research
New Donors and Old Practices: Does the Rise of China Challenge Aid Effectiveness?
- Publication date
- 19 September 2011
- Publisher
- 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.