International development assistance is big business. Total global aid flows, from North to South, are probably over $150 billion annually, a third of which goes to Africa. Maintaining levels of aid after the financial crisis was an important part of the discussion of leaders of the G8 and G20. China and India are rapidly entering the field of aid providers, following the emergence of Japan, South Korea, and others, and simultaneous to a re-emergence of US’s interest in aid under President’s Bush administration. And international private philanthropies have become significant, with the resources of the Gates Foundation for example outstripping the annual budget of major official donors like the World Health Organization, and donations by private medical companies adding significantly to overall aid flows.

The number of organizations can be “baffling”, according to the DAC, the OECD body that brings together dispersed aid statistics, and has worked hard towards coordination of donors. According to their count, there are no less than 200 bilateral and multilateral organizations channelling official development assistance – which includes the “official” agents alone – all with their own strategies, principles and reporting procedures. Many forms of large public-private partnerships – including in the health sector – have added to the complexity particularly in the last 20 years or so. In some developing countries, 40 donors are in operation, financing hundreds of projects, and it has been well established that this occupies far too large a part of recipient countries’ administrations. Dutch aid, for example, despite efforts to concentrate efforts can be found in no less than 125 countries. Donors like the US – and China – have multiple agencies within the government responsible for various aid activities.

In the last decade, following a period of perceived aid fatigue, interest in development aid has seen a big surge. Large disasters like the Gujarat earthquake, the Asian Tsunami and the earthquake in China mobilized governments and large constituencies of civil society, including of diaspora communities. The global Jubilee 2000 campaign advocated successfully for debt relief to the poorest and heavily indebted countries, and the Make Poverty History Campaign of 2005 advocated for substantially increased aid commitments. These raised awareness and interest in the aid industry, well beyond the earlier popular advocacy for relief like during the Sahel emergency of the late 1970s. Anti-globalization and other protests frequently bring World Bank and IMF in the global public eye. Global civil society and protests against international institutions, in 2007 for example contributing to the resignation of the World Bank president, have become an inextricable part of globalization.

Alongside renewed concerns to alleviate deprivation in the South, global security concerns also have given renewed attention to global aid efforts. In the US, after 9/11 development was elevated after a decade of relative neglect, and became seen as one of the pillars of national security alongside defence and diplomacy, with “humanity” regarded as a “weapon of war”. In other countries, security concerns have been less overt in influencing aid programmes, but the war in Iraq did become important for the UK aid programme for example, while Afghanistan became an important recipient of many countries’ aid. Nowadays most policy papers do regard security as one of the key questions for development policy, typically alongside climate change and poverty reduction.

So aid has, by and large, continued to expand as a means of international engagement, humanitarian and otherwise. It has become the interest of an increasing number of players, of countries themselves still recipients of aid, and of individuals like former Presidents who probably feel they could have done more when in office. Development aid has proven very malleable (Riddell 2007), as for example the rapidly evolving approaches (de Haan 2009), and the marriage of convenience with security concerns as noted above have shown. At the same time, and this is the main subject of this paper, views on aid are incredibly diverse, more so than any other form of public policy, with the exception perhaps of the debates on health sector reform in the US. This paper will analyze and try to contextualize these different points of view, which I label as the supporters, the opponents, the technocrats, the relativists, and the accountants. These differences are partly the result of a lack of conceptualization of what development policy is, but also very much the result of different underlying paradigms which have little to do with aid but will continue to divide the debate. In the conclusion of this paper I will explore the need for a better informed debate about aid, and what I clumsily think of as the triple unaccountability of aid. While originally written outside a Dutch context, the current paper aims to provide a contribution to the Dutch debate, where levels and modalities of aid are now heavily contested, and the debate is as polarised as elsewhere – unnecessarily so in my view.

A final introductory word about terminology. The main subject of my discussion is what I prefer to call the “aid industry” (de Haan 2009): the institutions and organisations, that have been gradually professionalised, and whose main business it is to deliver aid, the official development assistance as defined by the DAC’s OECD and the increasing number of Non Governmental Organisations. The objective of aid has been variously defined – from, say, filling financing gaps to empowerment – making assessments whether “aid works” very difficult. Aid is thus not synonymous with “development” or “poverty reduction” – the latter are much broader processes, with equally diverse definitions, which aid is meant to support, but does not necessarily succeed in doing, nor is it a necessary component.