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:

1. Canadian companies have mining interests in Peru;
2. Peru was chosen, but wasn’t a low-income country;
3. Sound bites talked about domestic interests;
4. Aid increased;
5. 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 5: Results, Risk, Rhetoric and Reality: The Need for Common Sense in Canada’s Development Assistance” by Ian Smillie. I like Smillie’s work, I like the way he writes and his take on things. I don’t always agree with the shortcuts he takes to explain things, but I do like reading his stuff.

Like others, Gilmore equates economic growth with development, and development with poverty reduction. That sequence is possible, and in some places perhaps even likely. However, the words and the concepts are not synonymous, and in too many poor countries the economy has grown on little more than the coattails of an extractive industry. Gross domestic product growth and averages often mask a reality in which real improvement to the lives of those at the bottom has simply not occurred, while in many cases the disparity between rich and poor has grown.

The BRICs that den Heyer referred to in Chapter 4 (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 4 – Power and policy) are the perfect example of this — overall per capita growth is high, but the resources are not distributed to all citizens even in the most ambitious view of trickle-down theory.

The answer to development is not one thing; it is many. The question is not whether the market is an alternative to aid, but whether aid can deliver on its part of the promise. The answer to that question seems not to be all that clear.

I’m curious if any of the other chapters will get into the numbers for measuring flows. I hope so, as there are lots of indications/place markers that would tie into a sophisticated numerical analysis.

So here is a second problem: Despite billions of dollars spent on development assistance, we seem not to have made much progress in reducing poverty. Where there has been progress — in places like China and other East Asian economies — it can be ascribed much less to aid and more to the phenomenon so beloved of aid critics like Gilmore and Moyo: the market. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that politicians attempting to make sense of their country’s aid budgets are demanding better and more evident results.

This is one of the short cuts that Smillie takes that frequently rubs me the wrong way. I don’t mean he’s wrong, but it does strike me as somewhat misleading. For example, there is an easy way to reconcile aid and market techniques — aid is about stopping social and economic backsliding, markets are about moving the economy forward (or at least growing it by attracting additional outside resources). Of course, there’s no proof — a huge problem in development writ large — but there are almost no countries where markets showed progress without a strong aid underpinning. I think the reality is somewhere in between — aid makes small or large differences in certain circumstances and not others; markets grow in some circumstances and not others, often having more to do with external context rather than internal strategies. If the economy is booming, every initiative works; if the economy is tanking, no initiative works. What’s more telling, and hard to measure is would there have been less benefit in booms or more disaster in busts without aid or the market initiatives?

If donors are serious about poverty reduction, one might think that a preponderance of aid would go to the poorest countries. Not so. In fact, only one-third of all ODA goes to the least developed countries and, if one takes Afghanistan out of that mix, the percentage drops to about one-quarter (OECD 2012).

Another short cut, and it is a popular one that the press and the Canadian public could get behind pretty easily. Popular, digestible, seems like common sense, and almost completely wrong. First, former PM Chretien had a very strong opinion about aid concentration and that opinion was not only strongly held, but also hard to refute as a strong aid premise — he would not sit around the table at a Commonwealth or La Francophonie and say “we will help you, but not you, you but not you”. We would help everyone. Not equally necessarily, but we would help all our “partners”. Which makes it very hard to “concentrate” on just the poorest. Second, what most of the public wouldn’t understand is absorptive capacity. People like to think you can drop any amount of money into a poor country and thus spend millions and millions, concentrating the most money. But those countries can’t do everything at once, they don’t have the local capacity, and unless you’re going to send development workers in like an invading army to “do it for them” (which would violate just about every principle of development), there are limits. When it’s a humanitarian crisis, sure, you can drop billions, but that’s not development. Third, development doesn’t stop at a border, although it frequently seems like it. Sometimes helping the poorest country might require helping the neighbouring country build its economy too so the region prospers. If you’re looking for a Canadian example, look at transfer payments between provinces — not all to the “poorest” province, but designed to raise the tides of all provinces. Are regional efforts effective? That’s a separate story, but it isn’t quite as simple a short cut to country concentration.

So before we get to the question of results in terms of the stated aim for development assistance — poverty reduction — we need to think about how much money is actually available for the effort. To do this, we should heavily discount or even remove:

ODA spent in pursuit of political, strategic, and security interests;

ODA spent in pursuit of commercial interests;

ODA spent on technical assistance;

ODA tied (directly or indirectly) to Canadian goods and services;

ODA spent on humanitarian assistance;

ODA spent on refugees during their first year in Canada;

the cost of administering the aid program, probably understated at $244 million in 2010–11 (CIDA 2013b); and

the cost of foreign student subsidies, estimated at $168 million in 2010–11 (CIDA 2013b).

It’s a great list. Clean, common sense for the common man. Except, well, I have to nitpick a little. Let’s look at “security” interests. Presumably, there is no argument that development cannot happen in a country that is being ripped apart by war. And there is also equally no argument that conflict has a nasty habit of not respecting borders. So, if Australia sees trouble brewing in those pesky island neighbours, presumably they would be right to consider conflict and war a destabilizing influence on the region that would / could / might / should affect their own country. In other words, they would have a strong national security interest in helping reduce such conflict. It might even induce them to pack off hundreds of aid workers, diplomats, and soldiers to the region to restore peace and contain the potential for sparks of war. Yet, does the motive dictate the classification as aid or non-aid or the result? Even in the individual psyche, we rarely do anything for a single reason, so is it right to say, “Well, your primary reason for doing x is your own interest, and therefore even if it leads to developmental results, it isn’t aid?” And if we treat it as a crime against development to have “other motives” (either primary or secondary), we do indeed have the mens rea of intent, but the actus reus may look a lot like development in another country. Aid, at its core, has at least two functions — to help the developing country and to help the global community of which it is a part. Even if all aid does is give everyone another trading partner in the end, there’s still a “commercial benefit” in the end.

Commercial interests are equally grey. Take radar satellite technology. I think, personally, that they represent one of the sectors in Canada that looks the most self-serving, supply-driven approaches on the planet. They come forward and say “Hey, we have this great technology for finding water, mapping geo trends, helping with urban / rural planning, environmental planning, etc.”. And they have projects ready to go, just write them a cheque. Sounds incredibly clear, it can’t be aid. Except it is no different than OxFam Canada coming forward and saying “Hey, we have this great idea for a project in Africa, and if you just write us a cheque, we can be up and running in no time.” One’s an NGO, so no “profit” motive, but is the “profit” the problem? Could we pay the profit portion out of another budget and pay the rest from aid? If we get a kick-ass, state of the art, environmental plan that knocks everything else out of the water, is the result that defines it as aid or the fact that the company developed the technology for other purposes? Because there are a lot of people eating food and using medicines that were initially produced for profit. Put more fairly, and maybe this ties (no pun intended) better with the tied aid, maybe it shouldn’t be a 0% or 100% choice, but rather a discounted amount.

I won’t spend any time debating technical assistance. A whole book could be written on not only what “is” TA but what the benefits look like, etc. Far too much to include here. I’ll settle for saying I would need a lot more argument to discount it 100%.

Tied aid is pretty complicated, and while we have lots of great statistics, I think most of them are meaningless. Take for example two trade-related projects (which by the way get classed as technical assistance, compared with identical projects in the social realm that get classed as simple capacity building), one that had a Canadian project manager so looked like 100% tied aid even though 90% was spent in-country on non-Canadians, and one that was run by a local organization in-country but used all Canadians for the expertise, so was 0% tied aid but 90% of the funds came back to Canada. The statistics and the systems are just not sophisticated to account for that kind of issue. Separately though, there are lots of good examples where the country wanted “Canadian expertise, Canadian goods” etc. — so Canada provides what it is asked for (knowing in some cases that the developing country is asking for Canadian so as to increase the likelihood we’ll fund it), but gets “dinged” because it was Canadian content. I don’t disagree that there’s an issue, but 0%/100% likely isn’t the solution either.

I have no real issue with discounting humanitarian assistance and refugee costs. There are some out there that make lovely convincing arguments for development content within both, but it’s a step too far for me.

Administration costs is a strange item, and defies the “common sense” argument. Let’s look at five examples of delivery mechanisms. Let’s say there’s a project for $10M in Vietnam, with admin costs of about $1M to manage and implement. For sake of argument, I’m going to hold it to 10% for all scenarios just so the numbers stay the same. Option 1 has CIDA design and deliver the project themselves. $1M for CIDA costs and the argument would be that’s not for the benefit of Vietnam so don’t count it. Option 2 would have a Canadian NGO do it with $50K in costs for CIDA and $950 for the NGO. Again, not spent in Vietnam, don’t count the $1M. Option 3 has a multilateral deliver it with HQ staff — say $10K for CIDA, $990K for UN org or international NGO. Don’t count the $990K or count it? Arguments either way (since it is now merged with the programming money). Option 4 has local NGO do it, with $50K for CIDA and $950K for NGO — local cost, local spent, so count $950K and leave out $50K. Or Option 5 with the government where $10K is in CIDA’s control, and the other $990K went to the Vietnamese government, but with no clear tracking since it was pooled funds.

Five options, same project, same costs, but the governance model for funding has five separate calculations for what the project cost. And the simple “common sense” approach would be relatively straightforward — you charge costs of delivering a project to the project, and developing projects are charged to the aid budget. Should it be 100%? Perhaps not. But I find little resonance with saying “we’ll count these costs here, but not these costs there”.

For the cost of foreign student subsidies, I would love to treat it the same as the refugee costs — it doesn’t “look like” development, therefore it shouldn’t be counted. Except CIDA used to do scholarships back in the day, with many of them in the Caribbean. We gave these Canada Scholarships to “deserving” students in developing countries, brought them to Canada, gave them a university education, and then they went home. A very strong “individual benefit”, not development. Except one of them became Prime Minister, and several others became Cabinet Ministers. It looks a lot like a long-term governance project that paid off huge dividends for relatively small  investments. And if they don’t go home, but stay, there’s always remittances flowing back too. Sooooo, I can count a micro-credit or small-business grants if they set up the business in-country, but if we give them educational subsidies, and they go back or stay here and start businesses that lead to additional resources in-country, we can’t count it? Again, the short-cut looks great, and the line has to be drawn somewhere, but I’m not convinced 0% is the right line.

Despite the herculean effort, CIDA still had a hard time explaining its results. The government’s report, Development for Results 2010–11, is almost exclusively about what CIDA did during the year: activities rather than results (CIDA 2011).

I need to digress for a moment here. I’ve done a lot of different jobs in government. Policy development, horizontal coordination, multilateral relations, multilateral programming, bilateral programming, some information work, regulations, finance, etc. And while I was better in some areas than others, and some I was quite good at, there’s a different area that I have shown somewhat unique strengths. Corporate planning. Performance measurement. Evaluation, risk management, reporting. I say that my strengths are a bit unique in the domain because I don’t act like the typical planner. Most corporate types embrace their inner planner and want to go to the nth degree of detail. All the bits and pieces that Smillie talks about — logic models, performance measurement strategies, data collection templates, performance indicators, evaluation plans, etc. And when it comes to indicators, most planners want more, more, more. I don’t. I usually am asking for less detail, shorter explanations, simpler logic chains. “We did x in order to get y and we got z results.”

Reading Smillie’s analysis of the various bureaucratic templates and tools, I’m struck by three things. First, a very inelegant “no sh**, Sherlock” reaction. Yep, everyone can tell you that the reporting burden is too high, including everyone that works there and everyone who has worked with them. That’s not news.

Second, based on a bunch of work I did when I was at CIDA, including the 2002 OECD DAC review of Canada’s aid program, I can tell you that not only is Canada really bad at explaining the x, y, z above (they even struggle with x and y at times, and never z), just about EVERYONE in development has similar problems. The ones who don’t are either heavily focused on humanitarian work (heck, even Rick Mercer can calculate the benefits of a bed net), taking short-cuts (such as using percentages to calculate the results of multilateral funding), or heavily focused on short-term outputs (one step past activities, but still shy of outcomes).

Third, now that I’m mostly out of the development world in my day job, I’ve come to realize that most government departments generally suck at results reporting. Activities can be explained, sure. Logic chain to the expected outcome? Maybe. Actual results at the outcome level? Extremely difficult on an annual basis.

Let’s look at a simple development project, maybe one that was giving out small micro-credit-style loans. Let’s assume one per month, normal calendar year. Great, so at the end of the year, they did 12 loans. That’s the activity. Of course, they know why they did it, it was to improve recipients’ standard of living, and let’s assume that it’s measured simply by income. So we have “12 loans to raise income” as the first two parts. But with what results? Suppose it takes 9 months to pay off the loan and be sustainable (wishful thinking). But, the person who got the loan on Jan 1 was successful by October; February person by November; and March person by December. Therefore 3 successes. But the April person is almost successful, as is the May person. June can see the light at the end of the tunnel, July is optimistic, etc. It may be that all 12 will be successful, but if you calculate results for that year in January of Year 2, the only successes you have are the three ones who got their loan first. Or, in other words, a project with 25% success in the first year. In year 2, that project would look amazing — 9 successes from the previous year and 3 from current would give 12 successes in year 2 — 100% success! Except perhaps the second half of the year was difficult and those who received loans after July will eventually default. The real success in year 2 was maybe only 50% — and the other 9 results were from previous funding, NOT the funding from that year.

So, this leaves the aid agency with a dilemma — what results do you report? Annually makes almost no sense, and lots of people will say, “no problem, we’ll capture it during an evaluation in five years that will negate the annual lag issue”. Except almost everyone active in development tends to think development projects often don’t show results until year 5 or 6 anyway — or longer if they are education projects. Short-term outputs, but long-term outcomes. The impact that Smillie started with, and the focus on outputs with which he ended.

But all those templates didn’t come from nowhere. They came from hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and thousands, of Canadian aid workers (inside and outside government) asking the same question — how the hell do we measure this? What tool can we use that will help us be able to report? We believe we’re making a difference, but how do we show it? So they invent a new tool. And another template. And systems to track metrics as well as the money.

It is the same motivation that drove donors to agree to the Millennium Development Goals — if we couldn’t measure progress and results on an individual basis, perhaps we could measure global collective performance (the ultimate outcomes!) and use logic chains to show how our projects contributed to that performance.

Again, I find myself liking Smillie’s prose, even agreeing with some of the general conclusions. But then a too-simple-by-half summary turns me off. I see the health of individual trees while Smillie is noting the forest is dying. It’s always a fun read, but I still want to move some of his lines around.

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 3: Revisiting the Ethical Foundations of Aid and Development Policy from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” by John D. Cameron.

The absorption of CIDA into DFATD and explicit subordination of aid policy to broader foreign policy suggests two possibilities for how we analyze aid and development policy. The first is to abandon any expectation that aid is connected to or inspired by moral concerns for the well-being of other people and to employ realist methodological perspectives that analyze aid purely as an instrument of foreign policy. […] The alternative […] is to re-examine the ethical basis for aid and to analyze aid in the context of a more theoretically consistent and coherent normative framework that draws attention to the broader range of government policies that affect developing countries.

I admit that I’m excited by the idea of putting aid ethics in a larger ethical framework, and while the first is an easy throwaway, the second argues for looking at policy coherence. I’m interested to see how deep he goes in defining coherence because there’s an assumption out in the literature, and particularly in many NGOs, that aid policy and foreign policy or more accurately trade policy are incoherent. They trumpet examples such as giving $40M in aid to a country while clawing back $25M in tariffs as obviously “incoherent”. Except that they haven’t first defined what they mean by incoherence, or which is the starting point and which is the ending point.

For example, if your opening “framework” was that you deal with all countries for trade on an equal playing field, and if they don’t support human rights, labour laws, environmental sustainability i.e. if they race to the bottom that unfairly “subsidizes” production by not incurring costs that more responsible producers incur, then that country pays tariffs (the above mentioned $25M), then you have a perfectly coherent trade policy. If you then say, “But wait, that’s a poor developing country that needs our help”, and the government turns around and gives them $40M in aid, including for human rights, labour, social development, education, governance, and the environment, it’s tantamount to giving them their $25M back and giving them an extra $15M. Still perfectly coherent trade policy — taxing the exploiters and pushing the country to raise its workplace regulations to match international standards. It even is perfectly coherent aid policy — helping those who need it, giving them money to help while still engaging them in trade which will pull them into the international community, laying the groundwork for long-term economic sustainability.

However, what is missing from the original complaint is “policy coherence for something” — you need an overriding policy that is the dominant one to resolve conflicts if/when conflicts arise. The Dutch and the OECD looked at this in the early 2000s and quickly found multiple levels/types of policy coherence — simple coherence where two policies conflicted (i.e. one said to do A, another said to do B), almost an administrative coherence; moderate coherence where two policies could work together for a common goal; or true coherence for a specific policy objective and everything that didn’t directly meet that objective was changed. This is what Cameron refers to as “policy coherence for development” and too often those last two phrases are left out, so I’m glad to see it so strongly highlighted.

What intrigues me too is that Cameron looks at two frameworks while studiously ignoring a third possibility — that while the humanistic portrayal says “poverty reduction”, there are many ways to meet that need, some of which are perhaps better delivered by Foreign Affairs and Trade than other forms. For example, if one of the priorities is economic development, and one of the sub-areas is private sector development, there are lots of micro-credit experts in development, but very few who know much about building coalitions of companies to advise governments what their negotiating strategy or positions should be at the WTO. That’s mainly Trade Commissioner territory. Put another way, there is another framework that says not just that there are “other policies” but one that says “other approaches are perfectly valid forms of poverty reduction, even approved as such by the OECD Development Assistance Committee”.

Ethical consistency and political responsibility suggest that scholars of aid should give equal consideration to positive and negative ethical duties. In practical methodological terms, this would require the expansion of our analytical frameworks beyond aid as an expression of positive duties to also include greater examination of the potential harms caused by both aid and non-aid aspects of development policy, in particular the ways in which other policies might undermine the impacts of aid.

While Cameron is quick to assume that we review the benefits of aid, and both the benefits and costs of non-aid, there are serious risks to the aid side too that are difficult to measure and evaluate, but no less concerning. Greater integration into the world economy opens those countries to shocks, building human rights institutions and strengthening rule of law helps stabilize aspects of governance but can also create new tensions that fragile governance systems are ill-equipped to manage. We do projects that are gender-sensitive, respect the environment, don’t displace Aboriginal communities, emphasize education and health, all with the latest tools. Except if the culture was not like that to begin with, there is a piece of it that must adapt or die. If that seems too esoteric, too remote, then let’s look at the number of projects that in conflict-torn regions provided mobile health services, complete with a vehicle so that the doctors and nurses could get to the injured. Sounds simple, right? Except that a week after the vehicle arrived, it was suddenly gone — and look, the military has a new troop carrier of the same size and shape, allowing them to attack farther afield. Not all development projects go according to plan, not all outcomes are foreseen. I wrote on Chapter 2 about the challenges of infrastructure projects (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 2 – Refashioning Humane internationalism) and the long-term unintended consequences. If you go farther back and look only at the “good intentions” of development projects, early projects that looked a lot like modern “Manifest Destiny” didn’t have very positive outcomes for Aboriginals. And all done with the best of intentions.

While the OECD/DAC emphasizes policy processes to enhance policy coherence for development, the Commitment to Development Index focuses explicitly on six non-aid policy areas (as well as aid itself) in its analysis of rich country development policies. Those six policy areas are trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology transfer (CGD 2013).

Having witnessed a number of the early discussions of the CDI, I am not as optimistic of the interpretation given to it. Most countries seemed to interpret it as “simple coherence” that eliminated externalities only, few were willing to go deep into the analysis. I love the idea of expanding to other areas, but I wish there was more “meat” to Cameron’s initial call to arms.

Take migration for example. The example given early is how Canada steals the medical professions from other countries, thus undermining their original health care system. It seems simple, seems obvious. So much so that many harp on it repeatedly and use it to beat the drums of injustice. Except there are three very big questions that any ethical framework would have to address, beyond those simplistic terms.

First, the UN Conventions on Human Rights (economic, social, political, civil) have mutually re-inforcing clauses that say labour mobility is a human right. A human right, full stop. Yet, the NGOs who advocate for strong human rights want foreign governments to limit a medical professional’s right to labour mobility because the origin country needs them. Some who are quite well-versed in labour mobility call that being held hostage; those more aggressive in their rhetoric call it slavery or at the very least indentured servitude. The ethical framework has to resolve that, or it cannot stand.

Second, there is a practical issue. How do you address the economic disconnect? There is a reason the doctors and nurses want to leave their home country. Not because they don’t like it, not because they hate their families, not because they don’t want to stay where they are — they leave because there aren’t enough paying jobs to sustain their families and they can make more money elsewhere. While the first part is purely on the “pull” factor of countries like Canada recruiting abroad, this is the internal push factor.

Eveline Herfkens used to tell a story of her first trip abroad as the Development Minister for the Netherlands. She went to Ghana and was going to renew a project that sent Dutch doctors to Ghana for sabbaticals basically to work and train new doctors in Ghana. When she announced to the Minister of Health the renewal, she asked why he didn’t seem happier. He said that sending a Dutch doctor was welcome but would cost her $200K. For the same money, he could pay maybe 4 doctors $50K more a year or even 10 doctors $20K more a year, and get 4-10 doctors instead of just one. Brilliant, she thought, so she changed the project, cancelled the Dutch doctors and agreed to fund the Ghanaian doctors. It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Except that the next day, in the Dutch papers, the headlines read, “Herfkens kills African babies”. Because the reality was that she wasn’t going to send the Dutch doctors anymore, and they had the support to go plus wanted to go, and they wouldn’t get the results that they had before. Maybe similar results, or maybe different, but not the same. Was the headline inherently racist in its assumptions? Of course, but hiding in the weeds is that the only way to get the Ghanaian doctors to stay is to pay them more. They want to stay, few want to leave a stable home if the country isn’t going to pot, and many want to stay even if it IS going downhill (maybe even more so). But the ethical framework has to figure out how to remove a strong economic incentive to move. Oh, and by the way? There are some who view it a lot like paying polluters not to pollute — you’re paying them to “do the right thing” and not leave their country. It’s a bit messy.

Third, and perhaps most important, you’re going to have a framework that decides (on some basis, maybe GDP?) what is “best” for the origin country. It sounds simple, at first blush, stay and save people. Except here’s the kicker. What’s the biggest challenge? Poverty. How do you fix that? An influx of capital. What do all those medical professionals do when they start working elsewhere? Send home remittances. Money from outside the country.

In fact, back in 2002-2003, African countries put on their collective website of the African Union articles about the same topic, how foreign countries were stealing their medical professions. What happened? Other countries told them to take them down and shut up. Because a couple of the countries had looked over at the Philippines, realized that they too had little to develop to “export” other than people, and started investing in medical training. So they too could send their newly trained citizens abroad and get the remittances coming back. There are numerous countries in the world where remittances outpace trade, development and several other types of flows in/from the countries. Some OECD countries have even proposed the remittances count as development assistance.

So, that ethical framework that says Canada can’t steal health professionals needs a broader context to resolve not only the “why” but how to measure the impact. And, more pointedly even, who decides — the individual who wants to exercise their mobility rights and earn money for their family; the origin country’s government that wants them to send money back, have factored future remittances into their development plans, and doesn’t have the money to pay them themselves; the host country that wants and needs their skills; or the NGO or academic who thinks it’s wrong?

As with my previous infrastructure examples, the ethical framework has to be able to deal with really complex messy issues, some with no clear answers. I’m not sure the call to arms in Chapter 3 gets us there, but it’s a start.