This book addresses an important issue—namely, why governments give aid—and offers a comparison of five countries since 1945: the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark. Each country occupies its own chapter, with systematic comparison being assisted by a common set of headings relating to the main domestic sources of influence: ideas, institutions, interests, and government organization. Two opening chapters set the stage and offer a brief history of aid's purposes. A rather short concluding chapter sums up the findings. No other book has the same agenda. Carol Lancaster's analysis benefits greatly from her position as an “insider” for 13 years on and off in the U.S. government, working on aid issues, and from the opportunity to interview around a hundred aid officials and expert commentators in the five countries during 2002–3.
The main argument is that domestic political influences make a difference. The text shows how, and the extent to which, each of the four different influences has mattered in the countries under discussion. It finds, unsurprisingly, that there is considerable variance across the countries in terms of how far competing and coinciding developmental, diplomatic, commercial, and other purposes have shaped aid policy. A finding common to all is that the donor's purposes have evolved toward greater prominence of the developmental purpose: The norm that rich countries should assist poor countries because they need help has become well established. Supply-side political constituencies have made this possible. These include, in particular, the nongovernmental organizations and, in Germany, the Stiftungen (well-funded political foundations), which are embedded in the political debate over aid among the political parties.
There is much in the book that will already be familiar to seasoned observers of the politics of aid, including discussions of the way Japan's aid policy has centered on managing its relations with the United States, and the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on U.S. aid policy. The material on Denmark and France will be much less familiar, at least to English-language readers. More striking, however, than Lancaster's claim that the drivers of aid policy have evolved beyond the Cold War origins in diplomatic realism is her account of how a combination of domestic political influences and international developments impacting on those influences has produced differences among the countries and led to changes over time. To this end, she explores the impact of factors, including worldviews or principled beliefs, and public opinion, that for the most part are portrayed as passive and permissive, rather than as a determinant of aid's purposes. A particularly interesting finding from Denmark is that the aid agency's (DANIDA) situation inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has given it a measure of importance and protection against other government departments that it might have lacked had it been more independent. We will have to wait and see if that has any lessons for the United States, where the recent reduction in the independence of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by the Department of State is nothing if not controversial. In countries like Germany, the proclivity of the electoral system to produce coalition governments has allowed smaller parties to gain greater weight for their “niche issues,” of which aid for developmental purposes has been a particular beneficiary.
Some of the international influences Lancaster identifies are specific to certain countries, for example, U.S. pressure on other countries to increase their share of the aid burden. Other international influences are more general, including the way the United Nations agencies have expanded and given encouragement to aid's developmental purposes. Lancaster further argues that because aid continues to have a mixture of purposes, it would be unfortunate if aid's performance is evaluated in terms of its developmental effectiveness alone. This is a valid comment, as aid's purposes now include a variety of global public goods, ranging from furthering democracy to conflict reduction in zones of political instability—all of which enjoy a more universal legitimacy than, say, fighting communism, promoting national trade and economic advantages (e.g., Japan) or spreading the nation's culture (e.g., France).
It is interesting, however, that democracy assistance and the use of foreign aid to advance the cause of human rights around the world do not feature prominently in the book, despite the fact the USAID has recently taken the lead in trying to develop ways of evaluating democracy and governance aid specifically. (See Maragaret J. Searles, “Evaluating the Impact and Effectiveness of USAID's Democracy and Governance Programmes,” in Peter Burnell, ed., Evaluating Democracy Support: Methods and Experiences, 2007.) This initiative came too late for the period covered by the book, as did the recent reforms to USAID's institutional relationship to the Department of State. Nonetheless, the chapter on the United States does illuminate the prehistory of these developments.
Inevitably there will be quibbles with some features. An even more theoretically ambitious study would have tried to link the main argument more closely to the theoretical literature on global public goods, which some of the development aid literature has pioneered since the late 1990s. Also, more should have been made of how much of their aid the donors choose to give over to the United Nations and other multilateral aid agencies and their choice of which particular organizations to support, for understanding the mixture of allocations can tell us a good deal about their purposes. To illustrate, more discussion of the George W. Bush administration's preference for bilateral over United Nations channels for spending the government's significantly increased commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS in developing countries could have been illuminating, especially given that it attracted much criticism abroad. Indeed, there are many multilateral aid organizations whose official mandate is defined exclusively in terms of developmental or humanitarian objectives. This means that the greater the share that goes to those organisations, the stronger is the suggestion that diplomatic or commercial purposes are not the most important to the donor. However, that reasoning is far less accurate in respect to the aid that member states channel through the European Union, although that donor hardly qualifies as a true multilateral anyway. Denmark is the one country where Lancaster does make much of the support given to UN organizations, which appears to be Denmark's way of elevating its place and image in the world over and beyond the confines of its small and relatively insignificant size.
Lancaster's claim that by the end of the Carter presidency developmental purposes “played the key role in decisions on the use of aid, in both diplomatically and developmentally important countries” (pp. 79–80) is debatable. More persuasive reasoning should have been offered, not least because we learn later that only around half of the total U.S. bilateral aid has been used for development and associated purposes (p. 215) and the other half “primarily for ‘nondevelopment purposes’ much of it tied to diplomatic purposes of various kinds” (p. 222). At times, USAID has been held accountable for aid failures in programmes driven by diplomatic purposes (p. 106).
Foreign Aid is innovative and helps to fill a notable gap in the literature. And it offers important judgments that should be of considerable interest to political analysts of aid. Analysts who come from an international studies background and need to be advised of the domestic political influences on this branch of foreign policy, and analysts who approach public policy more from a fascination with domestic politics, where attention to aid's purposes has tended to lose out to more high-profile policy areas within foreign affairs, can learn much from this book.
