Book reviews: The trouble with aid: Why less could mean more for Africa by Glennie J. (London: Zed Books, 2008, pp. 175, p/b, ISBN: 978-1-84813-040-1

✍ Scribed by Emma Mawdsley

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 37 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1713

✦ Synopsis

John Glennie has produced an intelligent, judicious and accessible dissection of foreign aid to Africa. It ought to rocket to the top of any reading list on the subject, and in an ideal world it would displace the recent populist publications on foreign aid from the bestseller lists! Glennie calls himself an 'aid realist', and distances himself both from celebratory, insistent 'aid optimists' as well as the sweeping hostility of the 'aid pessimists'. He is unsparing in his insistence on evidence, and on not conforming to scripts. Three key arguments stood out in my reading of his analysis. First, he makes a critical distinction between the direct and indirect impacts of foreign aid. He suggests that while the direct impacts of aid are relatively easy to measure (schools built, mosquito nets distributed, and perhaps more uncomfortably, people displaced by new infrastructure), it is very often the indirect impacts that have far greater impacts on the developmental opportunities and constraints open to countries and ordinary people. Policy conditionalities (and the closure of policy space), the continued under-mining of political accountability, dependency cultures and the impact of the influx of foreign money on exchange rates are some of the more problematic indirect effects. Second, Glennie asserts that donor agencies remain unwilling to acknowledge the detrimental impacts of aid. Discussions are couched in terms of improving aid in various ways, but rarely do donors evaluate the past and present injustices of particular aid relationships, or mistakes, or inherent contradictions and compromises. Without confronting these problems donors will not be able to genuinely work towards aid effectiveness. Third, Glennie argues that the loud clamour about increasing aid levels (for example, at Gleneagles in 2005) is obscuring what would be truly effective, and truly generous-cancelling debt, public investment in affordable pharmaceuticals for treating tropical diseases, banning tax havens, finding ways of limiting capital flight, re-orienting African banks (many of which now are foreign owned) to encourage them to lend to small and medium local borrowers and so on and so on. Instead, western publics and agencies are diverted by cries for more and more aid without being asked to reflect on whether more is better. Glennie quotes Bob Geldof as saying 'Something must be done, anything must be done, whether it works or not' (p. 9). As Glennie says, this can be charitably construed as a slip of the tongue-but it is in fact revealing of a real problem with much of the aid community: many people and institutions are unwilling to ask themselves what they are really achieving or trying to achieve. Thus, Glennie asks, why do the countries which are members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) aspire to 0.7 per cent of GDP as a target for foreign aid contributions? Shouldn't we be asking what we need to combat poverty, and how it should be managed? More aid may actually undermine development, rather than promote it. Or, in some cases, many more resources may indeed be needed, but they have to be delivered in ways that work-and in ways that are not immediately undermined by wider structural inequalities in the global economic and political systems.

So, while Glennie is deeply critical of the current structures and discourses of aid, he does not propose abandoning it in toto. With a discernment and clarity that seems to elude many in the field, Glennie asks deceptively simple questions, but ones which I suspect will disconcert both aid pessimists and aid optimists. He concludes with a full chapter on prescriptions for change, and in keeping with the rest of the book, these are potentially achievable, radical and realistic at the same time. What they require is willingness to embrace a more holistic, evidence-led and situated