Description
Speaking specifically to the 'leave no-one behind' UN proposal, and drawing on fresh quantitative and qualitative research, this paper argues that development aid as an act of solidarity, economic justice or redistribution, which has always been undermined by donor interest and colonialism, has now been eroded by decades of securitisation, the rise in populism and a move to the right in many donor countries. Within this context, aid has been reconfigured in two ways. Firstly, it is used as an additional fund to protect national borders in a limited way. This differs from the securitisation of development programmes, which sought to bring about liberal transition through development interventions and is influenced by the nationalist turn in politics. Secondly, the ODA budget has been politicised in order to win votes against a backdrop of increasingly populist politics. In both the UK and the US, for example, cutting aid budgets and using aid to further foreign policy priorities aligns with the nationalistic sentiment evident in both the ‘America first’ and Brexit discourses. Thus, current concepts of aid, and securitisation as a framework to understand aid, are no longer sufficient. This paper sets out a new conceptual framework for understanding development policy and aid allocation that takes account of this new landscape. This new framework – the ‘nationalisation’ of foreign aid - is based upon an empirical investigation of the UK as core OECD donor, supplemented with examples and insights from additional OECD donor practice. We systematically evaluate four dimensions of international development intervention: policy, institutional context, aid allocation and impact, to build a new framework for understanding aid and development practice, which goes beyond securitisation.
