From Recipients to Donors

Emerging Powers and The Changing Development Landscape

Emma Mawdsley

Foreign aid has seen enormous changes in the last decade. In the early millennium, it appeared that donor nations might succeed in combating partisan interests, and commit to a new era of coordinated policies and practices. However, the last few years have witnessed a number of challenges to this model: the problematic intrusion of security agendas; inherent difficulties in harmonization and alignment; and difficulties in securing promised finances after the financial crises. One of the key challenges arises from the growing proliferation of donors, with the growing flow of development funds that are by-passing the official agencies and being directed through NGOs, foundations, private organizations and remittances.

Whilst reviewing all of these issues, this book focuses on one of the biggest challenges, the growth of so-called ‘New development donors’, such as Brazil, China, Hungary, Korea, India, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Venezuela, and the United Arab Emirates. Some of these countries are relative newcomers to formal development assistance, whilst others have been active for decades. Their increasing visibility has been driven by: the rapidly expanding scale and scope of China’s development assistance around the world; scrutiny of Islamic aid following 9/11; and EU debates over development policy alignment following the EU-15 accession in 2004.

Are the growth of these new development donors a positive or negative thing for development? The New Development Donors weighs the positive and negative effects before concentrating on the new donors direct ‘development cooperation’ policies and practices. Drawing on the author’s rich original empirical research, whilst expertly condensing existing published and unpublished material, this is an essential and unique critical analysis and review for anyone with an academic or professional interest in development, aid and international relations.

Contents

Part One: Context
1. Introduction: Setting the scene
2. Theorising foreign aid
3. The historical lineages of the NDDs
Part Two: The NDDs in the 21C
4.The nature of rising power development cooperation
5. Institutional shifts, overtures and challenges
6. The symbolic claims of the non-western donors
7. The public face of aid amongst the NDDS
Part Three: Case Studies
8. India
9. China
10. Poland
11. Russia
12. South Africa
13. Brazil
Part Four: Conclusions

About the Author

Emma Mawdsley is a Senior Lecturer in the Geography Department at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her work on development politics includes research on ‘whose ideas count’ in transnational NGO networks; and emerging state-NGO relations in the 21C; the World Bank’s World Development Report series; and the US’s Millennium Challenge Account. She has been researching the ‘rising powers’ and development cooperation for several years, and has presented her work in a number of academic and policy forums. This is part of a wider interest in the ‘rising powers’, and she has co-led research and writing on contemporary India-Africa relations (with Gerard McCann), and written on China and Africa. She is currently leading a collaborative project funded by DFID to look at the public face of ‘foreign aid’ in China, India, Russia, Poland and South Africa. As well as research on development politics, she continues to research and teach on India’s environmental politics.