Why Aid Fails: Rethinking Donor-Recipient Dynamics

• In Event: Promoting Peace? The Past, Present, and Future of International Interventions

Abstract

Scholarly research in top American political science and economics journals typically frames its engagement with foreign aid around the aim of enhancing effectiveness for recipients. This focus, however, overlooks the systemic foundations of aid interventions. As a result, such literature often labels donors without overt geopolitical or commercial interests as politically neutral. Yet this neutrality can conceal advantages in non-commercial and non-geopolitical spheres, such as providing ideological cover for potentially exploitative projects elsewhere. In the last two decades, diplomatic and global historians have revolutionized how they study foreign aid and have revealed that Global North donors use strategies reminiscent of imperial relations, such as the promotion of narratives of progress. This article reviews key historical works, focusing on the racialized logics that influenced post-World War II foreign aid and the roles of multilateral institutions in its distribution. It suggests that by the late 1970s, a shift towards narratives of benevolence and meritocracy that highlight a story of progress obscured the racial and imperial histories of foreign aid. The article argues that monitoring and evaluation mechanisms allowed donors to sustain structural and ideological inequalities, mirroring the role of racial science in the imperial era without overtly discussing race. By connecting across disciplinary analyses, this article challenges dominant narratives about foreign aid and multilateral organizations in U.S. political science and economics.

Author

• Desh Girod, Georgetown University