Aid Conditionality

There are only two families in the world as my grandmother used to say: the haves and the have nots. – Sancho Panza, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes (as quoted in Human Development Report, UNDP, 2005)

The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats…[It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today…. [Globalization’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide…. Regions countries and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it. (CIA, Global Trends 2015, 2000).

Ante el establecimiento del inacabado nuevo orden mundial, la cooperación internacional al desarrollo se ha transformado radicalmente. Un ejemplo de ello es que la condicionalidad política de la cooperación, entendida como un instrumento de persuasión ejercido por el donante (como las sanciones a la ayuda internacional), cuyo objetivo es que el receptor se comporte como lo estipule el primero, ha adoptado las reformas estructurales, así como la promoción de la democracia, los derechos humanos y el buen gobierno como sus principales ejes temáticos. Esta investigación mediante consideraciones teóricas, históricas, jurídicas y prácticas, analiza el papel de la condicionalidad política de la cooperación, a través del estudio de su evolución histórica, sus objetivos, su eficacia, los efectos generados tras su instrumentación, así como las razones que explican la incapacidad de las sanciones a la ayuda para constituirse como una estrategia viable de desarrollo.En este trabajo se concluye que la condicionalidad ha servido a tres propósitos: a) como una medida de presión (no siempre coercitiva) para que los países del Sur instauren las reformas económicas solicitadas por el Norte; b) para promover la democracia y los derechos humanos, si bien en aras de fomentar las condiciones de vida de los ciudadanos del Sur, también para consolidar al principal objetivo actual de la agenda internacional: el sistema político-ideológico neoliberal, que en principio requiere de la práctica de ambos valores para su aplicación; y c) para practicar discrecionalmente este recurso de poder, a fin de mantener líneas de presión y coerción por parte de algunos donantes hacia algunos países del Sur, sin que el impulso al desarrollo ocupe el sitio que en principio le debería corresponder.

Previous studies have found that the democratizing effect of conditional aid is temporally contingent: the collapse of the Soviet Union as an alternative source of aid enhanced the effectiveness of Western aid conditionality on the adoption of democratic reforms in Africa during the post-Cold War period. Does conditionality still work with the rise of China as a major donor in Africa since the early-2000s? Building from earlier work on aid conditionality and the credible commitment problem in donor-recipient relationships, this article argues that the increased availability of Chinese aid would encourage African recipients to resist pressure from Western donors to improve democratic governance. In the meantime, traditional donors may also feel compelled to compete with the new donors, reducing their credibility in enforcing the conditions. Consequently, the positive relationship between Western aid and democracy in the African recipients would dissipate as the amount of Chinese aid increases. To empirically examine this argument, this article leverages the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000 as the temporal dividing point and new measures of China's development assistance to Africa based on expert opinions and media reports. The results show that the democratizing effects of the OECD's development aid in Sub-Sahara Africa has indeed diminished in this century. Furthermore, results from a synthetic control analysis suggest that major recipients of Chinese economic assistance have registered smaller improvement in political freedom than other comparable countries in the post-FOCAC period. These findings support the thesis that aid conditionality works only during a period when recipient countries do not have other alternative sources of aid, allowing donors to more credibly commit to enforce aid conditionality. The findings also suggest that the propitious conditions for democracy-promoting aid generated by the end of the Cold War may have been weakened by new geoeconomic realities.

La ayuda programática tiene como propósito principal apoyar el financiamiento de
políticas públicas del país socio, ya sea a nivel general o sectorial, a efecto de que los
recursos aportados refuercen las capacidades nacionales, en aras de incentivar mejoras
en cuanto a las condiciones de vida de la población beneficiaria. Este esquema de
cooperación requiere de un marco de compromisos recíprocos entre los actores
participantes, en un plano de responsabilidad compartida, transparencia y rendición de
cuentas mutua. En este sentido, la condicionalidad de la ayuda programática, entendida
como un recurso de gestión de la ayuda acordado previamente por las partes en
cuestión, dedicada a identificar y promover compromisos comunes a favor del
combate a la pobreza, el respeto a los derechos humanos y la rendición de cuentas,
conforma un elemento fundamental del cual depende en buena medida la eficacia de las
acciones a llevarse a cabo en el seno de estas actividades de cooperación. Ya que la
condicionalidad es un elemento inherente de la ayuda, es necesario atender a
determinados preceptos y procedimientos en torno a su instrumentación, en aras de
promover que esta actividad atienda sus objetivos con miras a hacer de la ayuda un
instrumento más eficaz de desarrollo, tal y como lo señala explícitamente el Plan de
Acción de Accra. Con ese objeto, el presente documento, con base en las
disposiciones que en la materia señala el Plan Director de la Cooperación Española y
Accra, tiene el propósito de proponer directrices y estrategias prácticas para la puesta
en marcha de este dinámico recurso en el marco de la ayuda programática de España, a
la luz de los estudios y consideraciones más representativas sobre el tema, como del
análisis de buenas prácticas que en este sentido han puesto en marcha otros donantes
de cooperación al desarrollo.

The relationship between development aid and recipients' 'good behaviour' (human rights, democracy, and good governance) has been frequently examined, in a belief that giving more aid to countries with better performance in these areas can motivate their improvement. Most researchers agree that traditional, Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors reward recipients' 'good behaviour' at least to some extent; however, the 'new', non-DAC donors have so far been portrayed as largely unconcerned with these issues. In this paper, I examine the evidence underlying such claims, by investigating whether human rights, democracy, and good governance play any role in 'new' donors' aid allocation. I find that similar to DAC donors, many non-DAC donors pay heed to recipients' democracy, human-rights or good-governance records at some point in their aid decision-making process. These results suggest that the fears raised regarding the nature of 'new' aid might be unfounded and rather point to the emergence of stronger global norms vis-à-vis the importance of human rights, good governance, and democracy to development.

This book contributes an analysis of UK-based non-governmental organisations engaged in transnational lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) activism, within a broader recognition of the complexities that British colonial legacies perpetuate in contemporary international relations. From this analysis, the book suggests that greater engagement with intersectional and decolonial approaches to transnational activism would allow for a more transformative solidarity that challenges the broader impacts of coloniality on LGBT people’s lives globally. Case studies are used to explore UK actors’ participation in the complexities of contemporary transnational LGBT activism, including activist responses to developments in Brunei between 2014 and 2019, and the use of LGBT aid conditionality by Western governments. Activist engagements with legacies of British colonialism are also explored, including a focus on ‘sodomy laws’ and the Commonwealth, as well as the challenges faced by LGBT people seeking asylum in the UK.

Available at: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030453763

At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients' willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and the internal affairs of sovereign states, yet are widely used as a means to advance human rights. But are they morally justifiable?Cecile Fabre's Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality provides the first sustained response to that question. For millennia, philosophers have explored the ethics of war, but rarely the ethics of economic carrots and sticks. Yet the issues raised could hardly be more urgent. On what grounds can we justify sanctions, in light of the harms they inflict on civilians? If, as some argue, there is a human right to basic assistance, should donors be allowed to condition the provision of aid on recipients' willingness to do their bidding?Drawing on human rights theories, theories of justifiable harm, and examples such as IMF lending practices and international sanctions on Russia and North Korea, Fabre offers a defense of economic statecraft in some of its guises. An empirically attuned work of philosophy, Economic Statecraft lays out a normative framework for an important tool of diplomacy.