How Would You Reform US Foreign Aid?

by Michael Bear · 2009-10-09 12:26:00 UTC
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On August 31st, President Obama signed a Presidential Study Directive (PSD) authorizing a whole-of-government review of US development policy. Recently, the PSD team has sent out two questions to various NGO-folk, requesting feedback to help inform the process.

The two questions are:

1. What is the vision / agenda for US development policy for the next 10-15 years? If the agenda of the last decade was increasing resources for social programs, what for the next decade:

2. Where should the USG invest its resources? What is the US niche -- alternative visions? Where can the US be catalytic, have the highest impact? Acknowledging that the US is one player amongst many and cannot solve the world's problems alone, what is the discrete role for the US government? How do we leverage US leadership?

A "whole-of-government approach" seems to imply -- if nothing else -- that the recent trend to align US development policy more closely with broader strategic interests will only continue. And I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Development policy is certainly no island, entire of itself. Whether we like it or not, closer coordination with State and the Department of Defense is probably inevitable. Especially as the current review is being co-chaired by National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Chairman of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.

(Such coordination is actually something of the holy grail of the foreign aid debate, going all the way back to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. This took on new urgency after September 11th, leading to the 2006 launch of the F-Process -- President Bush's efforts to bring USAID undermore direct control of the State Department.)

Of course, expecting any government to be motivated by humanitarian or idealistic concerns alone seems to me at best willfully naive.

All aid is political, whether we like to admit this or not, insofar as it affects the calculation of various actors on the ground, be they recipients, national governments, or insurgents.

Which brings us to the wonderful irony of it all, that one of the great strengths and weaknesses of NGOs is to insist on a neutrality -- or better an ideal of neutrality -- in which almost no one else believes.

[Photo from the US Army's photostream on flickr]

Michael Bear
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