Description
The foreign aid regime has long been a core component of the Liberal International Order (LIO), positioning Western states as benevolent donors to the Global South while embedding recipient states within global capitalist markets. Today, however, the regime has come under strain, not only due to external pressures accompanying the rise of China but also due to significant internal shifts and challenges. This article argues that the foreign aid regime, embodied by the OECD-Development Assistance Committee (DAC), is unravelling primarily from within. Once central to establishing and sustaining foreign aid as a collective Western project, the DAC now faces unprecedented threats to its coherence, credibility, and legitimacy. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of the ‘collective organic intellectual’, this paper examines the DAC’s historical role in maintaining hegemony within foreign aid and traces the internal dynamics that increasingly compromise its function. By situating the DAC’s evolution across three key periods—from the Cold War to the contemporary ‘Second Cold War’—this analysis reveals that the most profound threats to the DAC’s hegemonic role stem from shifts in member state priorities, increasing self-interest, and challenges to the ethical foundations of foreign aid, raising questions about the future of the DAC and the foreign aid regime within a fragmented and contested global order.
