I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 9: Why Aid? Canadian Perception of the Usefulness of Canadian Aid in an Era of Economic Uncertainty” by Dominic H. Silvio.
There is growing evidence in many countries that the state of the economy can have a powerful impact on public attitudes towards anything international, but particularly development assistance. Bad economic news can have negative effects on public attitudes towards aid; and positive news, positive effects (Smillie 2003; Zealand and Howes 2012). Since the beginning of the Canadian aid program in the early 1950s, it has received considerable public support (Lavergne 1989; Smillie 1998ab, 2003). However, the perception of the usefulness of aid has not been endorsed by Canadians without reservation.
This is a huge, under-analyzed area, and yet it is under-analyzed for a very good reason. As noted in earlier chapters, citizen’s understanding of what “development” actually is or what constitutes aid, is actually really quite shallow in many countries, particularly Canada (Or as Silvio notes, “Research shows that the public knows virtually nothing about foreign aid and that what they think they know is actually incorrect”). So, studying how much support a citizen has for a given area also brings into question if their opinion is even significant. If a person has a detailed understanding of an issue, their support/lack of support is likely quite stable; if they only have a superficial understanding, their support levels are more variable and prone to shift with the wind. If you then analyze the variability, is it statistically significant? Or is it just a measure of the force and direction of the wind?
The initial framework by Silvio is solid, suggesting multiple possible measures for public support and attitudes:
Public opinion polling;
Elections and electoral platforms;
Donations to NGOs;
Volunteering with NGOs;
Engagement in public debate;
Consumer behaviour (i.e. fair trade);
Most of items 2-6 are nuancing whether the support is “solid”, whether there is a true commitment to the “cause” or if it is just “polling-deep” (i.e. if you ask me to choose between butter or guns, I’ll choose butter, but that is just a polling question, easy to answer, without the consequences of not investing in guns to protect the citizenry). Unfortunately, data on #s 2-6 are almost non-existent and inherently unreliable as they are equally “self-reported” as with the polling data.
Based on this data, it is clear that the public is more likely than not to be comfortable with the level of aid currently being provided, and since 2009, has become more so. For instance, in 2010, over half (54.4 percent) considered the level of spending to be about right — meaning Canada should give the same amount of ODA (up 8 points from 2009).
As with the general lack of understanding of aid, these numbers are almost meaningless to policy managers, but for a different reason — if you ask someone to tell you if the government should spend more, wouldn’t it be more telling if they actually knew how much we spent on ANYTHING in government — health care, social assistance, aid — and the relative proportions on each, before asking them if it should go up, down or stay the same? In part, you would also need to know their general views of government (should be smaller, larger or same size) and their normal view of budgeting (nominal values of aid budgets, the relative share of the government budget, percentage of GDP, or share of global spending on development) before interpreting views of a specific sectoral expenditure. Without knowing those other contextual beliefs, and I know it’s too detailed a possibility, the winds shift outcomes for multiple reasons and you can’t tell why. Support might be “a mile wide and an inch deep”, but old research used to ask about budget levels and the result was predictable — if you asked first if aid should go up or down, and then asked them to estimate out of $1 spent by the government on everything, the estimates of aid would be somewhere in the 4-5 cent range i.e. on average, they estimated 5% of the federal government budget was foreign aid. When they learned it was a fraction of a penny, support for increasing aid went up, but not to the 4-5 cent range, even when they first said that current spending was appropriate and they thought it was 5%.
First, public opinion means very little to governmental policy formulation where ODA is concerned, perhaps not surprisingly in light of Canadian public opinion, which consistently gives the government a high performance rating on the aid file, while assigning it the lowest priority among both domestic and foreign policy issues. Second, public opinion, while widely supportive of issues such as development assistance, is not, in reality, very strong.
I think the conclusions are appropriate and reflect the weakness of polling data generally, and aid polls in particular. However, one alternate conclusion or at least one area that isn’t explored and perhaps could be in future, is whether public opinion might not affect ODA levels but might have more influence on the type of aid (humanitarian vs. development, given that humanitarian assistance is easier to sell and understand) or if it might influence recipient choice (given that we have large diaspora communities in Canada).
A tough area but a good analysis of what’s available.
I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 8: Preventing, Substituting or Complementing the Use of Force?” by Justin Massie and Stéphane Roussel.
When did military operations and development assistance policies become integrated foreign policy tools? For what politico-strategic purposes? Despite significant literature on human security, failed and failing states, peacebuilding, humanitarian wars, and even foreign aid as an instrument of foreign policy, the relationship between official development assistance (ODA) and the use of military force as converging tools of statecraft remains under-analyzed.
When I saw the title of the section, I was afraid that the analysis might end up being better suited to an NGO rant than quality academic analysis. Many NGOs wrongly assume that everything a military does is has to be about force. Many would add to that by misquoting Henry Kissinger and further characterize the military as evil, hence all they’re actions are evil. It’s popular, it’s emotionally compelling, sure, but it’s also facile and false. True academic analysis would look at the actions, note whether they add to development or detract from development, and ignore who is doing them. Whether the NGOs admit it or not, there are two pretty compelling aspects to military engagement, particularly when it looks like blue helmets doing peacekeeping: first, the basic reality that development can’t happen if two sides in a conflict are shooting at each other; and second, if a rebel force is shooting women who had the audacity to learn to read, do you want soldiers telling them to stop or development aid workers asking them nicely?
Unfortunately, the approach assumes far too much with depicting the relationship between aid and the military as boiling down to just three things:
aid as a means to prevent future military action and/or violence escalation;
aid as a preferred alternative to the use of force in the attainment of states’ national objectives; and
a complement to military action for similar political objectives.
Really? Those are the alternatives? If you have to force-fit into those three categories, I’m sure they’ll find exactly what they’re assuming. However, how about a different framework:
Aid only to a crisis location, with mainly development goals;
Aid and military assistance together to a crisis location, with multiple goals; and,
Military assistance only.
And then look at each of the three to see if development and/or military goals were achieved.
Back in 2004-05, the OECD Development Assistance Committee dealt with this type of issue in some detail, and without the academic rhetoric or the normative undertones. Basically, the question was very simple — are there any actions done by the military that meet the definition of development assistance that would allow the costs incurred to be counted as ODA? It wasn’t a quiet debate, with lots of countries having very different views about multiple issues. But let’s be clear — the debate wasn’t about whether it needed to be done, or the military’s role in doing it, or even the prerequisite links to effective development assistance, the debate was whether it should or could be counted towards ODA levels. After that, the question moves to “how to make it work together” to make it more effective.
Peacebuilding, in other words, is conceived of as an integrated and coherent agenda involving mutually reinforcing development- and security-related policies. From this perspective, for example, antiterrorist policies and development assistance are inextricably linked.
Actually, that isn’t what it says. It says there are links between the goals of security and the goals of development — that development can help build peace, and peace is the underpinning of development. It doesn’t mean that every element is inextricably linked nor that it is a fully integrated or coherent agenda. In some cases, it could be as simple as saying “If you’re delivering humanitarian assistance in a hot zone, maybe the military force can provide cover.” It’s about seeing what links are there and making sure they work together or are at least neutral to each other (policy coherence only in the sense of administrative non-competitiveness), rather than creating links that aren’t there. Relying on the assumptions that Canada has pursued self-interested policies, contrary to Swiss demolishing such theories in Chapter 6 (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 6 – Mimicry and Motives), ). the analysis is pretty linear but pretty interesting for the Marshall Plan, Colombo Plan, and the new “Commonwealth”. It’s a pretty far reach to say foreign aid was focused on conflict prevention, but if you start with only three buckets, any sieve will do I suppose. Equally, it’s hard to conceive of human rights programming as a “substitute” for military action, not the least of which is that effective sustainable human rights programming requires a zone that is beyond the need for ongoing military action.
Despite the rhetoric, there are three areas worthy of special attention where the links were more forced than real. Axworthy drove the human security agenda and tied to it, landmine awareness. Both were pretty active areas. Equally, post-911, more attention was given to the links between security (mainly looked at by the military) and governance issues (mainly in the domain of development). In all three instances, there were links, but none of them were mainstream military nor aid policies — it was limited to small portions of the budget, not a complete revamp of either policy. Too bad the analysis amounts to no more than repeating policy statements used to sell aid to the masses, picking and choosing one or two key phrases while ignoring 300 others about development that made no reference to security.
I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 7: Continental Shift? Rethinking Canadian Aid to the Americas” by Laura Macdonald and Arne Ruckert.
I really like the start of the chapter:
One of the defining features of the Harper government’s development assistance program, and of its foreign policy more broadly, has been a strong rhetorical shift towards an emphasis on Canadian economic interest in the promotion of foreign ties and in the delivery of foreign assistance. The Americas as a region has tended to serve as a proxy for this shift in focus. The higher levels of economic development of the region as a whole and growing Canadian trade and investment interests in the region, particularly in the mining sector, mean that increased aid to the Americas is commonly portrayed as a response to cold, hard Canadian self-interest, as opposed to the soft-hearted benevolence of assistance to Africa.
Swiss’ analysis in the previous chapter (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 6 – Mimicry and Motives) shows that self-interest claims are indeed mainly rhetorical and about how it is portrayed, but without much meat behind the mainly NGO rhetoric. Sound bite policy, not aid delivery policy.
Canadian development assistance to Latin America thus represents a good test case for the proposition that we have seen increased emphasis since 2007 on the economic self-interest of Canadians and Canadian firms, and less on the longer-term promotion of development and the well-being of the world’s poorest citizens.
And then they lost some of my interest. Because it assumes you can’t do the two simultaneously, when in fact the why is still about development, but the choice of “how” and “what” could still be about Canadian self-interest. For example, if we had a lot of tied aid (as we did before 1995 or so), it was heavily geared toward regional economic interests in Canada (particularly before 1990), yet it was still “development”. The real test should be not whether something is “for development” or not as all of it is development but whether we choose projects that align with Canadian interests that are less effective than projects that don’t align with Canadian interests. In other words, if the recipient country needs were basic health care first, governance second, social development third, and business development fourth, with the expected benefits matching those priorities (i.e. they would see the best gains first in health care), but Canada says “hey, we’ll help you, but we want to work on business development first”, then the results would be less than they could have been. Still development, still helping, but not effective or efficient. Put differently, the problems with tied aid are that (a) donors might offer something that recipients don’t need or want and (b) it’s not the most effective or efficient use of aid. In short, supply-driven distortion rather than the purity of a demand-driven needs analysis.
However, the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin downplayed Canada’s role in the Americas in both foreign and development assistance policies. The International Policy Statement (IPS) issued by Martin’s government in April 2005 explicitly committed Canada to focus on Africa in its development assistance, including a commitment to double 2003–04 levels of ODA to that region by 2008–09 (Cameron 2007, 231).
I have a small cautionary concern in this analysis which is back to sound bite policy explanations vs. the policy analysis behind it. It looks, at first blush, like a focus on geographic regions and one might think therefore that it is blatant and real regionalism.
But if you look at the list of “least developed countries” by the UN, it has three criteria — low GNI, low human resource weakness based on nutrition/health/education/adult literacy, and economic vulnerability. In other words, the ones most in need of aid, and unlikely to progress without it. It sounds like the humanitarianism call for assistance. Yet, again, if you look at the list of countries, only one (Haiti) is in the Americas, 15 are in the Asia-Pacific region, and, wait for it, 34 are in Africa.
Suppose as a donor you decided to go with this list of 50 countries, the bottom 50, how would you explain it in shorthand? Those “most in need” of aid? Well, of course, but all aid is supposed to be about that. So politicians as well as policy analysts look for paradigms to act as proxies for explaining an intersection of income + capacity + vulnerability, and look, two-thirds are in the same economic region. So, people start saying “the focus is shifting to Africa” which is geographically true, and a nice way to frame a sound bite, while also avoiding complaints of racism at UN conferences if the funds shift the other way (that isn’t a theoretical construct, people complained when $$ moved away from Africa or even within Africa that such a change reflected racism against black people).
Yet the reason I raise this caution is not simply because of false regionalism, but that it might avoid the real analysis behind that change (focusing on LDCs and need) vs. a decision later that is focused more on the division of labour (other countries are investing elsewhere with less money in Americas by other donors) and on the choice of types of programming (you can do different types of development programming in the second tier of 50 countries more so than the bottom tier because both partners have more of a capacity base to build upon, also doubling as a proxy for aid effectiveness with a slightly different weighting of sub-factors, which I’ll come back to when talking about Peru). That doesn’t negate the possible subsequent analysis, but at times the regionalism is just a proxy for the other frames and not always the obvious ones.
Despite these changes in justification for aid decisions and in aid recipients, as well as the greater rhetorical emphasis on the Americas, overall levels of ODA channelled to Africa did not decrease (see Figure 1). Latin America and the Caribbean did receive a greater share of Canada’s aid budget, with the main loser being Asia, due mainly to the scaling down of aid to Afghanistan.
Which is one of the challenges with regional analysis — some people might stop here and think “no difference, meh”, which is why I’m happy to see the further analysis on Peru, Honduras and Haiti (although I suspect Haiti is too complex of a humanitarian crisis to draw much in the way of conclusions regarding actual developmental programming).
Peru arguably represents the best example of Canada’s incremental shift in aid engagement in the Americas towards privileging private sector investments. Canada has significant mining interests in Peru, with Goldcorp, Barrick Gold, Candente Copper Corp, and various smaller companies operating in the country. In 2009, as part of CIDA’s aid effectiveness agenda, Canada designated Peru as one of its twenty focus countries, despite its status as an upper middle-income country. […] The programming focus of Canada’s newfound engagement with Peru lies in the areas of education and sustainable economic development, with the latter becoming the central focus in 2012. In fact, a quick scan of DFATD’s project browser reveals that almost all projects (six out of eight) approved in 2012 and 2013 focus on private sector development and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the mining sector (DFATD 2013b). The government describes the overall goal of this engagement as “fostering the sustainable development of the extractive/natural resources sector to benefit all segments of the population and increasing government capacity to reduce social conflicts” (CIDA 2011a). This focus is part of the larger reorientation of aid policy under the Harper government towards CSR as a central area of concern, with initiatives that, DFATD claims, will contribute to sustainable economic growth, creating jobs and long-term poverty reduction (DFATD 2011b).
That’s a really long quote that I wanted to include in its entirety because it reflects a solid line of thinking that rests on an initial premise that may not hold. The argument is best laid out as:
Canadian companies have mining interests in Peru;
Peru was chosen, but wasn’t a low-income country;
Sound bites talked about domestic interests;
Aid increased;
The focus in Peru was education and the private sector, particularly mining interests.
Ergo, we are doing mining projects because Canadian companies have mining interests in Peru. A nice logic chain through five steps. Except, and I’m not being naive as I say this, what if steps 1-3 are connected (call it Group A) and steps 4-5 (Group B) are connected, but A is not connected to B. How could this be? Let’s see.
Group A (1-3) probably falls to (potentially) just #1 and 2, since we’ve seen the sound bites and spin are indeed rhetoric. And when the current government rebalanced regionally with less focus on Africa, and they had to thus choose some more countries in Americas, Canadian interests in Peru might have swayed Peru to make the list, although not necessarily as crassly as most assume. If Canadian companies are operating in Peru, and thus we have ties and awareness in Peru, and those same companies complain to the government that “Peru has capacity issues and needs help”, is it inconceivable that politicians might start to think Peru needs help? Put a little differently, if NGOs argue for help in Guyana and no business people do, but some NGOs + some business people say Peru needs help, politicians start to hear twice as much support for helping Peru. Add in the great likelihood that Peruvians can afford to send delegates to Canada to advocate on their behalf and the Guyanans can’t, that could be three groups asking for help in Peru. To use the analysis of the paper, multiple frames converged on selecting Peru, and absolutely some of them were likely commercial, but not the only ones.
But once that decision is made, and CIDA is told “Go work in Peru”, what does a development program in Peru look like? Do they need basic sanitation or health care? Nope, they’re a middle-income country. The basic work that you would do in Africa is irrelevant to Peruvian needs — they’ve grown past that level of help. Basic education? Nope. In fact, on most factors of Human Development, they rank high. Governance? Sure, particularly in terms of things like CSR, training public officials, eliminating rent-seeking behaviour by officials (aka corruption). The environment would certainly be likely, particularly with extractive industries going on. But if you look at needs analysis with most middle-income countries, they’ve got the foundations built and are looking for growth. Less social development focus, more economic development focus overall. And not only is the sole sustainable growth source the private sector, in Peru, but it’s also currently extractive industries. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone, it is also what we’re doing domestically in B.C. and the North — because the basic social needs are met or are being met in other fashion, ergo focus on PSD, and ergo focus on the businesses that are growing currently i.e. extractive industries).
Does a government like Canada know that by choosing Peru we’re going to have to do work on PSD? Absolutely. Does it maybe create links between Group A and B? Sure. Just not entirely sure that it’s 1:1, and that the frames in Group A (the why) are the same frames in Group B (the what and how).
In January 2013, then Minister of International Cooperation Julian Fantino announced that funding for new development projects in Haiti would be frozen pending a review, expressing a frustration with the lack of progress in the country: “Canada expects transparency, accountability from the government of Haiti in exchange for future commitments” (Blatchford 2013). The reason for this decision is unclear, but in addition to concerns with lack of development progress and corruption, the Conservatives may have decided that they have little chance of gaining electoral benefits from increased assistance to Haiti in ridings with a large Haitian presence, particularly in Quebec. However, it could also be seen as a sign of a closer alignment of aid flows with commercial interests in the region.
I’m confused. The paper accepts claims from the government in commercially viable countries when they say it’s about commercial interests, but when they say the opposite in a commercially-irrelevant country, they must have suspect motives?
A better frame might be a greater focus by the Harper government in all programming areas (domestic, foreign, social, economic, etc) on clearly defined results, often short-term. That doesn’t happen in failed and fragile states. It’s partly why they remain failed and fragile for long periods of time. There are no magic wands, and no path to sustainability — if you want to think of it as a military metaphor, you send in millions of combat resources with only minor battle victories, but no guarantees that you’ll ever win the war and no clear exit strategy except more battling for years. If the rhetoric is true, and that there is less humanitarian values driving the choice of frames, repeated lack of demonstrable results would produce the outcome Fantino announced. Having nothing to do with electoral results or commercial interests, other than likely getting results somewhere else rather than no results in Haiti. And many would decry that thinking, maybe even going so far as to say, “Who is Fantino to decide that Haiti isn’t progressing fast enough?”. Except the answer is simple. He was the Minister. He gets to decide where the money goes, and if he’s not seeing the results he wants/expects, it would be a pretty odd day for that Minister not to redirect those funds elsewhere, particularly if it coincides with concerns of corruption.
Personally, and since the paper offers no evidence to make me think otherwise, I suspect it is a lack of depth of commitment to humanitarianism, not a changed commitment to other frames in Haiti’s case. Very few Ministers of any party have the stomach for long-term humanitarian assistance that shows little signs of improvement, and even signs of imploding.
The wave of electoral successes of left-of-centre parties all over Latin America throughout the 2000s has meant that Harper has been increasingly isolated politically in the region and was looking for new partners in the hemisphere, which he found in post-coup Honduras. Nevertheless, the high rates of violence in the country and widespread human rights violations, as well as the questionable manner in which the Lobo government came to power, reveal the lack of emphasis on the democracy pillar in the government’s Americas Strategy. The Honduran experience thus shows Harper government’s political and economic interests conflicting with its espoused commitment to promoting democracy.
Okay, I’m lost again. Earlier in the paper, it basically said that it didn’t matter whether politicians were right or left, there was the same level of support, just different frames at play. Yet, here again, no analysis is done, no evidence presented, just a conclusion that it must be because they are both right-wing, that must be the reason? Plus, it says that if there are Human Rights abuses and violence in the country, interest in democracy must be suspect. It reminds me of an editorial cartoon back when Susan Whelan was Minister, and it showed her announcing partners that had a strong commitment to good governance and democracy, respect for human rights, etc., and concluded with the punchline that our first country of concentration would be Switzerland.
Going back to the issue of Ministers not having the stomach for pouring money into failed states with no immediate results apparent, here’s a shock that often hits politicians in development work. If you care about human rights and democracy, you have to engage those who don’t care about them. If you only talk to those who have it “right”, you’re never improving either. So couldn’t I use the same line of evidence to say “Hey, Honduras was politically isolated from the rest of the Americas, so the US and Canada threw them a lifeline because they saw them about to sink into violence and Human Rights abuses”? Do I think that’s true or accurate? Probably not. But it has the same evidence as the paper did, namely none when it came to the opposite conclusion.
Overall, this is the weakest paper so far. I like some of the upfront framing, but by the end, it feels like I’m reading a hatchet job done by an opposition party. Even on CSR, it reads like “If you don’t do CSR, you’re evil; if you do CSR, you obviously don’t mean it”. I expected more evidence, more analysis, and less filler.
I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 6: Mimicry and Motives: Canadian Aid Allocation in Longitudinal Perspective” by Liam Swiss. As I start the critique of this section, I have to note three large disclosures.
First and foremost, Liam is a close friend. While it wouldn’t stop me from disagreeing with him on just about any subject (!), I respect his work quite a bit. In fact, it is the primary reason I’m reading the book — it includes a chapter from him.
Secondly, and I’ll lose a lot of credibility here, I quite like the chapter and it is the best one so far. That is quite unrelated to my first disclosure, and far more related to my third disclosure.
Third, I have a bias for numerical evidence and linear extrapolations from data. I am not a statistician and am often quite suspicious of advanced statistical techniques when it leaves the academic world and approaches the policy world. What works in science, where a lot of variables can be held constant, seems to lose application when it gets warped and tortured into overall policy analysis and then re-engineered into a case-by-case application. I may be able to follow the gist of using wavelet applications to analyze non-linear epidemiological data, it doesn’t mean I want to use it for practical policy analysis where those pesky other variables that worked so well in theory tend not to remain constant. This means I like data analysis that goes just “so far” and “no farther”. You’ll see later why I mention this bias before getting into the actual document.
…This chapter uses aid allocation patterns to do two things: (1) discern which other donor countries Canada’s aid allocation most closely resembles over time to identify which countries and, in turn, motives Canada may be emulating in its aid practices; and (2) examine several key factors underpinning the provision of aid to recipient countries on a dyadic basis to highlight the motives that drive Canadian aid relationships over time.
Such a simple statement, and yet the basis of any good discussion of aid “policy” should start here — separate from the high-principled phrases of NGOs or press releases, where does our money go and how does it compare internationally? Pages 104-106 are simple mind-maps with the recipients of Canadian aid listed — a network diagram with Canada as the hub and our recipients as the spokes — for 1960, 1985, and 2010. Forty-five years in two increments and the diagrams are powerful. They show, almost unequivocally, just how dispersed Canadian aid policy has become. The diagrams increase in complexity and density, leaving 2010 looking very much like “everyone who asks”. I almost wish that similar diagrams had been developed back in the early 2000s for Minister Susan Whelan when she was arguing for country concentration, as they are pretty powerful (yet simple) representations of data. Pages 108-109 go further with the data, looking at the degree of similarity in lists of donor recipients between Canada and 28 other donors using Jaccard coefficients.
The goal of these two parts is simple — first, Swiss demonstrates that our aid recipient network is not static, it has changed dramatically between 1965 and 2010, and not through normal rhetoric, but with the data clearly represented. Second, Canada’s list of aid recipients is compared with the individual lists of aid recipients for 28 other countries to see if we are more like one country than another in our approach.
It used to be said, fairly common and perhaps even by many of the other authors in the book, that Canada has moved away from the donor darlings like the “altruistic/humanitarian” Nordics and are now like “crass, self-interested Americans”. Yet, the data upsets that apple cart fairly strongly, showing that a large number of the countries are basically starting to have pretty high similarities between programs. One could even argue that the foundations are laid for donor harmonization, as we have very similar aid recipient lists. And one might argue that’s a good thing. Yet, as much as I love the data and analysis, the little niggling voices at the back of my brain are screaming “but, but, but…”.
One caveat I have is whether similarity in aid lists itself, assumed to tell us something, really tells us anything at all. If 50 countries needed help, and some 10 donors help maybe 25 each, ideally there would be 5 donors in every country. The lists might average out to only 12-13 out of 25 would be similar, leaving you a maximum coefficient of about .500 (if I follow the Jaccard approach correctly). In a perfect distribution, .500 would be the max any one country SHOULD have with another, so if it goes above that, it may be that two countries are doing similar things, but it also means some recipients might be receiving little support. Country concentration and similarities may equally be a sign of a problem more than a solution, so I’m worried about the extrapolations from a comparison that starts off being ambiguous to analyze. Not a detraction from Swiss’ analysis, but a slight challenge to the base meaning of correlation (other than that two countries are potentially similar in reach).
Secondly, I fear that comparing simple aid lists/indices is almost meaningless. Canada, for example, maintained $50-200K “Canada Funds” in some developing countries. Since the projects were “developmental” in nature, and the recipients were ODA-eligible, the countries make Canada’s aid lists. But no one at CIDA would consider a “Canada Fund” to be an aid program, and Canada isn’t the only one that did these small projects. Equally, most aid managers would distinguish between a “full development program” (say $30M+), an “aid program” (say $10M+), a project fund (say $1M-10M), and Canada Funds (say less than $1M). Most aid managers would also separate out humanitarian assistance and some hardcore types would also remove anything delivered through a multilateral channel. In essence, triaging the list into “true development programs” where Canada has gone “all in” for investing vs. a bunch of countries where it has spent some money, but not fully committed, vs. a much smaller list by weight where we threw some bilateral money at it (potentially for political relations reasons — I’ll come back to this later when discussing diaspora levels) rather than true development engagement.
Here’s my fear with a simple coefficient of similarity using a basic index of recipients, with no triaging. If Canada gives $100M to China, $5M to India, and $1M to Haiti, and Denmark gives $1M to China, $90M to India, and $9M to Haiti, wouldn’t the coefficient look pretty positive since the two countries would both have the same recipient list? Yet the programs are extremely different in composition.
By a similar token that Swiss compensates for later, Canada has a very slow project approval engine compared to other donors. This temporal delay could mean for example that you shouldn’t compare Denmark 1965 to Canada 1965 but rather to Canada 1966 — Denmark might have be on the ground in ’65 but Canada might not have been disbursing until 1966. I think any recipient should be eliminated from the analysis of lists unless it has been a recipient for at least 2 years so that it would mean everyone was fully up and running for the comparison years.
I think there is some great deeper analyses to be done in that data, and despite my bias upfront, I’d love to torture the data some more. Generally, my goal would be to force the data lists into more homogenous categories to ensure that the measure of similarity is comparing lists of apples to lists of apples, and isn’t generating false coefficients that are being hidden by a laundry list of other fruit on the list. And, as a small foreshadowing to the next section, the triaging might also aid in extrapolating motives for aid patterns.
Having the most in common with the UK and the US in its early years as a donor, Canada then began to more closely parallel the like-minded group of donors, before again following a path where its aid allocation matched most closely the US and the UK. This preliminary analysis suggests that, rather than strike a maverick path of its own and allocate aid along a uniquely Canadian set of criteria, Canada has been a mimic over the years.
As mentioned above, many writers assume we’re more crass now and that we were more humanitarian previously, like the “like-minded” group. Except no evidence is ever presented to show that the “like-minded” groups were, in fact, humanitarian-minded other than their press releases and policy statements, nor that the Americans and Brits have actively been self-interested for other than policy statements. And this conclusion that Canada used to be similar to “like-minded” but are now similar to “US and Brits” is a HUGE marker for the next section. Remember that conclusion as I’ll come back to it.
After Swiss deals with concentration and similarities, pages 110-117 start to turn the attention towards attempting to detect motives for aid from aid disbursements. The basic premise is simple — if we give aid to more countries where we trade than where we don’t, perhaps trade is influencing our choice of aid recipients. I love the premise, and while it is notoriously difficult to track motives from spending (regardless of the entire discipline of political economy that I regularly find lacking), the approach is one that I think goes “just far enough, but not too far” in crunching the data.
As possible variables to determine what might drive aid, Swiss uses many of the same variables that CIDA’s internal analysis used back in the early 2000s. Tables upon tables of data were generated to help inform “country concentration” discussions. That’s not secret, it was all unclassified and often pulled from public sources. GDP per capita was a key factor, as it would be in any development policy discussion of “need” — everyone uses it. Some people substitute Purchasing Power Parity, trying to account for exchange rate differences but GDP per capita is standard development fare and a viable potential factor.
Distance between capital cities is the technical way of asking if countries give more to their neighbours and in their own backyards or if they have a truly “global” view of aid. For example, Australia in the early 2000s very clearly decided to concentrate on its backyard — Asia and Africa. They cut bilateral aid to most non-Asian countries; they reviewed the spending patterns of UN funds and programs and if they didn’t have at least 50% (as I recall) of their funding in Australian aid recipients (their own test of similarity), they cut all core funding to that fund and only gave project funding for countries on the Australian bilateral list; they replicated that hard-nosed approach to funding Australian NGOs, focusing on those whose geographic priorities aligned with the new aid list. With Foreign Affairs arguing constantly that Canada is both an “Americas” and a “Asian-Pacific” country, it’s a fair question if our aid program matches those claims.
Other obvious factors to include are trade; humanitarian need (although I would eliminate that factor, as per my list above — if you’re looking to see if self-interest influences development aid more than humanitarian principles, then including humanitarian assistance might mask the regular influence elsewhere); and total population in recipient countries (to account for the skewing by large countries like China, Brazil, India).
What may be truly innovative in approach to me though are the indicators included to capture good governance (the Polity IV score — it has always been difficult in the past to find a reliable and somewhat universal indicator other than sub-elements of the UNDP Human Development Index); intrastate conflict (an interesting element on its own, but perhaps a little weak as a potential proxy for security interests, could be adjusted with adding military deployments perhaps); and Total Recipient ODA volumes (as an potential indicator of similarity and/or mimicry).
I still have all the same concerns as early on — triaging the lists, establishing thresholds, eliminating humanitarian, etc. Or at least running the numbers multiple times on sub-datasets. But I also would love to see some other considerations.
In terms of comparisons with funding sources (country donors), I’d love to see a similar analysis that showed degree of similarity (like the first half of the paper) with multilateral organizations like UNDP, UNICEF, World Bank, and Regional Development Banks (perhaps we are following our multilateral masters) or analysis for various membership clubs. At the donor level, I’d like to see separate groupings for funders of UN Specialized Agencies (an assessed contribution that goes with UN membership), G7 members, Nordics, and major English-speaking members of DAC (US/Canada/UK/Ireland/Australia/NZ). On the recipient side, I would love a sub-dataset for Commonwealth, Francophonie, Small Island Developing States, HIPC, OAS, APEC, and the LLDCs. Maybe grouped coefficients for Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and maybe even a separate analysis for Central and Eastern Europe given that it started at DFAIT and moved over to CIDA because of the complete lack of infrastructure and capacity for DFAIT to manage projects rather than words and people. (As an aside, that’s not a slam against DFAIT, most departments with a heavy policy focus show the same schism when they try to manage project funding).
So, I’m in. Sure, I want “more More MORE!” when it comes to the sub-datasets, but that would be enough for Swiss to write a whole book (hmm, Swiss, if you’re not busy for the next 10 years, could you get on that please?), and way beyond the scope of this paper. I love the dataset that goes just far enough without torturing it beyond recognition, and I want more, but let’s see what he found.
Comparing Canada to the other donors reveals two interesting conclusions about the factors that contribute to Canadian provision of aid to a country. First, the only consistent factor over time appears to be a country’s level of economic development. The poorer a country, the more aid it will receive. This holds for both Canada and the majority of the donors in my sample. In this sense, Canada is following the pack and providing aid along the lines of helping those most in economic need. Likewise, Canada resembles other donors in terms of what appears not to matter: trade, democracy, disaster, and conflict — none of these factors are robustly associated with multiple donors’ aid allocation over time.
Excuse me for a moment while I take that paragraph, blow it up, and mail it to every academic, every NGO, the peer review secretariat at the OECD, and well, just about everyone I know who has argued about the “self-interested”, evil Canada that doesn’t do development for developmental or humanitarian reasons. I may even want to refer to it in EVERY OTHER SECTION I REVIEW, because Swiss just analyzed his way to a ferocious “booyah” for most of the literature in the area.
No EVIDENCE of those other factors influencing aid? Even when you account for temporal lags and weighting factors? The ONLY factor that shows a correlation with our aid policy is a developmental need? We didn’t skew it to our trade partners? We didn’t skew it to our political or geographic neighbours? And the evidence is testable, reviewable, open to challenge, and most importantly, understandable?
Now that’s the kind of analysis this public sector employee can embrace. Yeah, as I said above, I want to test that conclusion even further with smaller, more niggling datasets. I want to see if it holds if you throw in some other sub-groupings. But it’s pretty powerful at the macro level. Bomb-shell evidence and nicely done.
And yet, even I have three small doubts that some other factors may be hiding in the data, and I’m not sure they can be completely ruled out yet.
First, various influences may not be statistically significant enough to register in the dataset, but even I would not argue they are non-existent and never play a part. If trade influenced 1-2 countries only, I don’t know if it would trigger a high enough result on the macro index.
Second, taking a page from political economy circles, it isn’t always the overall spending that would show the influence but rather incremental spending. For example, if Canada had a new trade agreement with a South American country to whom we normally gave $10M a year in aid, and we boosted that in the years before or after by even $3M a year, that wouldn’t likely show up as a blip because our trade flows might not change much until 10 years after the trade deal. I’m not sure even reviewing incremental spending would capture that type of influence, but it worries me slightly that total aid flows to a country might mask micro-influences.
Third, there is a hidden variable that frequently has reared its head in country concentration discussions, which is a domestic political dimension. How many diaspora are there in Canada for a given recipient? Put differently, and somewhat bluntly, if Canada wants to cut aid to China, there is a heck of a lot of Chinese-Canadian ties (some of them well-represented in Parliament) who are going to complain long and loud about those cuts. So, while a given Minister or Prime Minister might want to concentrate, there is a political cost-benefit analysis to be done — is cutting a small amount of money to a country, perhaps an amount that is a rounding error on the overall aid budget, worth the flak that the PM is going to receive from the diaspora in the country? It’s not pretty, but it is an operational reality when you’re trying to build support for your aid policy. It is likely a micro-influence, and I think it would only potentially register in a triaged list for small programs (under $10M), but it IS a consideration at the political level.
Page 116 and page 117 are where Swiss loses me. After the huge “booyah” above, I was pumped reading the final conclusions. But he sticks with the same paradigm that is prevalent in the literature and while his data isn’t necessarily enough to kill the rest of the literature completely, I have a problem making it fit.
Here’s my issue based on the original paradigm, re-worded to fit my interpretation:
Canada used to be like the “like-minded group”;
The like-minded group is believed to be more humanitarian;
Canada is now like US and the UK;
The US and the UK are believed to be more self-interested.
ERGO –> Canada used to be more humanitarian and is now more self-interested
But the evidence shows that conclusion to be false. Canada’s motives have not changed — we didn’t become less humanitarian and more self-interested. Which means something in the premises of #1 to #4 must be wrong. Since Swiss proves that #1 and 3 are right, then #2 and/or #4 must be wrong.
At first blush, I want to shout another giant “booyah”. His analysis even proves it — “none of these factors are robustly associated with multiple donors’ aid allocation over time.”
In a perfect world, these two conclusions together should:
be delivered accompanied by a loud thundercrack that shakes the heavens;
cause a few academics and NGO heads to quietly resign, citing personal reasons;
send some journalists rushing to old-style telephone booths to file stories; and,
cause a few Canadian chests to swell that we’re doing it right.
I know none of that will happen, but it’s the academic equivalent of a stand-up triple in baseball.
Could it mean too that perhaps the differences have nothing to do with self-interest or humanitarian values (philosophy of approach) and are more likely simply a different way of doing aid (disbursement approach)? Or even just that we’ve got a different list of recipients, based solely on need and reflecting more of a division of labour?
I know, I know, that goes way beyond Swiss’ evidence, and I’m reaching past the point where I normally want analyses to go. But it strikes me that the article retreats to the supposed safety of the existing paradigm, after drastically weakening the foundations of that same paradigm. I’m looking forward to seeing if any of the other sections completely demolish the remaining supports.
In short, I loved the article (shhh, don’t tell Liam I said that). And I want more.
