PERSPECTIVE

International development cooperation has achieved many positive results. When we met in Monterrey a decade ago, we recognised that increases in volumes of financing for development must be coupled with more effective action to generate sustainable and transparent results for all citizens. Our dialogue in Busan builds on the foundations laid by previous High Level Fora, which have been proven to remain relevant, and which have helped to improve the quality of development cooperation.

"Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation,"
Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness,
Busan, South Korea, 1 December 2011, par. 6

Development aid, far from being necessary to rescue poor societies from a vicious circle of poverty, is far more likely to keep them in that state.

Peter T. Bauer (1993)

A Starting Point

This book is ultimately a personal reflection rather than an academic treatise, and so, while as far as possible remaining objective and supported by evidence, it is in the end as much advocacy as argument, at times taking the risk of verging on the polemical. It aims to open up perspectives as much as analyze facts. It is about the development of poor countries, not the principles of how societies and economies develop but the narrower canvas of development assistance to poor countries, its effectiveness and whether there is a different way to achieve its objectives. It aims, in fact, to help move the perception of the path to development in poor countries squarely beyond development assistance and beyond the discussion of its architecture, design and practice. It also asks for a partial suspension of belief that only rigorously evidence-based statements are admissible while judgments based on experience are not. Evidence is a wonderful thing; but conclusive evidence on how to succeed in development aid is almost unobtainable, and it is wholly predictable that much of the current effort to obtain it will in the end provide no better basis for action than experience.

Nearly US$4.0 trillion (in today's currency) has been disbursed in net official development assistance (ODA) to developing countries (after repayments) since 1960, or an average of about US$70 billion a year at today's prices, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). During all this time foreign aid, or foreign assistance, has been the subject of extensive attention – books, papers, films, concerts, pamphlets, investigative reports and advertising campaigns, produced overwhelmingly by outside governments, organizations and individuals. The British Library lists over 250 new books on "economic development assistance" published during 2010 to 2011. There are 300 or so internationally recognized journals focusing on development, including development aid, and many others that deal intermittently with the subject. One might well question the value of another work on how to strategize, design, appraise, negotiate, implement, procure, manage, monitor, evaluate, scale up, reform, reinvent or move beyond foreign aid, written by another outsider, when what is now clearly called for is an upsurge, an outcry, from indigenous thinkers themselves, especially those from the poorest and most affected countries, about how to handle foreign aid. Those indigenous thinkers are emerging but seemingly there are still too few of them. In the meantime I offer two reasons why I should be entitled to speak up both for myself and for them.

The first reason is that I am not entirely an outsider. I was brought up from infancy in the "colonies" – that is to say, in the countries known then as Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia in Central Africa that were once part of the British Empire. So what, one might ask. That life has gone with the wind and we have all said good riddance to a historical era that featured the nineteenth-century "Scramble for Africa" by the rival imperial powers. The gone-with-the-wind allusion is however important. From my viewpoint I did not much like the idea that the world of my childhood had vanished without trace, nor did I enjoy leaving behind forever the country of my earliest memories and experiences.

The fact of being from a transitory component of African society living a relatively privileged life did not mean that my childish sense that Nyasaland was my country and my home was more unreasonable than those of another child, whether of a farmer, a trader or a government official, indigenous or alien. I was the son of a colonial government official, and colonial officials tended to have a lesser sense of ownership than farmers and traders, even foreign ones, who invested in the country. Nevertheless as children our feelings about being part of the place were quite natural even if our parents tended to see themselves more on a temporary mission for his or her Britannic Majesty. Many of us after all were actually born there, or in my case nearly so, arriving at less than 1 year old. We were not on any mission. We belonged to the place. And in a sense we remain a part of the Nyasaland, now Malawi, diaspora, because those of us who left still retain some residual, if distant, allegiance to the country, while a few of us stayed on.

Many of us also grew up to think of Nyasaland as different from other colonies. The country surely had the usual ethnic and class anomalies of a colony. Some of us would experience a vague sense of guilt at being waited on by a retinue of servants; it didn't seem to make sense that people who were deputed to look after me, my sister and brother, some of whom were themselves parents, should treat our own parents with exaggerated respect and be treated in turn with exaggerated, albeit institutionalized, disrespect. But I lived with it and so did they, apparently without too much trouble. The big difference was that the country did not have the gold, diamonds and other high value minerals that caused overt social trauma among neighbors like the Congo or South Africa, and it did not have the same toxic race relations. The country's exportable offerings were largely tobacco and tea rather than minerals. It had a few towns, scattered villages and the beautiful Lake Nyasa (now known within the country as Lake Malawi) "discovered" for Europe by David Livingstone.

It was generally a quiet place, termed quaintly a protectorate according to the nomenclature of that era, a status that distinguished it somewhat from the settler colonies around it. In 1960, its population was only 3 million. The British colonial authorities invented a beautiful national crest consisting of a leopard standing on a rock before a rising sun. The leopard disappeared after independence and only the less beautiful, but more relevant,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0857286234
• ISBN 13: 9780857286239
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland