The Aid Triangle & Partnership

Mac MacLachlan, School of Psychology & Centre for Global Health, Trinity College Dublin

Mac MacLachlan

• “.. The numbers of poor people in whose name development is justified are greater than they were when it was invented, and in many cases their poverty stems directly from the havoc it has wreaked on their lives. Under these circumstances, is the concept any longer useful?” Black (2002: 10)

• Calls for a re-think of how international aid is done

Mac MacLachlan

    

        

     

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good

by William Easterly

Mac MacLachlan

Historical development of aid

• In the 1960s many believed that aid could launch nation-states on a trajectory of development.

• African leaders frequently saw aid as due recompense for the injustices of colonialism and as a balancing of budgets by loans and gifts from the ‘mother countries’ (Fanon, 1965)

Mac MacLachlan

“Aid industry”– “the creation of structures to facilitate the provision of aid by the rich developed donor countries to the poor developing countries” (Arnold, 2005:160)

Mac MacLachlan

The paternalism and authoritarianism of the donors, and their demand for compliance with their own agendas, progressively broke the African spirit enlivened by the promise of autonomy that independence had implicitly given. (Arnold, 2005)

Mac MacLachlan

Critical to improving international development

• Move away from equating development only with economic growth

• Health and poverty need to be tackled together

• Expose and address the human dynamics of aid.

Mac MacLachlan

The Aid Triangle

• Illustrates how the aid system incorporates power relationships, and therefore relationships of dominance

• Explores how such dominance can be both a cause and a consequence of injustice

• Explains how the experience of injustice is both a challenge and a stimulus to personal, community and national identity– and how such identities underlie the human potential that

international aid should seek to enrich

Mac MacLachlan

Book argues that:• Understanding how the three dynamics -

dominance, justice and identity – interact, and shape the relationships of aid, is a first step to improving the processes and hopefully the effectiveness of aid and development.

Mac MacLachlan

Mac MacLachlan

So, what about research in global health?

Mac MacLachlan

• As a concept, capacity development is linked to empowerment and social justice and a lack of capacity is often rooted in inequity and unequal power relationships (Morgan, 1999).

• Capacity, therefore, is multi-level, ranging from worker capability to the capacity of their workplace to enable and promote it. (McWha, 2010).

Mac MacLachlan

Where would you start?

• Stewardship – ‘the gift’…• Governance – & ethics of • Paris Declaration

– Ownership– Alignment– Harmonisation– Effectiveness

• Positioning of ‘aid research’ in Irish universities.

Mac MacLachlan

What is Dominance?

• When the interests of some prevail over those of others

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Dominance

• Northern Universities, Southern Universities– Ranking/Physical infrastructure/ Human

Resources/Funding/Publishing Outlets

• Emancipatory Research?• Who sets the research agenda?

– How can academic research ‘competition’ be more collective cooperation?

Mac MacLachlan

Justice

“Few things kill an individual’s motivation faster than the feeling that someone else is getting a better deal. Organizational justice principles state that in addition to being fair, the people who make decisions must be perceived as fair” (Latham, 2007:95)

Mac MacLachlan

• In-Justice

• Southern Universities are the ‘natural’ home of such research:– Content, Context, Process

Mac MacLachlan

Mac MacLachlan

Mac MacLachlan

Identity

• Undermining capacity - as students go north to study - self-belief, point of reference

• (e.g in Global Health

• Hopkins???..... Irish Universities?)

Mac MacLachlan

Aid’s Impact on Identity

Mac MacLachlan

Mac MacLachlan

In Conclusion

• Where aid systems reinforce dominance and injustice, and deprive people of a dignified identity, they can never be considered a means of ‘development’, and they must be challenged, continually and progressively.

• How can the content, process and context of global health research be directed towards empowerment of researchers in low income countries?

Mac MacLachlan

Mac MacLachlan