Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 63

Indian Politics & Policy
and between 1973 and 1994, Arab aid
accounted for 13.5 percent of global
ODA (Walz and Ramachandran 2011).
Arab aid tends to flow to other Arab
and Muslim countries, but in recent
years to sub-Saharan Africa too.
The fourth subgroup of non-
DAC donors referred to above tends
to call their aid development assistance
or cooperation, and to focus on infrastructure,
particularly China, and particularly
to Africa. The main southern
donors tend to be regional powers—
China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.
Although aid from this group does not
impose policy conditions, the majority
of their aid is tied to the use of donorcountry
goods and services, contractors
or oil imports or packaged with commercial
deals and foreign direct investment
in an era when DAC aid is moving
to untied aid. Aid from this group
of countries is much less transparent as
regards data and disaggregation. Non-
DAC donor ODA in 2015 (excluding
India and China) was $17.55 bn, of
which $12 bn was from Saudi Arabia
and UAE compared to DAC aid of $131
bn that year. 1
The evolution of the international
aid regime in the past quarter
century can be summarized as follows.
Following a decline in the 1980s,
the era of Third World debt, aid flows
began rising again in the 1990s. The
traditional donors pledged to reform
the aid architecture, creating the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in
the Paris High-level Forum, 2005, followed
by the Accra Agenda for Action
in 2008. This was supposed to usher in
a revised architecture that prioritized
commitments to improve (recipient)
ownership, alignment, harmonization,
results, and mutual accountability. This
is now the basis of the OECD-DAC approach
to ODA. However, the Paris Forum
was attended by many new donors
(notably, not India, but India signed on
in 2006). However, there has been not
much progress in implementing all the
commitments made in the Paris Declaration
and Accra Agenda, even by DAC
donors. Since the Fourth High-level
Forum on Aid Effectiveness of November
2011 in Busan, South Korea, DAC
donors have been trying to extend their
lending norms to new donors but with
diverse results to date.
These developments have led to
the construction of the so-called Southern
model (De Renzio and Seifert 2014)
which does not impose DAC economic
criteria, philosophies, and conditionalities.
However, on a closer look, the
Southern model collapses into a diversity
of donors and practices. Comparatively
speaking, Chinese assistance is
much larger than India’s and its motivations
have shifted from ideological
to mutual economic interests, resource
access, and energy security (Gu et al.
2016). Non-DAC aid on the whole tends
to be geopolitically motivated somewhat
like Western aid was at an early
stage during the Cold War; perhaps it
will evolve as it matures as Western aid
did toward the current OECD-DAC approach
referred to in the last paragraph,
less nakedly geopolitical and more embedded
in development economics, but
that remains to be seen.
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