The Rising Powers and the New Politics of Foreign Aid:

Contributions from Gift Theory

Emma Mawdsley

eem10@cam.ac.uk

Changing global geographies of power and wealth

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DAC: The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD

Policy, political, commercial and academic research

1) What impacts will the NDDs have on humanitarian intervention, longer-term development, poverty reduction and economic growth in poorer countries?

2) What impacts will the NDDs have on the existing architecture of foreign aid – the ideologies, policies and practices of the dominant institutions?

3) What part will NDD development assistance play in the changing global geographies of economic and geopolitical power that are taking place and predicted to accelerate?

4) What challenges do the (re-)emergence of the NDDs have for theorizing international relations, development and foreign aid?

Analysis?

A wide range of responses:

“In Africa and elsewhere, governments needing development assistance are skeptical of promises of more aid, wary of conditionalities associated with aid, and fatigued by the heavy bureaucratic and burdensome delivery systems used for delivery of aid. Small wonder that the emerging donors are being welcomed with open arms” (Woods 2008: 1220)

Richard Manning (former Chair of the OECD-DAC): challenges and opportunities

Naim (2007): ‘rogue donors’ making nefarious use of ‘toxic aid’

Gift Theory and Foreign Aid

• - Key theorists: Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu

• - Gifts carry a social charge; they create and maintain social relations of giving, receiving and reciprocating

• - Gift exchange is distinguished from:- - economic exchange (commerce) - - redistribution (rights)

Gift theory and foreign aid

• - International relations and the symbolic repertoire of aid (Hattori 2001; Kapoor 2008)– - ‘Negative giving’ (persistent failure or inability to

reciprocate) creates relations of superiority and inferiority.

– - What do (western/DAC) donors seek to signal, and what do they seek to euphemise or obscure?

– - What social relations are they constructing and maintaining through aid relations?

• Despite the consistent evidence that [western] aid allocation tends to be dominated by … political and strategic interests ... there remains within the development community as a whole a sense that the true objective and motivation of development is the moral one of assisting the less fortunate (Rowland 2008: 8)

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- Rituals and rhetorics: the performance of aid (Da Silva 2008)

“East Timor’s biggest counter-gift to the international community has been to function as an instrument through which the values cherished by aid donors, expressed in western myths of good society, can once again be cultivated in the process of building a new national state” (Da Silva 2008).

The symbolic claims of non-western aid

1) The assertion of a shared experience of colonial exploitation, post-colonial inequality and present vulnerability to uneven neoliberal globalisation, and thus a shared identity as ‘Third World’ nations;

2) Based on this shared experience, a specific expertise in appropriate development approaches and technologies;

3) An explicit rejection of hierarchical relations, and a strong articulation of the principles of respect, sovereignty and non-interference; and

4) An insistence on win-win outcomes of South-South foreign aid and mutual opportunity.

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The Maoist period:

1949-78

What donors/partners seek to signal

DAC donors

• Charity• Moral obligation to the

unfortunate• Expertise based on superior

knowledge, institutions, science and technology

• Sympathy for different and distant Others

• The virtue of suspended obligation, a lack of reciprocation

South-South partners

• Opportunity• Solidarity with other • Third World countries• Expertise based on direct

experience of pursuing development in poor country circumstances

• Empathy based on a shared identity and experience

• The virtue of mutual benefit and recognition of reciprocity

NB: this is a highly generalised and therefore problematically crude binary!

“After Hurricane Katrina …Sri Lanka offered aid to the US. Even though it was only a small amount of money, this symbolic act was important for Sri Lanka to regain dignity and to escape from the status of a ‘pure’ recipient country, as a victim country. Now Sri Lanka had become a donor country. It also showed how Sri Lanka could feel compassionate to Westerners, being generous, within their capabilities, to the distant needy, but also able to rebalance the asymmetric relations that had developed after the tsunami, where Westerners were always donors and generous, and Asians were always recipients and forced to be grateful” (Korf 2007: 370-1)

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• “By refusing these gifts [post-tsunami aid] India refused once again to enter into the subordinate role of a hopeless developing country dependent on foreign benevolence. Instead the refusal is the expression of a newly gained Indian self-consciousness of strength and independence” (Bjerg 2005 p.17)

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Ethnographic accounts– Both in official accounts and my informants’ personal narratives, chuyen gia

[overseas/aid expert] work is spoken of as an act of disinterested benevolence, a gift of tutelage and enlightenment given freely and without expectation of return to the peoples of ‘needy’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. …

– … So there was nothing demeaning for either the givers or receivers of this aid. Vietnam too was a poor country, but this was because of the costly wars it had fought in defence of its homeland, and as a defender of revolutionary modernity on behalf of all the world’s progressive peoples and nations. It was therefore neither problematic nor shameful to receive the payments which African countries were offering in return for the Vietnamese experts’ services. The former [experts] speak of themselves as humanitarian providers and bringers of advancement to ‘backward’ African nations, expressing pride in having done work that reflects credit on themselves, their families and their homeland. They speak of themselves as enlighteners and providers …, unlike Western experts and aid workers whose countries are routinely represented as professing humanitarian aims but undertaking such giving merely to acquire strategic clients, captive markets and cheap labour. (Bayly 2007: 183)

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• Somalian author, Nurrudin Farah (1993) ‘Gifts’

• - ‘Ingrid’, the Danish aid worker, is patronising, arrogant and culturally ignorant.

• - However, describing the China’s donation of the Benaadir Maternity Hospital to Somalia, at which Dr. Mire and Duniya work, Farah writes: – “The modesty of the Chinese as a donor government was truly

exemplary. No pomp, no garlands of see-how-great-we-are … And you would meet the Chinese doctors, who came as part of the gift, as they did their rounds, soft of voice, short of breath when they spoke Somali, humble of gesture. Unlike the Italian and Dutch doctors on secondment from their governments as an overpriced package from the European Community, the Chinese did not own cars”. (p.20)

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What they seek to ‘euphemise’

DAC donors

• Commercial and geopolitical self-interest

• Hegemony• National superiority• Inadequate responses to

gross inequality• Inadequate

acknowledgement of past and present responsibility

South-South partners

• Commercial and geopolitical self-interest

• The challenge to hegemony

• National superiority• Growing differences in

interests within the Third World

• Interference in the sovereign affairs of other states

Ditto!

Solidarity between nations?

‘India’s foreign policy has always exhibited a dichotomy between principle and practice: an ideological opposition to formal institutionalised discrimination in the international system – such as United Nations Security Council permanent membership and nuclear weapon status in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — has gone hand-in-hand with a pragmatic willingness to seek the best possible deal for India within a hierarchical international system that is not egalitarian’ (Sahni, 2007: 23).

• “Official Indian sources confirm that these South-South Cooperation principles continue to guide Indian aid. However this cannot be accepted unreservedly as a comprehensive description of India’s aid characteristics. Firstly, a quite different aid policy, rather like an Indian version of the Monroe Doctrine, is pursued by India where neighbouring countries of strategic importance — for example, Bhutan and Nepal—are concerned. Here, India both overtly and covertly flexes its economic and military muscle to intervene in domestic affairs, and massive aid has been given over long periods in blatant pursuit of India’s national interests” (Kondoh et al 2010: 36).

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Justice within nations?

• - Strong (but not exclusive) focus of many of the NDDs on economic wealth creation and the productive sectors (agriculture, transport and energy infrastructure etc)

• - Modernisation, technological optimism, little regard for costs and losers

• - Generally weak regard for environmental and social sustainability, or for marginalised peoples.

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• … I have been struck by the adoption of an idiom of socialist neo-tradition in official representations of Vietnam’s present-day pursuit of overseas trade and investment opportunities. What has been said since the early 2000s in official media accounts of these initiatives is that Vietnam’s quest for export markets in a host of ‘liberalising’ African economies is not a pursuit of narrow economic gain or ‘interest’ (loi ich). On the contrary, say the ministries’ media spokesmen, these efforts are wholly consistent with the country’s heritage as a socialist provider and maker of ‘traditional friendships’ (quan he huu nghi truyen thong) through the imparting of aid and tutelage to the continent’s ‘needy’ postcolonies (Bayly 2007:226-7).

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• “The India-Africa partnership has deep roots in history. Linked across the Indian Ocean, we have been neighbours and partners for thousands of years … The advent of the Europeans and the colonial period disturbed these interactions but could not disrupt them. Later, both India and Africa shared the pain of subjugation and the joys of freedom and liberation. Satyagraha [truth force], non-violence and active opposition to injustice and discrimination were first used by Mahatma Gandhi on the continent of Africa … Nehru was also a firm believer and practitioner of the principle of Afro-Asian solidarity.” – Shashi Tharoor on a visit to Mauritius, 2009

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• “In contrast [to the domestic context], China’s current official and semi-official statements and representations of China–Africa relations self-consciously and deliberately situate current Africa policies and initiatives in a distinguished lineage of principled relations, even when the actual links are at best tenuous and the substantive content radically transformed … The PRC continues to trumpet its past 50-odd years of involvement in Africa as positive, progressive and grounded in the eternal and principled truths of non-interference, mutual benefit, unconditionality, and special friendship and understanding towards Africa” (Strauss 2009: 228).

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Conclusions

• - Gift theory provides analytical insight into the social relations constituted between states through languages, practices and symbolic repertoires of aid and development

• - Alternative moral geographies (how would this work within International Relations theories)?

• - The virtues of reciprocity• - The importance of dignity and honour• - Not symbolic alone: is there a case for loans

working better than grants in some cases and contexts?

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Morality, dignity and IR?

• Philippe Nel suggests that as well as the longstanding demand for a more just redistribution of global wealth and decision-making power, the emerging powers also seek recognition – what Nel calls ‘the unfinished struggle against disrespect and humiliation’ (2010: 1).

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Issues for critical theories of aid and development

“Postcolonialism is haunted by the very figure it seeks to displace as it continues to privilege Europe as the central subject of history by reorienting the world around the single axis of the colonial/postcolonial” (McClintock 1992)