WHY WE LIE ABOUT AID About the author PABLO YANGUAS is a research fellow at the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre and Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, as well as an international development consultant. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University after studying History and Archaeology at the University of Seville. His research centres on the political economy of foreign aid, the politics of development policy, and public sector reform, and has appeared in academic journals such as World Development, Development Policy Review, Third World Quarterly and Journal of International Development. As an advisor, he specialises in politically smart and adaptive foreign aid with a focus on anticorruption programming. WHY WE LIE ABOUT AID Development and the Messy Politics of Change PABLO YANGUAS Why We Lie About Aid: Development and the Messy Politics of Change was first published in 2018 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Pablo Yanguas 2018 The rights of Pablo Yanguas to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Typeset in Bulmer by T&T Productions Ltd, London Index by Rohan Bolton Cover design by Michael Wallace Cover photo © Mikkel Ostergaard/Panos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78360-934-5 hb ISBN 978-1-78360-933-8 pb ISBN 978-1-78360-935-2 pdf ISBN 978-1-78360-936-9 epub ISBN 978-1-78360-937-6 mobi Contents Acknowledgements Introduction | ONE The theatrics of aid debates | TWO The banality of certainty | THREE The ugly politics of change | FOUR The limits of donor influence | FIVE The paradoxes of development diplomacy | SIX The struggle of thinking politically | SEVEN Understanding the messy politics of change Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgements This book draws upon a decade of study, research, and work, a time that I have been privileged to share with too many friends and colleagues to list here. My first words of appreciation have to be for my mentors: Tom Callaghy at the University of Pennsylvania, Nic van de Walle at Cornell University, and David Hulme at the University of Manchester. They are all responsible for turning a hapless history major out of Seville into a bona fide international development researcher. I hope that this book can make up for all my stubborn questions, my obscure obsession with Weber, and my general inability to follow sound career advice. My best ideas are but echoes of their massive contributions to the political economy of development. The research that substantiates this book was made possible by support from the Einaudi Center and the Peace Studies programme at Cornell University, and from the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre and Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Of my many good friends and influences at Cornell, Phil Ayoub, Don Leonard, and Igor Logvinenko were my closest co- conspirators in this business of asking tricky questions about international and comparative politics, while Jaimie Bleck was, from that very first day at the Ithaca airport, a contagious source of enthusiasm and sheer joy about Africa and Africans. Over time, I have also benefitted from the wisdom of teachers and senior colleagues: Peter Katzenstein, Sam Hickey, Kunal Sen, Richard Batley, Heather Marquette, Merilee Grindle, Brian Levy, and David Booth will all find traces of their own work in this manuscript, which is all the better for it. My editor at Zed Books, Ken Barlow, offered encouragement and astute guidance in the long journey from inception to submission, and, together with two anonymous reviewers, provided useful feedback on the final text. Whatever flaws remain are probably the result of not listening to them closely enough. I am continuously amazed at the willingness of practitioners to talk to junior researchers. Most of my insights into development grew out of conversations in Nairobi; Freetown; Monrovia; Tegucigalpa; Accra; Kampala; Dhaka; Washington, DC; Paris; Madrid; and London. I especially want to thank Alan Whaites, Nick Manning, Kathy Bain, Beatriz Novales, Nic Lee, and Isabel Castle, not just for their trust and inspiration, but also for demonstrating what aid can be like when smart, capable, and principled people take the reins. A whole book cannot do enough justice to their hard work and commitment, or that of their hundreds and thousands of peers across the development community. Finally, as is often the case, no one feels the pressure and costs of writing a book quite as strongly as the author’s family. My wife, Mar, has always been my biggest supporter, even when work has taken me far away from her. In the time between conceiving this book and submitting the final manuscript, our two children, Victor and Martina, were born. It is to them that I dedicate the book: may you grow up to see a more internationalist and humane world than the one captured in these pages. Manchester, August 2017 Introduction A scandal in Kampala There are not many public scandals about foreign aid, but Ireland was rocked by a particularly big one in 2012, when Irish Aid suspended its entire assistance programme in Uganda. In October of that year, it was revealed that four million euros destined to help rebuild the country’s war-torn northern region had been siphoned out to a personal account by the Office of the Prime Minister1. The revelation quickly escalated into a full-blown public debate about the future of development cooperation in Ireland. The Tánaiste – deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs in charge of Irish Aid – was ‘absolutely disgusted’ about the corrupt misappropriation and demanded that all the money be paid back in order to maintain future aid to Uganda2. Some politicians called for an investigation by the legislature to ‘get to the bottom’ of the scandal, while others used the opportunity to call for significant cuts to the aid budget. Newspapers printed opinion pieces questioning the logic of foreign aid in a time of financial bailout and fiscal austerity, and prime-time specials were aired on television detailing the context in which Irish money had been so blatantly stolen. After a while, inevitably, the scandal subsided. The Ugandan government repaid the misappropriated funds in January 20133, and Irish Aid personnel quietly got on with the business of figuring out what went wrong and how to avoid similar scandals in future. The Irish government maintained the suspension for a while in protest at the lack of judicial action against the Ugandan officials responsible, but by 2014 foreign aid was again flowing into school rehabilitation, strengthening local responses to HIV/AIDS, and promoting access to justice for the very poor4. Perhaps one of the more significant consequences of the Irish Aid–Uganda scandal was exposing the public to very important, but also very complex, questions about the nature of development assistance. Should we give aid to countries with questionable democratic institutions? Should we work with potentially corrupt leaders in order to reach the poor and disenfranchised? Is it moral to send money abroad when there are still so many who need it at home? What should we expect to achieve in exchange for our aid? Irish society is to be applauded for asking these questions, just as it surely needs to be excused for not finding any definitive answers. After all, foreign aid is a tiny slice of any country’s national budget, hardly worth covering in prime-time news or newspaper editorials; even its scandals – with the exception of the above – are seldom publicised beyond official reports and specialist conferences. The fact is people know remarkably little about how foreign aid actually works. Instead, they are treated to shallow polemics supporting either end of the political spectrum: in Ireland, as in any other donor country, aid is a convenient black box with which progressives and conservatives can safely play to their bases. On the left, increasing the aid budget is a clear signal of charity and solidarity, just as, on the right, cutting it is an easy way to evoke fiscal responsibility and a business mentality. Politicians and pundits can so easily play with foreign aid because it has no constituency other than its professionals and – perhaps a distant second – its recipients in foreign countries. As a result, we are often treated to a pantomime of extremes in which development assistance is framed as either feeding starving children or fattening corrupt dictators. There is only room for nuance when treating aid as an instrumental resource: buttressing a country’s international reputation or its ability to maintain and expand its influence abroad. But that is hardly a conversation about what development cooperation means on the ground. The opaqueness of the aid world is at times calculated, which is partly the fault of its own professionals. It is also, I believe, self-defeating. The fact is that aid is neither salvation nor damnation, not just charity and definitely not just waste. Like many policies at home, foreign aid is messy: its principles and goals are subject to bias and short-sightedness as much as genius and foresight; its projects are managed by hacks and mercenaries as much as artists and visionaries; and its outcomes are incredibly difficult to evaluate with scientific accuracy, prone as they are to the vagaries of economics and politics. At the end of the day, the more internal documents you try to decipher, the more frustrated idealists you talk to, and the more local processes of change you try to unpack, the clearer it becomes that the defining characteristic of aid is its intrinsic humanity. Neither sinner nor saint: just human. Fallible, obviously, and gullible, quite a bit; but also entrepreneurial and subversive, an instrument for promoting change in the most difficult environments, which, after all, is what development is really about.