International Development Cooperation Today

Over the past 60 years high-income countries have invested over 4000 billion euros in development aid. With varying degrees of success, these investments in low-income countries contributed to tackling structural problems such as access to water, health care, and education. Today, however, international development cooperation is no longer restricted to helping by giving. Instead, it is rather about opportunities, mutual interests, risk taking, and an inclusive societal approach. With the arrival of major new actors such as China, India, and Brazil, and the manifestation of private companies and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, development aid is being eclipsed by new forms of international cooperation, increasingly accompanied by investments, trade, and give-and-take exchanges. The agenda for sustainable development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 and to be realised by 2030, is a case in point of new influential frameworks that usher in a global rather than a traditional North-South perspective. This book reviews 60 years of international development aid and its relevant actors, outlining today’s challenges and opportunities. Richly illustrated with case studies and examples, International Development Cooperation Today maps successes and failures and synthesizes visions and discussions from all over the world. By pointing out the radical shift from the traditional North-South perspective to a global paradigm, this book is essential reading for all practitioners, academics, and donors involved in development aid.

Healthcare Diplomacy

This chapter presents a historical summary of international development aid in developing Africa as a form of diplomacy. Most of these developmental projects started in the 1960s after independence and have been used as a tool for diplomacy. Healthcare for example has been a major tool for diplomacy by the United States of American (USA) and now China (PRC). During this era, the USA was the leader of soft power diplomacy and PRC was still a poor country trying to survive by making new friends in Africa. China's engagement in African health projects has differed from aid provided by traditional Western donors. The PRC builds on its own prior experiences of building its health system as a developing country and in the manner in which it places special emphasis on the issue of the national sovereignty of recipient countries.

Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood: The NGOization of Palestine

In this article, we examine the shifting roles played by non-state actors in governing areas of limited statehood. In particular, we focus on the emergence of voluntary grassroots organizations in Palestine and describe how regimes of international development aid transformed these organizations into professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that created new forms of colonial control. Based on in-depth interviews with 145 NGO members and key stakeholders and a historical analysis of limited statehood in Palestine, we found that social relations became disembedded from the local context and re-embedded in new relations with international donor organizations resulting in a depoliticized public sphere. NGOization of the economy also resulted in new forms of exclusion and inclusion as well as contestations between a new class of urban middle-class professionals working in NGOs and the older generation of activists who were involved in grassroots organizations. Our findings have implications for business and human rights and governance in areas of limited statehood, in particular how private actors such as NGOs are able to exercise power in the economy.

Global Aid in the Water Sector: A Descriptive Analysis of International Development Effectiveness

This study analyzes the intent and effectiveness of international development aid through a content/trend analysis of over 42,000 aid projects in the water supply and sanitation sector. The water sector is a vital and understudied component of international development that is rife with internal contradictions. On the one hand, access to water is rapidly increasing cross-nationally, but over 700 million still lack improved access to water. On the other hand, renewable freshwater resources per capita are rapidly decreasing, and annual freshwater withdrawals are steadily increasing. These concurrent issues lead to water stress and decreased freshwater sustainability, which in turn affects global political, ecological, and health issues. To address these issues, national governments and multinational aid agencies have been lending to the water supply and sanitation sector since 1950. This study assesses the trends in international aid over the past 65 years for their intent and effectiveness in solving global water and development issues. The results have implications for the development effectiveness of nations’ and organizations’ aid and calls for social scientists to investigate well-being and environmental impacts simultaneously in all sectors of development.

Same-sex lives between the language of international LGBT rights, international aid, and anti-homosexuality

This article considers how international development aid is used in engaging with sexuality rights in Africa. It considers both the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights as aid conditionality in international aid relations and responses to these from African political leaders. The central issue identified is that political leaders for and against these rights have marginalized and ignored voices of the sexually diverse people in their engagements in African settings. Here, a problem emerges that people’s own claims for rights are subsumed within the broader agendas set by politicians at international and national levels. This article analyzes these relations and their outcomes for activists and civil society groups in diverse African settings by considering the language of LGBT rights used by international political actors and the ways in which African political leaders develop their own language on the issue.

History and Paradigm Shift: NGOs in International Development Aid

As Chinese NGOs are trying to go abroad under the Belt and Road Initiative, understanding the existing niche, discourse, and paradigm of the mainstream transnational NGOs in current international development aid system is crucial for Chinese NGOs to adapt and develop their own identity on value and norms. Based on key researchers’ observations, historical facts and statistics, this research examines the mainstream NGOs’ evolution in organization, action and discourse embedded in the macro-history of transnational NGOs and transformation of the international development aid system; it sums up the transformation around three macroscopic relations to understand and evaluate the action paradigm and discourse of the contemporary mainstream NGOs in transnational development, namely, around “Transnational NGO-State” relations a change from the private sphere to the public sphere, around “North-South” relations a shift from one-way aid to equal cooperation, and on “NGO-Society” relations an evolvement from voluntarism to professionalism. In the end the article points out the difference between Chinese NGOs and those of the developed countries in terms of the origin, timing, goal and discourse and specifies five basic questions China must face in its identity building.