net worth, by one report, estimates are that the Giving Pledge reflects a total giving commitment of at least US $600 billion.18
While private philanthropists have great latitude in how they spend their money, countries have carefully negotiated a set of rules and processes for official development assistance. For example, countries track relevant funds against sustainability markers (“Rio markers” as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. The Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (“OECD”) evaluates all official development aid based on its efforts to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals.19 It also evaluates how much additional private funding gets leveraged from the spending of official development aid, finding in 2018 that 77 percent of all leveraged private funding went to middle income countries, and not to those most in need. 20
Part of this also involves making sure funds are both programmed and spent effectively, a concern in many countries. In 2014, a report by the ONE Campaign estimated that corruption deprived countries’ economies of 1 trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000).21 To give perspective, this sum would be enough to provide about 165 million vaccines or educate 10 million children per year.22
Experiences with foreign aid: a personal account by John Seitz
The unanticipated consequences of the use of technology (discussed in more detail in the Technology Chapter 9) can be seen in a situation of which I (Seitz) have some personal knowledge. When I was in Iran in the late 1950s with the US foreign aid program, one of our projects was to modernize the police force of the monarch, the Shah of Iran. We gave the national police new communications equipment so that police messages could be sent throughout the country quickly and efficiently. The United States gave this kind of assistance to the Shah to bolster his regime and help him to maintain public order in Iran while development programs were being initiated. All fine and good, except for the fact that the Shah used his efficient police – and especially his secret police, which the US Central Intelligence Agency helped train – not just to catch criminals and those who were trying to violently overthrow his government, but to suppress all opponents of his regime. His secret police, SAVAK, soon earned a worldwide reputation for being very efficient – and ruthless. Such ruthlessness, which often involved torturing suspected opponents of the Shah, was one of the reasons why the Shah became very unpopular in Iran and was eventually overthrown in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, a person who had deep anti‐American feelings.
For a fuller discussion of the unanticipated consequences of American aid to the Shah, see John L. Seitz, “The Failure of US Technical Assistance in Public Administration: The Iranian Case,” in Eric Otenyo and Nancy Lind (eds), Comparative Public Administration: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), pp. 321–34.
Part of the way donor governments address concerns about effectiveness of funding is to cherry pick what they spend and where they spend it, and as a result some of the neediest causes remain unfunded. For a more global approach, donor governments channel money to development institutions with relatively strong policies governing how the money gets spent. Multilateral development banks maintain specific policies and procedures that not only require careful management and accounting of funding, but also which help avoid unacceptable social and environmental harms. What is interesting is that these institutions originally started out after World War II by lending money in support of the twentieth‐century development approach, but the results were so disastrous for communities and for the environment that they had to change their policies to constrain lending towards sustainability, refusing to fund projects with unacceptable social and environmental harms. These social and environmental safeguards have now become the norm for international finance, both public and private.
The amount of foreign aid that wealthy nations have contributed in relation to the donors’ wealth fell rather dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. There was a slight upturn at the end of the century, but the aid was still far below the United Nations’ target. From 2000–2014, official development assistance increased 66 percent; however, bilateral aid dropped considerably during this same time period. While the United States gives the largest amount of aid, in relation to its wealth as measured as a percentage of gross national income, it is near the bottom of aid donors.
Plate 1.1 Street children in Nepal
Source: Ab Abercrombie.
Culture and Development
There are about 15,000 nations on our planet and about 200 nation‐states. The nation‐states are the political entities, what are commonly referred to as countries. They are often made up of several or many individual nations, or different cultures. The nation is a group of people that share a common history, a common ancestry, and usually a common language and a common religion. They often have common traditions, common ways of doing certain things and of interacting with each other and toward outsiders. Because of these similar features that make them different from other peoples, each nation’s people see the world and their place in it differently than others, approach problems differently, and have arrived at different solutions to situations humans face. The unique language of the culture is used to pass the common history and traditions down to the young. The United Nations now estimates that of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, by the end of this century about 90 percent of them will be endangered.23 The term “endangered language” means that the group that speaks the language – which is often unwritten – is becoming so small that there is a real possibility the group will die out or become absorbed by the larger dominant culture around it and will disappear forever.
For most of the twentieth century, “development” was associated with certain economic policies and associated consumption culture, particularly in the United States. The United States has been one of the largest producer of goods and services and its culture is closely associated with material wealth. Because of the worldwide popularity of US movies, music, fast food, and clothes, and of the English language, it is common to read that the American culture is replacing local cultures in many countries. But some recent studies indicate that only some rather superficial aspects of the American culture are being adopted, such as Coca‐Cola and Big Macs, while more important values are not.
Social integration is proceeding at such a rapid pace that one can say that there is the beginning of a world culture. Much of this culture is exported from the United States, but it is also truly international as foods, music, dances, and fashions come from various countries. Many European cultures place a higher value on leisure and government social services than did the dominant twentieth‐century culture in the United States, which emphasized earning higher income so people could acquire more material objects. The degree to which people seem to be happy to trade income for more leisure to enjoy life varies across the globe, and, maybe not surprisingly, those who do may have a higher “satisfaction with their lives” than those who prioritize primarily material gain.24
What will be lost if a culture dies out? Cultures represent the amazing variety of human life on Earth that reflect the different ways members of one species – the human species
