Part 2

During the 1960s foreign aid came of age. Its structures proliferated and professionalized, while the amount of aid money flowing rose steadily. The United Nations, previously handing out only technical assistance, moved into direct capital aid to development projects, by creating a Special Fund for development. The World Bank, soon after, created its own International Development Association. In 1965, the Special Fund and UN technical operations were amalgamated into the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). American aid operations were consolidated under John F. Kennedy into a powerful new United States Agency for International Development. Other major donors followed suit with new agencies and new funding.

At the same time, governments in the Global South increasingly linked aid and trade. The first UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in March 1964 signalled the change. Donor nations and the Global South, recognizing that aid alone was insufficient to meet Southern demands for economic growth, met in Geneva to adjust the terms of North-South trade. Aid was increasingly rebranded as official development assistance (ODA, a term first used in 1969), a name change that reflected a more holistic approach to growth that bound together technical and capital aid, trade and financial policy, and multilateral coordination. As the UN noted in launching its first “development decade” in 1969, “development concerns not only man’s material needs, but also the improvement of the social conditions of his life and his broad human aspirations. Development is not just economic growth, it is growth plus change.”1

This global shift had a profound impact in Canada. The tentative structures and ad hoc programming of the 1950s gave away to elaborate structures and strategic planning. The small and flimsy aid organisation within the Department of Trade and Commerce was replaced in 1961 by the External Aid Office, a creaky fiefdom that staggered along under the hidebound direction of diplomat Herb Moran. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau completed the transformation in 1968, when he established a free-standing office to handle aid operations, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), with a broader mandate and more independent management. CIDA put more cash into the country’s development mission and was more open to Canadian civil society input. Yet the new agency still reported to Canada’s foreign minister through an interdepartmental committee that kept a wary eye on aid’s potential contribution to meeting Canadian foreign policy and trade objectives.

So, then, what precisely did this transformation mean for Canadian aid? Was aid still servant to trade? Was it effective in advancing diplomatic and economic goals? Could civil society actors and individual policy makers really make a difference? And what of interactions between donor and recipient?

Aid, the four case studies in this section agree, was never purely humanitarian in motive, but was always an instrument of the Canadian state. However, their authors differ, sometimes quite dramatically, over aid’s ability to meet objectives other than development and humanitarian goals, and over who influences aid policy. On the one hand, in his history of aid to Pakistan, Ryan Touhey found that Canadian largesse bought neither influence nor market access, only trouble. Pakistan was no helpless petitioner for Canadian help, but instead pursued its own political aims. The new CIDA structures did little to change this reality. On the other hand, for Stefano Tijerina, aid was a blunt but effective instrument of the promotional state, which successfully mobilized grants and gifts in pursuit of new markets in the Global South. Canada acted more as junior bully than Samaritan, bolstering a pro-Western regime in Colombia in ways that assisted US goals for the region.

Asa McKercher and Kevin Brushett also see aid as subservient to the Canadian state’s economic and political objectives. Yet both offer a more sophisticated explanation for the dynamics of aid policy making. McKercher explores the heightened political debate around aid relations with Latin America that followed the Chilean coup in 1973, which ushered Canadian civil society actors into policy-making circles. They successfully challenged the autonomy of state actors, forcing them to revise their expectations and objectives. Using a similar archival approach, Brushett explores the career of aid administrator Lewis Perinbam, arguing that one individual can moderate and even subvert the state’s capacity to use aid for its own ends. Both cases centre challenges to government aid policy from Canadian civil society, rather than from recipient governments. More professionalization in aid bureaucracies and more money for aid opened the doors for understanding aid as a function of triangular relationships between donor, recipient, and civil society.

Note

1 See http://research.un.org/en/docs/dev/1960-1970.