New Donors and Old Practices: Does the Rise of China Challenge Aid Effectiveness?

The rise of China in international development has raised much concern, with major questions regarding the future of a ‘Paris Consensus’ in the face of major emerging donors being hesitant about joining fora dominated by OECD countries, and about a ‘Beijing Consensus’ overtaking a ‘post-Washington Consensus’. The fierce and popular critique of aid as articulated by Dambisa Moyo adds an additional and critical spark to these debates. This paper contextualizes the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ approaches to aid, to enhance the understanding of differences, similarities, and potentials for collaboration. A main hypothesis is that the differences across old approaches (say, US vs UK) are as large as differences between Chinese and UK approaches. Moreover, while the debate has stressed that new donors tend to remain outside the consensus established by donors grouped within the DAC, the implementation of Paris principles by DAC donors themselves has remained limited, and it is important to understand the national politics and institutional constraints within donor countries, old and new. The emergence of new donors has partly led and partly coincided with a re-politicisation of aid, and for the study of aid effectiveness assessing whether aid worked it is critical to understand these dynamics. For this purpose, the paper makes three arguments.