One year. Three states. Three unanticipated and virtually simultaneous decisions to enact major aid policy change. Furthermore, these three traditional Western donors made choices about the trajectory of their aid policy that were not only at odds with expectations, given the politics and historical trends in each country, but also diverged from one another. Motivated by this puzzle, this thesis responds to the following question:
Why do states change the trajectory of their aid policy?
For the purposes of this study, I consider a state’s aid policy to be the distinct subset of its foreign policy that is concerned with questions about why, how, where and on what to expend its
6 After dropping below the 0.7% threshold in 2013 and 2014, Dutch aid spending returned to 0.75% in 2015, before
dropping under 0.7% again in 2016. The brief return to 0.7% is an aberration that is accounted for largely by the fact that domestic spending on supporting refugees can be counted as ODA under current DAC rules. Dutch
contributions under this component increased dramatically in 2015. So, while technically Dutch aid spending once again exceeded the 0.7% threshold, the actual volume of spending available for what can broadly be categorised as ‘development purposes’ has been drastically reduced.
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Official Development Assistance (ODA) contributions. While I acknowledge that ODA is not a perfect measure, it remains the best readily-available proxy for a (DAC-member) state’s ‘aid’ budget7. For reasons of simplicity, I use the term ‘aid’ as a proxy for ODA throughout this thesis.
Furthermore, I consider ‘aid’ to be synonymous with the terms ‘foreign aid’, ‘development cooperation’, ‘international development, ‘development aid’ and ‘development assistance’ (Lightfoot and Szent-Iványi 2015, 11). Although I acknowledge that each of these terms has subtly different meanings or intimations, these distinctions are not important enough to the aims of this study to persuade me to deviate from the clear preference in the determinants of aid literature to use the term ‘foreign aid’8. That said, in the empirical chapters of the thesis, the
language I use tends to reflect the particular terminology favoured in each jurisdiction. In my experience, ‘foreign aid’ is the term favoured in Australia, ‘international development’ is most regularly used in the UK, while ‘development cooperation’ is preferred in the Netherlands. While on the subject of terminology, I include definitions for terms I use regularly, or that have contested meanings, in the Glossary. I indicate a term that is included in the Glossary by rendering it in bold typeface the first time it appears in each chapter (including in this Introduction).
It is important at this early stage, as I undertake ‘boundary work’ to convey how I approached the thesis question, to acknowledge that my decision to specifically defining aid as an element of a states’ foreign policy is potentially controversial. This is because equating aid as a component (or tool or instrument) of foreign policy has taken on normative connotations. Supporters of aid often object to aid being classified as a ‘tool of foreign policy’ because this suggests accepting the premise of the ‘foreign policy approach’ originally advocated by Morgenthau (1962)—that aid should be deployed to secure national interests. To be clear, my equating aid as a tool of foreign policy is a purely technical stance, not a normative one9. Aid
policy is foreign policy precisely because it constitutes an action of a state “directed in whole or part outside of the boundaries of the state” (Gyngell and Wesley 2007, 19).
7 ODA is precisely defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development
Assistance Committee (DAC) to enable comparison of ODA flows across member states. However, for the
immediate purposes of this paper, ODA can be considered as the voluntary transfer of resources from one state to another for the purposes of promoting development. This approach preserves compatibility with a variety of literatures and scholars who employ a variety of different terms with essentially the same meaning.
8 As I highlight l later in this chapter, and detail further in chapter two, I consider this thesis to a contribution to the
qualitative comparative aid policy literature (see Table 2.B). The five most recent key studies of this literature use the term ‘foreign aid’. Four of these use the term in the title of the book (Van Belle, Rioux, and Potter 2004; Lancaster 2007a; van der Veen 2011; Lundsgaarde 2013).
Introduction
Page5 Conceptualising aid policy as a component element of a state’s foreign policy provides a means to interrogate a shortcoming of the International Relations literature: its limited ability to explain why states choose to reorient their foreign policy (C. F. Hermann 1990). Even the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), which focuses on decisionmaking processes, tells us “little about the sources and conditions that give rise to significant alteration to state foreign policy” (Alden and Aran 2017, 125). In light of this, the cases introduced in the opening vignettes are of “special interest” to scholars of foreign policy because they are each examples of “[c]hanges that mark a reversal or, at least, a profound redirection of a country’s foreign policy” (C. F. Hermann 1990, 4). Furthermore, the fact these cases involve redirecting the same type of foreign policy heightens the likelihood of advancing theoretical understanding about how change proceeds. “While it might be impossible to formulate a viable theory that would purport to explain all types of foreign policy,” argues Jervis (1976, 18), “there is good reason to think that theoretical progress would be easier to achieve if the ambition was limited to explaining certain types of foreign policy.” In short, as the title of the thesis conveys, my ‘paying attention to aid’, is a means of engaging with the broader problem of explaining foreign policy change.
This is not to deny that there is not a growing need to pay attention to aid in its own right. Foreign aid has rapidly become an important feature of international relations, despite only emerging as a distinct element of foreign policy relatively recently (Picard and Groelsema 2008, 7; Hook 1995, xi, 19; Firth 2005, 273; Lancaster 2007a, 5). It is instructive that Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands each spend considerably more on aid than they do on diplomacy10.
Moreover, global aid spending is increasing. Over the last two decades, the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—historically considered the representative ‘club’ of traditional donors—have expanded their expenditure on official development assistance (ODA) by 134% in real terms, from US61.32 billion in 1997 to US143.33 billion in 201611. The proportion of Gross National
Income (GNI) that DAC members devote to aid has also expanded by 52%, from 0.21% of GNI in 1997 to 0.32% in 2016, while the volume of aid provided by non-DAC members has also been rising dramatically. Quite simply, as van der Veen (2011, 13) has argued, “[t]he sheer volume of aid makes development assistance a topic of considerable importance…” In summary, in both theoretical and empirical terms, there is a pressing need for aid policy to be studied as “a sui generis tool of contemporary foreign policy” (Hook 1995, xiii; see also Potter 1980).
10 For example, just prior to its demise, AusAID’s budget was roughly four times larger than that of the Department
of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
11 Constant 2015 prices. Only a very minor component of this dramatic expansion is accounted for by the expansion
of DAC member countries since 1997 (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia). ODA from these new DAC-member states constituted only 0.86% of total DAC ODA in 2016.
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One final piece of ‘boundary work’ is required before moving on to situate my study within the International Relations literature. This thesis is limited to examining what Gyngell and Wesley (2007, Chapter 2) identify as the ‘strategic level’ of foreign policy. Strategic level foreign policy, according to Gyngell and Wesley (2007, 22), “is made as a series of commitments and attitudes on the relations between a society and the outside world, usually expounded in general policy statements and ministerial speeches”. The strategic level domain of foreign policymaking features the active involvement of senior political actors who consider ‘big picture’ questions. I consider the ‘strategic level’ of aid policy to predominantly entail questions regarding the strategy, size, structure, and shape of a given state’s aid program. As such, aid policy decisionmaking at the strategic level involves actors with the authority to act in the name of the state (R. C. Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 2002, 59) answering four questions: why do we give aid? (strategy); how much aid will we give? (size); how will we organise our aid (structure) and how and where will we spend our aid? (shape). These aspects of strategic-level aid policy decisionmaking can be summarised as the ‘four S’s’.
While I engage with each of the four S’s during this thesis, one way I have limited the scope of this project in my research design is by focussing primarily on the question of size. I deliberately framed how I set up the puzzle at the outset of this Introduction in terms of aid spending changes. Yet those familiar with these aid policy changes will be aware that the spending changes announced in 2013 in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands were all accompanied by significant changes in other strategic dimensions. In Australia, cuts to aid were followed almost immediate by the decision to integrate Australia’s aid agency, AusAID, into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), thereby ending four decades of autonomous existence. The abandonment of the 0.7% target in the Netherlands was also accompanied by machinery of government changes. Moreover, each of the states in question conducted serious rationalisation exercises in the post-GFC period where they dramatically reduced the number of partner countries supported by their respective aid programs.
While not ignoring non-spending strategic level changes, I focus on aid spending for five reasons. First, the size of the aid budget the aspect of aid policy which generates the most media and public interest. Second, a state’s level of aid spending is accepted widely accepted proxy for how important a government considers aid to be (even though the success of its policy is clearly dependent on many other factors than aid volume, not least aid quality) (Hook and Rumsey 2016, 61). Third, the 0.7% target clearly still exerts a powerful normative hold on the actions of states, as my accounts of aid policy change demonstrate. Fourth, for the three reasons just
Introduction
Page7 provided, the size of the aid budget is generally the strategic aid policy issue political actors care most about. And fifth, defining change in the other dimensions of strategic aid policy is considerably more difficult. In summary, I made the assessment that a focus on aid spending was likely to provide the most explanatory purchase within the complex and difficult terrain of aid policy change.