Aid: The Drama, the Fiction, and Does it Work?

Over the last twenty years, development aid has continued to expand as a means of international engagement. It has aroused the interest of an increasing number of players, of countries that are themselves still recipients of aid, like India, and of individuals like former Presidents. Development aid has proven to be very malleable, as the rapidly evolving approaches towards aid, and the marriage of convenience with security concerns have shown. At the same time, and this is the main subject of this paper, the views on aid are exceptionally diverse. This paper analyses and contextualizes these different points of view, which have been labelled as the supporters, the opponents, the technocrats, the relativists, and the accountants. These differences are partly the result of a lack of conceptualization of what development policy is, but also very much the result of different underlying paradigms, which have little to do with aid but will continue to divide the debate. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for a better-informed debate about aid, and redressing a ‘triple unaccountability of aid’.