The chief harbinger of the domestic politics turn in the determinants of aid literature was the emergence of convincing critiques of the prevailing Manichean selfish-selfless framework. The development specialist38 Roger Riddell (1987, 65–73), in his book Foreign Aid Reconsidered, was
the first author to make a sustained argument that the dichotomy at the heart the determinants of aid literature was both false and misleading, and did not take account the complexities of the real world. David Lumsdaine extended Riddell’s critique in his 1993 book Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime 1949-1989. Lumsdaine embedded Riddell’s critique explicitly in the International Relations literature by examining and challenging the underlying theoretical assumptions that the selfish-selfless framework was based on. Lumsdaine (1993, 13) rejects the notion that “international politics is a realm apart, utterly distinct from human character and domestic society” and offers a five-point critique for why the “system- level determination of self-interest” does not always hold. (While important precursors to the comparative aid policy scholarship, I have not recorded Riddell and Lumsdaine’s contributions in Table 2.B as they do not use the same cross-country case study methodology as the scholars that are included).
For Lumsdaine (1993, 62), “the character of international politics is not wholly determined in advance by an unvarying human nature or international system but reflects moral choices which become embodied in the regular patterns of international affairs.” To support this argument, Lumsdaine examines the aid giving practices of states over a fifty-year period. His investigation reveals that “foreign aid cannot be explained on the basis of economic and politics interests of the donor countries alone, and any satisfactory explanation must give a central place to the influence of humanitarian and egalitarian convictions upon aid donors” (Lumsdaine 1993, 29). Lumsdaine’s account of change in the foreign aid regime gave further credence to the idea that accounting for second image factors is an indispensable component for understanding aid policy change.
The progress achieved by Riddell and Lumsdaine was complemented by the work of a group of scholars who challenged the veracity of the dominant third image selfish-selfless framework using middle power theory. A volume edited by Olav Stokke (1989c)—Western middle powers and global poverty: the determinants of the aid policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—sought to discover why the aid policies of these similar states were
38Foreign Aid reconsidered was written while Riddell was a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute
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typically distinct from other donors. The study concluded that the major determinants of “[t]he aid policies of the five countries reflect, for most dimensions, the dominant socio-political values of the domestic environments” (Stokke 1989b, 309). Yet, in a reflection of how scholars studying aid were increasingly comfortable integrating third and second image perspectives to explain aid’s complexities, Stokke explained how aid policy is “moulded in a setting in which traditions, norms and interests of both the domestic and the external environment influence the outcome,” and that, “such determinants vary from one system to another” (Stokke 1989a, 9). A companion volume to Stokke’s study edited by Pratt (1990b) sought to examine why these five middle powers took a particular interest in development issues, found that a these states prioritised development issues relative to other western donors because such issues were congruent with the prevailing political culture in these middle powers (Pratt 1990a, 15). These twin studies of Western middle powers typified the emerging comparative aid policy scholarship. Scholars active in this space were resolved to ‘look inside’ the black box of the state to discover why the aid policies of similar states differed.
Three especially important studies were published in 1995,a making it a key year in the comparative aid policy literature. Steven Hook’s (1995) National Interest and Foreign Aid, Marijke Breuning’s (1995) International Studies Quarterly article (a condensed version of her doctoral dissertation (Breuning 1992)) and Alain Noël and Jean-Philippe Thérien’s (1995) contribution to International Organization together encapsulate the ‘first wave’ approach to aid scholarship. Most evident was the shared frustration with the constrictive and ineffective (for their purposes, at least) ‘selfish-selfless’ framework. Breuning (1995, 236), for example, finds that the “donor interest versus recipient need dichotomy is too simplistic”. Noël and Thérien, for their part, point out that “[i]nternational relations scholars obviously remain a long way from a consensus on the motivations underlying development assistance.” Even for Hook, whose study incorporates statistical analysis based directly on McKinley and Little’s model and, of the three studies, gives by far the most credence to third image factors, acknowledges that “a comprehensive understanding of state behavior requires an additional assessment of the role of unit-level characteristics [which Hook explicitly calls ‘domestic factors’] that bridge the gap between systemic context and observable behavior” (Hook 1995, 159).
Hook, Breuning, and Noël and Thérien each bring new theoretical concepts to bear on the study of aid. Steven Hook, beginning with his doctoral work (1993), through his first book (1995) and beyond (Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998; Hook 2008a; Hook and Rumsey 2016), has used regime theory (Krasner 1982) to examine how the foreign aid regime functions to both reflect and constrain donor state’s aid policy choices. (I discuss the literature on the international aid
Literature Review
Page41 regime in more detail in chapter three, subsection 3.3.3). Breuning’s work also commenced with her doctoral studies (1992). She continues to deploy role theory to better understand aid policy choices (Bruening 2013), most notably by extending Holsti’s (1970) notion of national role conceptions (Breuning 1995, 1998). (I also discuss the literature on national identity and aid in more detail in chapter 3, subsection 3.3.2). Noël and Thérien’s 1995 article links the concepts introduced by Hook and Breuning to investigate how “welfare principles institutionalized at the domestic level shape the participation of developed countries in the international aid regime” (Noël and Thérien 1995, 523).