Over the past five decades, the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia have, together, received more than a trillion dollars in aid.  Yet, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this world-wide collaboration among donors and recipients has basically been a failure.  Many today would say that it was an outright disaster. 

For those who have travelled the fifty years down this road with their windows open, it has become obvious that the landscape of sustainable development needs action that is quite different from that of conventional development assistance programmes.  The future belongs to smaller, more decentralised initiatives that involve the active participation of the people affected.  to be successful, such action must be designed from the bottom up.  It has to be much more sensitive than before to issues of gender, social justice, environment, community and local culture. 

And it is now beginning to be widely accepted that governments are not the only - or even the best - agents of change.   

Although aid money is often very small compared to the investments made by the recipient country itself, the visibility of aid projects can greatly leverage their impact on development practice.  Their potential for distorting national development priorities is immense, and it is now time for a systematic investigation of their impacts, positive and negative.  As a starting point, it would be useful to identify some of the issues that such an investigation should address. 

The literature of development is bursting through the shelves with stories of internationally funded projects that led to environmental costs that exceeded the economic benefits.  Many mega projects including large dams, chemical industries and nuclear power stations have shown what damage can be achieved by the kind of creative (or, more accurately, grossly ignorant) benefit-cost analysis carried out by development economists. 

But the fundamental question is: what has aid done on poverty?  More broadly, what has been the impact of aid on poverty and resource destruction?  Despite, or rather as a result  of, all the inputs and transfers of money by the international community over five decades of International Development, the world today is more impoverished than it was when the Second World War ended.  One cannot deny that there is now more wealthy people  than there ever were before.  But there are also more persons marginalised and living in poverty and there are far fewer trees in the forests than at any earlier time in history.   

Each year, the statistics provided by UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank - not to mention independent sources like the World watch Institute, the World Resources Institute and the Third World Network - show that the disparity in economic conditions and the devastation of the resource base continue to grow.  Today, the income of the world’s riches 20% is sixty four times as much as that of the poorest 20% a ratio that was meant to decline, but instead increases every year by 2%.  World-wide, the forests disappear at a rate of more than 2% each decade, and in some countries at a rate of more than 1% per year. 

Political acceptability of this reality is low.  Yet it is widely accepted.  Northern governments, many years ago, pledged a significant part of their GNP to redress this imbalance.  Only a handful was able to redeem this commitment - and even they are under domestic pressure to reduce it.  If all OECD countries had lived up to their promise - they would have transferred an additional one thousand billion dollars over this period of fifteen years, ten time the GNP of a Nordic country and three times the GNP of India. 

But it may be just as well that they did not.  Aid fatigue is disease that might have originated in the North; yet it could become an epidemic that, like its namesake killer syndrome, is about to spread very quickly to the South.  And with a similarly devastating effect on the way things were normally done in adult relationships, this time not between individuals but between countries.  There is no longer much to choose from among the metaphors that best describe the relationship between the rich and the poor in the international economy : rapist-victim or predator - prey?  Only a few (primarily small European such as the Nordic, Dutch and Swiss - and Canadian) economies can plausibly claim to be elsewhere. 

The Brundtland Commission underlined the need for different kinds of development patterns, and for the urgency of improving, in quantity and quality the flow of finances to support these.  The Constant refrain at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (as, indeed, at Stockholm twenty years earlier) was for “new  and additional” finances to meet the emerging challenges of environmentally sound and sustainable development.  Indeed, the primary bargain struck at Rio was that the developing countries would sign the global conventions and the industrialised implementing the carefully negotiated plan of action, Agenda 21.  The developing countries signed.  The funds never arrived.  On the contrary, they declined even from the pitiful levels that existed pre-Rio. 

The total ODA flows today to the South are some $10 billion less than they were before the Rio conference.  With the end of the Cold War, more and more development assistance money is each year siphoned off into peacekeeping, humanitarian missions and Eastern Europe.  The barely $1 billion per year mobilised for the GEF  is earmarked largely for activities directed at concerns dear to the North: climate stabilisation and biodiversity conservation.  The $125 billion per year price tag set on the international community to contribute towards implementing Agenda 21 has, in nearly three years, yielded precisely nothing.

Despite, all the lip service at Rio, and since, to the need for partnership with the civil society, NGOs have not in decades had such difficult fund raising times as they find themselves in today.  Is this the measured response of the donor agencies to the growing impact of independent sector organisations at such international negotiations as at Rio, Cairo and Copenhagen? 

“Capacity building” has for almost a decade been the buzzword on the lips of all delegations, northern and southern.  Yet there is still virtually no money available from international donors for institutional or programme support.  Or for genuine innovation - in hardware technology, institutional design or policy implementation.  Or even for institutions that can create the one thing on which there can be no dispute - sustainable livelihoods in large numbers.  Again, the only hopeful signs in this direction come from the few donors with foresight and creativity on the horizon: the Swiss, the Canadians, the Scandinavians and some independent Foundations. 

The greatest part of development aid goes to projects. Narrowly conceived, time bound, hackneyed, limited impact - but high profile projects.  Projects that are meant to be simple to monitor and easy to report on.  Projects whose accountability must be measured primarily in financial terms, not in impact or effectiveness.  Projects that are convenient for the donor agency interms of geographical location, subject  scope and methodology.  Projects with local implementing agencies that are safe - either because they are in government, or because they are appropriately connected to it.  Projects limited to three or four years, time-frames that belie the very meaning of sustainability. 

One often has to wonder whether these activities are designed to solve the problems of the recipient of the donor. 

These shortcomings do not necessarily arise from any lack of competence among the staff within the donor agencies.  In fact, the rolls of these agencies include men and women who are among the most skilled, sensitive and sincere development professionals in the world.  Rather, the problem is of a systemic nature, arising from the mandates of the agencies, the imperatives of accountability, and the limitations of bureaucracies.  These proximate causes are in turn determined by more fundamental issues, such as the philosophy, policies and practices of aid; the learning curve and the time it takes to adjust to changing conditions or perceptions; and the limits to organisational abilities to handle innovation and risk. 

Nevertheless, development workers at the other end, who have the privilege to deal professionally with donor agencies do often wonder why things are the way they are.  And, more important, why they are not the way they could be and, better, should be.  Why can’t more funds go directly to institutions that create sustainable livelihoods instead of to large scale projects that simply destroy them?  Why does such a large percentage of aid have to go to government agencies, despite their well known inabilities and inefficiencies?  Why is there so little support for new, innovative initiatives that involve some risk of failure but high potential pay-offs if successful?  Why is “duplication” or repetition of an activity such anathema if market approaches (which are now considered desirable) can only work under conditions of competition? 

Why are NGOs considered so good for crating awareness, carrying out surveys and project design - but no good for implementation?  Why are project criteria such as “absorptive capacity” and “focus” so important only for NGOs?  Why do governments task so much about building institutions and capacity, yet do so little about them?  Why should we be so hemmed in by project selection or design criteria that were set many years ago in the donor agency headquarters at their national capital 10,000 kilometres away?  Why is the output  valued so much higher than the process and the capacity that is built up?  Why is the input considered  to be so much more important in evaluating the success of donor intervention than the output? 

The time has come to recognise that some of the age-old pat answers to project proposals are no longer relevant in the new age of sustainable development: It’s too small.  It’s too research-oriented.  It does not fit our priorities.  It’s been done before.  It’s already being done by someone else.  It’s too complex (multi-disciplinary).  It’s too big for your organisation.  It’s too big. 

That development assistance is available under certain conditions set by the donor government is only natural.  That aid is tied to sale of products from the donor country is not the big issue.  That a large fraction of the aid given - in some cases as much as 75% - must, by law or by convention, come back in some form to the donor is not the major issue either.  After all, if aid programmes have to be justified to the tax-payers and their elected representatives as a matter of purely economic self-interest, this is a necessary, logical outcome.  What is more pernicious is the widespread tendency of aid givers to support activities in receiving countries that cater mainly to the demands of the rich and politically powerful; increase disparities; lead to alien consumption patterns, inappropriate technology choices and costly, out-of-scale production systems; destroy the resource base; obliterate cultural diversity; undermine self-reliance and generally promote a development pattern that is neither in the interest of the recipient country as a whole, nor sustainable. 

Nor, of course, is it in the longer term interest of the donors.  The cheap labour and raw materials for centuries taken at will by many of them from the South will henceforth have to be paid for at ever increasing costs: pressures of mass migration, breakdown of global life-support systems, wars and terrorism-not to mention growing domestic problems of unemployment, drugs, alienation, violence and crime.  Rapid and sustainable development of the South together with the accelerated demographic transition that follows as a consequence is, in fact, the best insurance for a better sustainable future for the North - a matter of self-interest in the 21st century next only to a transition to more sustainable consumption patterns and production systems in the North itself. 

Even if, as the Social Summit at Copenhagen also suggested, the time for traditional forms of aid is over, the time for growing inter-dependence among the peoples and societies of this world is not.  Structural adjustment is certainly needed in countries of the South to bring and end to the inefficiencies, corruption and distortions in their economies, but not necessarily in the manner fostered by donor agencies which can only lead to further and more ingrained inefficiencies, corruption and distortions.  Where real aid is now needed, however, is for encouraging northern nations to eliminate the inefficiencies, corruption and distortions in their economies, and to make their own transition to sustainability.  Only adult, mature relationships among nations, based on mutuality and fair give-and-take can possibly lead to these transitions.  Perhaps the growing malaise in the international economy and the global change issues of the Montreal and Rio conventions  will soften the resistance among governments to such changes. 

And it is perhaps no coincidence that it is precisely these issues that offer the opportunities of more appropriate financial flows between the North and South: more equitable trade regimes and payments for the use of global resources and environmental space such as the commons, carbon emissions, genetic resources, radio frequencies, air travel and international speculative transactions.  When the South realises and seizes such opportunities and, for once, brings to the negotiating table some real bargaining chips, development assistance may well  gradually be transformed into genuine development co-operation. 

One could then imagine the time, not so far off, when the South-for its own survival-will have to transfer value systems, knowledge, technologies and even funds to the North.  Fundamental changes are needed if the Aid Syndrome is not to become a terminal disease for the international community.   q

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