Since 9/11, new security concerns have come to dominate foreign policy. These are inevitably spilling over into aid policy and affecting how much is given, which countries receive it and how it is disbursed. What risks do new security imperatives pose to foreign aid? Will development goals become subservient to overarching strategic security concerns? This paper in International Affairs, analyses the geo-strategic interests of major donor countries and the implications of the new security-driven aid flows on development.
As the global security agenda has shifted, the donor behaviour of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union has witnessed similar reprioritisation. Rather than seeking to co-ordinate aid through multilateral institutions in order to help the world’s poorest people, the war on terror has magnified and exacerbated the tendency among major donors to create their own mechanisms for aid disbursement and pursue their own interests.
In the 1990s, serious efforts were made to redefine aid priorities to focus on human security following the Cold War distortion of foreign aid disbursements by geo-strategic interests. Donors struggled with duplication, incoherence and waste in bilateral aid arrangements and sought to increase co-ordination in their activities through multilateral institutions. Real coherence is now emerging, centred not on a development agenda but rather on achieving global and regional security imperatives:
- Much of the newly allocated US aid has been destined for projects designed to serve the new war on terror, with most funds being allocated to front-line states like Afghanistan and Iraq and to other strategic countries.
- Japan has reduced its external assistance budget choosing to channel most funds to Asian countries through multilateral organisations in the form of special contributions which allow it to retain control over disbursement.
- With the creation of the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK has significantly increased its development assistance since 1997, with Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan featuring at the top of DFID’s list of bilateral recipients.
- The EU has adopted a new framework declaring security as a first condition for development as it considers institutional reforms that will bring development and security goals closer.
Rapid increases in aid by major donors are not being translated into the achievement of human development goals. It is virtually a fiscal certainty that much of the new aid being channelled to meet security imperatives will dry up, leaving development agencies to give priority to the development needs of countries at the front line of the war on terror. A number of conditions must be met to avoid this global security-driven scenario for foreign aid:
- Development agencies must continue to prioritise human development goals leaving preoccupations with counterterrorism, WMD and broader security concerns to other agencies.
- Rather than attempting greater coherence and co-ordination of foreign aid and security policies in general, a better differentiation and allocation of goals at the global level is required.
- Donors must avoid the erosion of multilateralism evident at present through increasing bilateral aid budgets.
- Donors must prevent a return to the Cold War patterns of almost purely geo-strategically-led aid which obstructed rather than facilitated human development.
- Increased commitment from donors in terms of aid predictability, increased co-ordination, bolstering good governance and institutions and rationalising the demands they place on recipient governments.
