Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
aid. While there is a general consensus that emergency or disaster aid
is necessary in an unstable and interconnected world, development aid
has long been criticized as a neocolonial tool that increases the depend-
ency of poorer nations on the West for three main reasons.
First, development assistance has often been 'tied' to economic or
political objectives that serve the interests of donor countries. The prac-
tice of conditionality, whereby aid or loans come with a set of specific
actions like trade liberalization, has often been employed by multilateral
agencies like the World Bank and IMF (Cho, 1995). Secondly, scholars,
agencies and governments increasingly question the effectiveness of the
'aid business' in tackling the fundamental causes of poverty and inequal-
ity. Enduring problems include a lack of transparency, corruption, the
ineffective channelling of resources through tied aid, the misappropria-
tion of aid for military spending, and fragmentation of the aid effort
across small bureaucratic agencies worldwide. Increasingly, develop-
ment experts have argued that official aid agencies are not set up to work
with poor communities and they argue that a grassroots approach to
administering aid is urgently overdue (Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 2007).
Thirdly, the geography of ODA is constantly changing according to
prevailing global economic and geo-political agendas. While the dawn of
the twenty-first century brought a new lease of life for international aid,
driven by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and pledges by
some European governments to double aid efforts in the poorest nations
of the world, the 2008 global financial crisis has changed the playing field
once again. In a recent move by the UK government to realign aid spend-
ing with national security interests, the UK will focus upon efforts to
improve world security in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, Somalia
and Yemen, while other nations like Burundi, Cambodia, Liberia and Iraq
will see their aid budgets severely reduced. The conditional and insecure
nature of international aid has led many neoliberal proponents to argue
that 'freer' trade, rather than aid, has greater potential to eradicate pov-
erty and reduce global inequalities in the twenty-first century.
151
Global Trade, Aid and Development:
the Key Debates
In the last half century, the world has witnessed a significant shift in
attitudes towards international trade and economic development by
moving towards a reduction in tariffs and restrictions on trade
