Yash Tandon
2011-12-13, Issue 563
The ‘aid industry’ fooled many into believing it was a necessary tool for development. But following the Busan forum on aid effectiveness, its time to rethink a world without it, writes Yash Tandon.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) was held in Busan, Korea, 29 November – 1 December 2011. It is an end of a long journey that began with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE) in 2005. It was a misguided journey right from the beginning. Its authors were probably well-intentioned, but they legitimised and built on a monstrous global aid industry that is largely Eurocentric and self-serving, and that has nursed illusions for over half a century. HLF4 was launched with much fanfare; but it ended with the recognition – finally – by the architects of the PDAE that they were on a wrong course. The Outcome Document talks of not ‘aid effectiveness’ but of ‘development cooperation’, which is what it should have been from the start; and it sets out the schedule for the ‘phasing out’ of the aid structures by June 2012. This paper is part of a larger story of how the ‘aid industry’ has managed to fool the rest of us for so long. It gives the main highlights of Busan’s final burial of this self-reproducing aid industry. The ‘industry’ will no doubt try and find other reasons to survive. Nonetheless, those not taken in by the industry must now rethink of a world without ‘aid’.[1]