Development Assistance

Development assistance, (or synonyms such as technical assistance, international aid, overseas aid, foreign aid, development aid, or development cooperation) is aid given by bilateral and multilateral agencies to support the socioeconomic and governance development of developing countries. It is provided by governments through their bilateral aid agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), or through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, regional development banks, or through international development nongovernmental organizations. Development assistance focuses on poverty alleviation and governance as opposed to emergency relief or humanitarian aid, which aims at alleviating suffering following crises such as war or natural disasters.

Official development assistance has three main characteristics: (1) it is undertaken by government bilateral and multilateral organizations; (2) promotion of socioeconomic development and governance is the main objective; and (3) it has favorable terms, including donations and concessional loans, which have low interest rates on a longer repayment period including a grace period for repayment. Development assistance, as a flow of resources between developed and developing countries, differs from remittances—financial transfers sent home by foreign workers—or foreign direct investments made by multinational corporations. Most recently, some have included in the definition a security-related spending component, which is debated by several nongovernmental organizations, which argue that any military expenses, for example, cannot be accounted as development assistance.

Evolution

Development assistance emerged in the post-World War II, Cold War period. Development assistance began with a “modernist” paradigm involving the transmission of technical knowledge and technology in large infrastructure projects and in “universal” programs, such as programs in public health, most often funded and led by governmental and multilateral agencies. The focus of development assistance over the decades shifted from mainly large physical capital- and technology-intensive infrastructure to human education, population control, and after the 1980s, to policy reforms in the form of the structural adjustment plans, and decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s. Overall, although large infrastructure projects have remained central in development assistance, there has been an increased recognition of the importance of smaller scale, local capacity-building projects led or managed jointly by governments and nongovernmental organizations. Different forms of partnerships, in the form of collaborations, cross-sectoral partnerships, and cooperation have emerged.

The domain of international assistance changed in the 1990s due to several factors. The first one concerns the emergence of national and international NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) also labeled “civil society” or “third sector organizations” or associations. This has been referred to as “the rise of global civil society.” The second factor has dealt with the emergence of new conceptions of “development” and “poverty,” especially under the influence of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.

Sen's definition of development goes beyond the economics-based definition of poverty, which often tends to misrepresent the level of well-being of an individual or of a community. Sen argued that the most important factor to human beings does not concern income or consumption per se, but rather the capacity to realize their potential as individuals and groups and to achieve what they truly value. Sen views the removal of structural “un-freedoms,” or obstacles to human beings to achieving what they truly value, as a central element of poverty alleviation strategies and as a way to achieve individual and collective development. This new conception of development has been translated into measures of development including, among others, the Human Development Index.

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