12

CIDA and Aid to Africa in the 1990s: A Crisis of Confidence

David Black

There exists now such a degree of cynicism and despair about CIDA that the situation can fairly be described as having reached a crisis of confidence.

—Patrick Johnston, 20101

The March 2013 announcement in the federal budget that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) would be “merged” with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) to form an integrated Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (now Global Affairs Canada) was both immediately surprising and long anticipated. It was surprising because, true to form, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government had engaged in no discernible consultations with the traditional development policy community prior to this abrupt and far-reaching institutional restructuring. It was long anticipated because, for at least a decade, CIDA had been repeatedly portrayed as deeply and probably irredeemably flawed: chronically defensive, risk averse, inefficient, and lacking in clear vision or purpose. By 2013, therefore, it was widely perceived as (in John Stackhouse’s phrase) a “dead agency walking.”2

While much of the commentary on CIDA’s weaknesses was arguably overstated, it had become entrenched by the mid-1990s largely because of the absence of robust rebuttals from the agency or its political masters. This, in turn, reflected an institution that had come to think of itself as uncertain, weak and vulnerable, and that lacked powerful advocates and allies among the political and administrative elites of the federal government. In bureaucratic politics terms, its “organizational essence” had become embattled and unclear. In short, it was suffering from a chronic, collective crisis of confidence.3

This chapter argues that, while the roots of this condition are long, they were dramatically deepened (and arguably rendered irreversible) by a series of blows over the course of the 1990s, many of them related to CIDA’s policies and performance in Africa, where its programming was most heavily concentrated. Together, these blows led to chronic uncertainty and a lack of conviction concerning its organizational essence, making it an easy mark for the many skeptics and critics that beset it.

“Organizational Essence” and the Aid Agency

In an article on “Canada and the Bureaucratic Politics of State Fragility,” focusing on DFAIT and the Department of National Defence/Canadian Forces (DND/CF), Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Philippe Lagassé argue that “governmental organisations—agencies, services, or departments—are driven to defend their essences. In basic terms, an organizational essence is an identity that is reproduced through institutional practices, norms, and culture. An organizational essence is that which forms an organisation’s raison d’être. It is a self-definition of what an agency, service, or department is, what it does, and how it does it, how it relates to other agencies, services, departments, and to the government or the state as a whole.”4 Drawing from the work of former US national security bureaucrats Morton Halperin and Priscilla Clapp,5 Desrosiers and Lagassé contend that organizational essences are composed of “missions, roles, and capabilities.” Like other socio-cultural identities, an organizational essence is not unchanging, nor is it uncontested. Nevertheless, it typically has a high level of stability and durability. Indeed, if it does not, this can be seen as a sign of institutional infirmity.

If we accept that such essences are key determinants of the health and behaviour of public sector institutions, what sort of essence can we ascribe to CIDA? As anyone familiar with the agency will quickly realize, and as the various chapters in this collection make clear, this is not a straightforward question to answer. However, there are a few general points we can make. First, CIDA was (and now forever shall remain) a relatively young organization, certainly compared with its key interlocutors in international policy: Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Defence, and Finance. As a result, it was inevitably beset by a certain level of insecurity and inexperience within the bureaucratic politics of the federal government. Second, it was legislatively, and thus politically, subordinate to DFAIT. Much of its institutional history was therefore spent seeking to protect and, periodically and cautiously, enlarge its relative autonomy. Third, it was self-consciously an institution apart. It was an organization of outsiders, often recruited from non-governmental development organisations, “who brought to the agency a commitment to development and a desire to build a career around it.”6

In terms of core mission(s), there was some foundational ambiguity. As has been habitually noted, at least since Keith Spicer’s path-breaking analysis in 1966 (see Brown’s exploration in this collection), the motives underlying development assistance programming are inescapably mixed, including geo-strategic, diplomatic, commercial, and ethical objectives. Whereas the other agencies with significant responsibilities for dispensing portions of Canadian aid, including Finance, DFAIT, and to a lesser degree Defence, were much more attuned to the first several of these motivations, CIDA (by far the largest dispenser of development funds) was indissolubly linked to the objective of “provoking development,” in the words of former agency president Marcel Massé.7 This meant a core commitment to the ethical or moral purpose of aid. In the words of the 1994 Special Joint Parliamentary Committee Reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy, “help for those most in need expresses the basic moral vision of aid and corresponds closely to what the vast majority of Canadians think development assistance is all about.”8 While CIDA personnel clearly understood the need to design their policies and programs in ways that also achieved other, narrower purposes, if only to sustain the support they required from other bureaucratic and political actors, the basic developmental purpose of poverty alleviation and, beyond this, progress toward a more just international society was at the core of their organization’s self-defined essence.9 Quite what this meant and how it was to be achieved remained a matter of ongoing contestation.

Finally, in terms of roles and capabilities, by the late 1980s there was a core tension concerning what CIDA could and should be doing, and what capabilities it required to fulfill the roles it sought to perform. Historically, CIDA was principally a policy taker rather than a policy maker, with a strong bias toward institutionally (though not geographically)10 decentralized operational capacities aimed at successfully navigating projects through the shoals of local dynamics “in country.” The agency’s heavy emphasis on applied operational capacity and contextual understanding meant that its capacity for research and reflection was limited.11 It also meant that it forged particularly close though often fraught relationships with Canadian non-governmental (or civil society) development organizations, resulting in a robust, diverse, and growing complex of state-civil society “partnerships”12 on which its operational activities relied.

This relatively decentralized structure, within and beyond the agency, ran up against a different kind of imperative in the late 1980s. In the context of debt crises in Africa and Latin America, as well as the rise of neo-liberal thinking, key international financial institutions (notably the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank) instituted structural adjustment lending, requiring recipient countries to undertake market-oriented policy reforms as a condition of new development finance. Major bilateral donor agencies increasingly followed suit, supporting structural adjustment “conditionalities” in their development programming. In this policy environment, CIDA’s leadership tried to embrace a more macro, country-wide, policy planning and advising orientation toward recipient countries, in line with neo-liberal policy prescriptions. Increasingly, the agency sought to become a locus of expertise on the development problematique more broadly, albeit with a narrowly macro-economic emphasis. In this regard, it sought a key role as a policy player if not a major policy maker, rather than just a taker of big ideas generated elsewhere. By the early 1990s, this had become a source of contestation within the agency, and with its partners in the non-governmental development community, concerning its organizational essence and its bureaucratic relationships with other international policy agencies. The tension between CIDA’s claim to specialized capacity in the understanding of project-based operational challenges in developing countries, and its aspiration to become a locus of high-level expertise on the more long-term, structural challenges facing these countries, became a source of intra-agency uncertainty concerning (in Halperin and Clapp’s terms) its core missions, roles, and capabilities.

By the early 1980s, CIDA’s organizational essence had also become tightly bound up with its practices and performance in its proliferating array of African aid recipients. From 1980 onward, Africa overtook Asia to become, and remain, the largest regional recipient of Canadian aid.13 It is also the region where poverty and human insecurity were and remain most prevalent, and therefore humanitarian need is greatest; and where aid is proportionately most significant as a source of development finance, and thus most implicated in the results (both positive and negative) of development interventions.14 Consequently, it became an ongoing testing ground for various, evolving innovations in development assistance, Canadian and global. Finally, African recipients took on a high level of political prominence because the continent’s heavy concentration of francophone and anglophone countries, often members of either la Francophonie or the Commonwealth, meant that Canada had both a relatively high level of prominence as a donor and a strong identity-based interest in highlighting its continental role.

In the course of the 1990s, each of these aspects of CIDA’s “organizational essence” was brought under scrutiny and challenge. It is worth emphasizing that this challenge was bipartisan, unfolding during both the final years of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government and the early and middle years of Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government.

CIDA, Aid Policy, and Africa in the Late Mulroney years

With hindsight, CIDA’s fortunes arguably reached their apex in the late 1980s, with the publication of the highly regarded “Winegard Report” (For Whose Benefit?) in 1987 and the subsequent release of CIDA’s policy document, Sharing our Future.15 The former was seen as a thoughtful and forthright effort to set aid policy on a firmly “humane internationalist” footing.16 The latter was rightly seen by critics as watering down Winegard’s message and prescriptions,17 Of these, the one that, in David Morrison’s assessment, “probably had the greatest potential for changing CIDA’s organizational thinking and behaviour” was the proposal to decentralize key decision-making and implementation functions away from headquarters in Gatineau to a number of field-based hubs, including Dar es Salaam, Dakar, Abidjan, and Harare in Africa.18 It was anticipated that this would lead to more efficient and grounded policy and program decision making, with a higher degree of responsiveness to local needs and requirements (what later came to be known as “ownership”). The costs of decentralization were to be underpinned by slow but steady growth of the aid budget, from 0.5 per cent of GDP when Sharing our Future was released, to the longstanding target of 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2000.19 On these premises, CIDA and DFAIT expeditiously initiated a substantial process of decentralization beginning in 1989, more than doubling the number of field-based aid personnel in nine diplomatic posts and a number of satellite offices.

These plans were almost immediately thrown into doubt, however, when the 1989 budget imposed an unexpectedly large cut of $360 million on the CIDA base budget (a 13 per cent cut). A succession of “streamlining” measures were adopted as further cuts ensued, and by the summer of 1992 it became clear that the short-lived experiment with decentralization was dead.20 Decentralizing steps that, in 1988, had been projected to “significantly improve the quality and efficiency of Canada’s assistance, as well as bringing our programs closer to the people we are trying to reach—the poorest”21 were within four years deemed expendable.

Decentralization was not only a casualty of austerity. In the first years of the 1990s, new leadership at CIDA under the “second coming” of Marcel Massé as president sought to steer the agency away from its more organizationally decentralized emphasis on a policy approach that was “‘tailor-made’ locally and incrementally,”22 and toward a more strategic, knowledge-intensive policy leadership role. The reasons for this were several. As noted above, they reflected the new primacy of controversial “policy lending” or structural adjustment programs (SAPs) as the centrepiece of development assistance policies, reflecting the ”high neo-liberal” tenor of the times and the intrusive policy approach adopted by the IMF and World Bank in response to the debt crisis of many developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America. CIDA had been a relatively late adopter of structural adjustment and was a “policy taker” in the process.23 Given the controversy surrounding the draconian social impacts of these policies and the sharp opposition to them among many of CIDA’s non-governmental “partners” in Canadian civil society, they were undoubtedly a source of controversy within and beyond the agency. CIDA’s own role and emphasis in relation to SAPs became one of mitigating their negative social impacts in key “partner” countries such as Ghana and Guyana.24 SAPs and CIDA’s role in enabling them were a jarring challenge to the agency's sense of its core mission as an organization committed to poverty alleviation. But for Massé, fresh from a term as Canada’s Executive Director at the IMF and World Bank, they were a matter of intellectual conviction.25

SAPs were also part of a strategic vision for the agency that emphasized its role as a policy leader on issues of international development and Canada’s role therein. This vision sought to carve out greater autonomy in Ottawa’s policy-making process to pursue this goal. Toward this end, Groupe Sécore from Montréal was commissioned to undertake a comprehensive Strategic Management Review in 1990–91. Based largely on its recommendations, senior management decided in early 1991 to recommend to the minister of state responsible for international cooperation, Monique Landry, that it adopt “sustainable development” as its overarching framework; that it focus more attention on influencing and supporting the core policy functions of recipient governments; and that it “work ‘horizontally’ in attempting to influence the areas of Canadian government policy affecting developing countries.”26 By early 1992, CIDA had prepared a recommendation seeking cabinet’s approval for the new policy direction.

Given CIDA’s historic role as an implementing agency and policy taker, this approach (resting on overarching country programming frameworks and more proactive strategies in support of African regional integration) required the acquiescence of other powerful players in Canadian development cooperation policies, notably DFAIT and Finance.27 Indeed, University of Toronto political scientist Cranford Pratt interpreted the agency’s embrace of structural adjustment as partly a reflection of its desire to earn the trust of these players, committed as they were to a more “realist” view of aid policy. “It was as if CIDA wanted to prove to DFAIT and to cabinet that it could be trusted with decisions that had important commercial and foreign policy dimensions,” he wrote.28 If this was the intention, it failed. DFAIT effectively blocked consideration of CIDA’s policy paper at cabinet and, at the behest of Foreign Minister Barbara MacDougall, had an alternative “international assistance policy update paper” prepared by a senior departmental official that outlined a far more forthrightly self-interested vision of Canadian foreign aid as an instrument of key foreign and trade policy priorities. “There could hardly be more dramatic evidence,” Pratt summarized, “that DFAIT was far more preoccupied with commercial and foreign policy concerns than with any commitment to reach and help the poorest people and countries.”29 The policy update paper generated a storm of controversy among Canadian development CSO’s and sympathetic scholars, and was eventually put on hold. Nevertheless, it clearly signalled DFAIT’s opposition to a substantially more autonomous policy role for CIDA.

Finally, and in some respects most shockingly, CIDA responded to a third successive round of budget cuts in 1993 by making an abrupt decision to cut bilateral aid programming to an entire region, central and east Africa, rather than adopt a “lawnmower approach” that would cut programs across the board. The primary upshot was a decision to slash the bilateral program in Tanzania, one of Canada’s largest and longest-standing development and Commonwealth “partners.” In doing so, CIDA took a strategic decision to prioritize a variety of political and commercial considerations over the obvious and ongoing humanitarian and developmental case for aid to Tanzania.30 This decision, so clearly at odds with the core of CIDA’s organizational mission, demonstrated how shallow and fragile this mission was. Although the specific decision on aid to Tanzania was reversed not long after the defeat of the Progressive Conservative government in the 1993 federal election, it portended more traumas to come, later in the same decade.

By the time the Chrétien Liberals took power in 1993, therefore, CIDA’s efforts to reinforce its mission and expand its role had been twice rebuffed, through the dismantling of decentralization and the sidelining of its aspirations for an enlarged policy role. Meanwhile, its “partnerships” with Canadian civil society had been seriously strained by the agency’s prioritization of structural adjustment. And it had demonstrated a high degree of sensitivity to more narrowly self-interested political and commercial priorities, in contravention of “humane internationalist” considerations and long-standing bilateral and civil society partnerships, through its program cut to Tanzania. As uncertainties about the direction and viability of its “organizational essence” grew, morale came under unprecedented strain. Yet, there was reason to hope for improved fortunes under the new Liberal government.

CIDA, Africa, and the Chrétien Liberals

The pre-election references to foreign aid in the Liberal Party’s platform, expressed in its Red Book and Foreign Policy Handbook, were not extensive, but they strongly criticized the decision to cut aid to Tanzania and contained relatively clear humane internationalist statements of intent.31 Once the party was in power, there was further encouragement for those with a humane internationalist bent from the report of the Special Joint Parliamentary Committee Reviewing Canadian Foreign Policy. While the report was not as authoritative on foreign aid issues as the Winegard Report, the committee made clear its view that “the primary purpose of Canadian Official Development Assistance is to reduce poverty by providing effective assistance to the poorest people, in those countries that most need and can use our help.”32 It then laid out a set of proposed priorities (basic human needs, human rights, good governance and democratic development, the participation of women, private sector development, and public participation) that, though broad and imprecise, were generally consonant with this core purpose.

In contrast, the government’s own 1995 White Paper on foreign policy, Canada in the World, clearly compromised this clarity of intent, situating aid, first, in the service of Canadian jobs and prosperity; second, as a contribution to global security; and third, as an expression of Canadian values and culture.33 Moreover, the foreign affairs minister, André Ouellet, while admired within the agency for his energy and efficiency, was primarily concerned with “the Canadian side of the operation, especially in the distribution of work to private-sector suppliers and the use of ODA to promote trade.”34 In the absence of strong political leadership and a confident sense of purpose, the agency was exceptionally vulnerable as, under the leadership of Chrétien and Finance Minister Paul Martin, the government decided to prioritize dramatic budgetary restraint and eliminating the fiscal deficit over all other policy priorities in the mid-1990s.

The hammer fell in a series of devastating budgetary blows, beginning with the 1995 federal budget, which announced a three-year, 20.5 per cent decrease in international assistance spending. Foreign aid became “ground zero” for Martin’s deficit cutting project. As the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) later noted, “Canadian aid was hit harder by budget cuts than any other federal programme area, falling in real terms by 37 per cent between 1991–92 and 1999–2000, while federal spending as a whole fell by 11 per cent, and defence spending (in the course of what has been characterized as a ‘decade of darkness’ for the Canadian Forces) was cut by 20 per cent.”35 Nor can it be said that other donors were behaving in a comparably draconian manner. Despite overall declines in aid spending during the 1990s, among OECD Development Assistant Committee (DAC) members only Finland cut more deeply. Thirteen of the then twenty-two DAC members actually increased their aid spending. As a percentage of GDP, Canadian aid fell from 0.45 per cent in 1991 to 0.25 per cent in 2000, and to a low of 0.22 per cent in 2001—the lowest level since the mid-1960s.

Particularly devastating to CIDA’s core sense of mission was that the cuts fell hardest on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)—the region where impoverishment and insecurity were most acute. Between 1992–93 and 1997–98, Canadian aid to SSA fell in nominal dollars by 29.1 per cent, compared with the overall rate of decline in ODA of 24.3 per cent, and of all bilateral aid of 23.1 per cent (see Figure 12.3)—this, despite the fact that Africa’s relative fortunes and rates of absolute poverty continued to worsen as the continent struggled through a second successive “lost decade.”36

There were several possible ways of interpreting this trend. All of them profoundly challenged CIDA’s organizational essence. One was that the political leadership in Ottawa had lost any real confidence that aid could effectively address the manifold challenges confronting the countries and people of Africa. While this was never explicitly acknowledged, such an existential challenge to the core mission of aid would be profoundly discouraging. It was reinforced externally by the emergence of a new round of devastating critiques of aid failures in practice. A striking example was Peter Uvin’s study of the role of the ”aid system” in unwittingly enabling the genocidal violence in Rwanda.37 A second interpretation, just as disheartening, was that aid, notwithstanding its obvious challenges and limitations, could make a difference in ameliorating the condition of the poorest people and countries, but that the government cared too little about these conditions to act as if they mattered. A third, and related, view was that the government was simply reflecting the concerns of its electorate, which, despite persistently high levels of support for aid in the abstract, saw development assistance as a priority that came after almost every other policy priority subject to the government’s deficit-cutting scrutiny.38 Any and all of these interpretations were deeply discomfiting to the agency’s sense of collective purpose and morale.

Further eroding CIDA’s sense of mission were a series of assaults on its long-standing and mutually supportive ties with Canadian civil society organizations. A budget-linked decision in 1995 abolished the agency’s Public Participation Program (PPP) and cut all funding to the broad network of community-based development education NGOs in Canada. Similarly, CIDA cancelled the Global Education Program, which supported the efforts of teachers’ associations to build global education into school curricula and teacher training.39 A small but vital element of CIDA programming for over twenty years (see Brushett in this collection), PPP and responsive public education funding were likely, and ironically, targeted due to the sharp criticism levelled by many development CSOs against the agency, particularly as it prioritized the unpopular structural adjustment policies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nevertheless, these cuts eroded the foundation for CIDA’s organizational essence directly and indirectly. Directly, they meant that CIDA lost important voices in Canadian communities advocating engagement with the challenges of global poverty and inequality. Indirectly, the cuts signalled to CIDA that the government was prepared to ”ride out” public opposition in this policy domain, judging the development education and advocacy community to be politically marginal. None of this was promising for efforts to defend CIDA’s organizational essence in caucus and cabinet, let alone with the Canadian public.

A further challenge to CIDA’s organizational essence came from a resurgence of tension with DFAIT, revolving around the ascendant “Human Security Agenda.” When Lloyd Axworthy became minister of foreign affairs in 1996, he brought to the portfolio an activist agenda seeking to recast and expand the idea of security as the foundation for a re-energized Canadian foreign policy.40 Supported bureaucratically by the new Global Issues Bureau within DFAIT, Axworthy undertook an array of initiatives, most of which were concentrated in Africa or bore particularly on the “security-development nexus” there.41

Unfortunately for Axworthy, the foreign ministry had insufficient resources to underpin his activism. CIDA, though battered by cuts, still had far more money for programming than DFAIT, which made it a ripe target for what Pratt characterized as a “takeover bid.”42 Though this never became a serious possibility at the time, there were various encroachments on CIDA’s budget—for example, the $10 million per year Peacebuilding Fund established within the agency which, though wholly inadequate to the scale of the challenges associated with the new multilateral emphasis on peacebuilding in complex post- or peri-conflict situations, nevertheless reinforced a growing trend toward the “securitization” of Canadian aid.43 While the need for serious engagement between development and (human) security issues had become increasingly self-evident, particularly in Africa, deploying aid funds to meet security imperatives compelled CIDA to divert resources from the slow and patient work of fostering sustainable development in its broadest sense. This disturbing trend reached its apex with the rapid emergence of Afghanistan as the largest bilateral program in agency history under the Harper government, alongside Canada’s costly twelve-year military deployment to the Afghan war.

Conclusion: The Long Demise

Beginning in the early 2000s, CIDA’s fortunes experienced a partial revival, as the Chrétien government, in the company of other donors, substantially reinvested in development assistance to support its commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals as well as the G-8’s Africa Action Plan, launched (with energetic leadership by Chrétien) at the Kananaskis Summit in 2002. Over the remainder of the decade, Canada committed to doubling ODA, and to doubling aid to Africa marginally faster. Notwithstanding some controversy over the base from which this growth was to occur, the commitment was formally met, even when the Harper government that took office in 2006 signalled its intention to de-emphasize Africa and prioritize Latin America.44

Yet by the end of the decade and the years of re-investment in development aid at a rate of 8 per cent annually, Canadian ODA had reached a mere 0.34 per cent of GDP—well below the 0.45 per cent where it had stood when the Mulroney cuts began in 1991.45 More to the point of this chapter, even in this relatively expansive and hopeful period, CIDA was routinely maligned by critics and supporters of foreign aid alike. A year after the Harper Conservative government took office, for instance, the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade issued a damning report entitled Overcoming Forty Years of Failure: A New Road Map for Sub-Saharan Africa. Though rightly critiqued as “deeply flawed in its assumptions, methodology and argumentation,”46 its criticisms of the agency as “ineffective, costly and overly bureaucratic” and of Canadian development assistance as “slow, inflexible, and unresponsive to conditions on the ground in recipient countries” typified many other assessments.47 Its stark conclusion was that “despite the dedication and hard work of CIDA employees over the years, the Government of Canada should undertake an immediate review of whether or not . . . CIDA should be relieved of its duties. The experiment of creating an independent aid agency to strengthen Canadian development assistance has not produced the intended results.”48 While widely panned at the time, this conclusion turned out to be prescient.

The argument in this chapter is that the sense of CIDA as weak, vulnerable, and defensive, and the various procedural and policy pathologies that flowed from it, was rooted in the agency’s inability to defend its organizational essence—its core sense of corporate identity—and to adequately articulate and sustain the mission(s), roles, and capabilities on which it was based. Indeed, over time, weakness and vulnerability came to at least partially define CIDA’s organizational essence. This largely unanswered challenge was strongly and irreversibly advanced by a series of blows inflicted during the 1990s by the leadership of both major political parties. Despite the agency’s efforts to adapt, it ended up failing both to expand its autonomy to pursue its core mission(s) in relation to other government departments concerned with international policy and to sustain the vitality of its “partnerships” with Canadian development CSO’s.

To be sure, much of this failure was rooted in structural, political, and ideational factors beyond CIDA’s control. These included the perennial controversy over the appropriate role(s), utility, and limits of foreign aid, a controversy which, as the chapters in this collection indicate, is as old as the Canadian aid program. Nor does this conclusion diminish the achievements of CIDA personnel, projects, and programs in various times and places over the course of its forty-five years of existence. But it does highlight the importance of carving out a distinctive organizational space whose identity and capacities are firmly linked to addressing the challenges of global poverty and inequality. As Nilima Gulrajani has argued about the architecture of development agencies more broadly, whether this space is lodged within the foreign ministry (as now seems certain for the foreseeable future) or elsewhere is less important than that this institutional home has a distinct identity and a robust political and intellectual foundation.49 Without it, Canada’s ability to address these acute global challenges and the multiple problems arising from them will remain enfeebled.

Notes

1 Patrick Johnston, “Modernizing Canadian Foreign Aid and Development: Challenges Old And New” (Toronto: Walter and Gordon Duncan Foundation, 2010), 3.

2 John Stackhouse, “CIDA was long dead. Harper only buried it,” Globe and Mail, 22 March 2013.

3 It can be argued that this crisis of confidence was three-dimensional, involving: an internal dimension, concerning the agency’s capacity to make, defend, and sustain key policy decisions; a prescriptive dimension, reflecting uncertainty and division concerning the best uses of development aid; and an external dimension, entailing a lack of confidence among other international policy institutions in Ottawa concerning CIDA’s capacity to succeed in its core mission, and questioning the utility of that mission.

4 Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Philippe Lagassé, “Canada and the Bureaucratic Politics of State Fragility,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 660.

5 Morton Halperin and Priscilla Clapp, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006).

6 Philip Rawkins, “An Institutional Analysis of CIDA,” in Canadian International Development Assistance Policies: An Appraisal, ed. Cranford Pratt (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 160.

7 Rawkins, “An Institutional Analysis of CIDA,” 166.

8 Cited in Cranford Pratt, “Development Assistance and Canadian Foreign Policy: Where We Now Are,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 2, no. 3 (1994): 80.

9 On the persistent centrality of poverty alleviation to the mission of Canadian foreign aid, see Ian Smillie, “Institutional Corruption and Canadian Foreign Aid,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 23, no. 1 (2017): 47–59.

10 CIDA’s operations were notoriously heavily concentrated at headquarters in Gatineau, with only very limited decision-making authority decentralized to missions in recipient countries. Geographic decentralization has long been mooted as a key requirement for enhanced responsiveness and effectiveness, but it has never been sustainably implemented.

11 It can also be argued that the decision to establish a dedicated development research institution—the International Development Research Centre—in 1970, shortly after CIDA’s own establishment, reinforced the operational and somewhat anti-intellectual bias of the agency. On the decentralized and operational orientation of CIDA, see Rawkins, “An Institutional Analysis of CIDA.”

12 See, for example, Betty Plewes and Brian Tomlinson, “Canadian CSOs and Africa: The End of an Era?” in Canada Among Nations 2013: Canada-Africa Relations – Looking Back, Looking Ahead, ed. Rohinton Medhora and Yiagadeesen Samy (Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation and Carleton University, 2013), 213–26.

13 See David Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 455; Stephen Brown, “Canadian Aid to Africa,” in Medhora and Samy, Canada Among Nations 2013, 181.

14 Though the share of aid in external financial flows to Africa has steadily declined, from 62 per cent in 1990 to 22 per cent in 2012. See Amadou Sy, “Africa in Focus: How Finance Flows to Africa,” Brookings institution, 20 May 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2015/05/20/how-finance-flows-to-africa/.

15 For a detailed account of this period, see Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 277–312.

16 Humane internationalism was defined by Cranford Pratt as “an acceptance by the citizens of the industrialized states that they have ethical obligations towards those beyond their borders and that these in turn impose obligations on their governments.” See Pratt, “Humane Internationalism: Its Significance and Variants,” in his edited collection Internationalism Under Strain: The North-South Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 13.

17 Pratt was among the critics. See Pratt, “Canada: A Limited and Eroding Internationalism,” in his edited collection Internationalism Under Strain, 24–69.

18 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 311.

19 CIDA, Sharing our Future (Gatineau: CIDA, 1988), 22.

20 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 311.

21 CIDA, Sharing Our Future, 35.

22 Rawkins, “An Institutional Analysis of CIDA,” 173; Massé had previously been president in 1980–82.

23 Marcia Burdette, “Structural Adjustment and Canadian Aid Policy,” in Pratt, Canadian International Development Assistance Policies, 210–39.

24 David Black and Peter McKenna, “Canada and Structural Adjustment in the South: The Significance of the Guyana Case,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 16, no. 1 (1995): 55–78.

25 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 313.

26 Rawkins, “An Institutional Analysis of CIDA,” 176.

27 CIDA, Africa and the Middle East Branch, Africa 21: A Vision of Africa in the 21st Century (October 1991).

28 Pratt, “Development Assistance and Canadian Foreign Policy,” 78.

29 Cranford Pratt, “DFAIT’s Takeover Bid of CIDA,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 5, no. 2 (1998): 4.

30 See Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 373.

31 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 380–81.

32 Pratt, “Development Assistance and Canadian Foreign Policy,” 80.

33 Government of Canada, Canada in the World, Government statement (1995), 40; Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 399–401; Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), Canada in the World: A Review and Analysis of the Government’s Foreign Policy Statements, February 1995.

34 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 377.

35 CCIC, “Renewing Canadian Aid: A CCIC/in common Fact Sheet,” 2000.

36 See CCIC, “Renewing Canadian Aid”; and Larry Elliott, “The lost decade,” Guardian (Manchester), 9 July 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/09/population.aids.

37 See Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998).

38 For an insightful critique of the proposition that Canadians were supporters of a generous humane internationalist aid program, see Alain Noël, Jean-Philippe Thérien, and Stephane Dallaire, “Divided over Internationalism: The Canadian Public and Development Assistance,” Canadian Public Policy 30, no. 1 (2004): 29–46.

39 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 416–17.

40 See Lloyd Axworthy, “Canada and Human Security: The Need for Leadership,” International Journal 52, no. 2 (1997): 183–96; and Greg Donaghy, “All God’s Children: Lloyd Axworthy, Human Security and Canadian Foreign Policy, 1996–2000,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 10, no. 2 (2003): 39–58.

41 For examples, see Rob McRae and Don Hubert, eds., Human Security and the New Diplomacy: Protecting People, Promoting Peace (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

42 See Pratt, “DFAIT’s Takeover Bid.”

43 See, for example, Stephen Brown and Jörn Grävingholt, eds., The Securitization of Foreign Aid (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016).

44 For details, see David Black, Canada and Africa in the New Millennium: The Politics of Consistent Inconsistency (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), especially chaps. 2 and 5.

45 And from 2010 onward, ODA experienced another round of deep cuts, as the Harper government, like its Liberal predecessor, leaned disproportionately on foreign aid to bring the budget deficit back toward “balance.”

46 Stephen Brown, “CIDA under the Gun,” in Canada Among Nations 2007: What Room for Manoeuvre?, ed. Jean Daudelin and Daniel Schwanen (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 91–107. See also Stephen Brown, “Le rapport du Sénat sur l’aide canadienne à l’Afrique : une analyse à rejeter,” Le Multilatéral 1, no. 3 (2007): 1, 6–7.

47 The generally sympathetic study by Patrick Johnston of the Walter and Gordon Duncan Foundation noted that “bureaucratic, hidebound, out-of-touch, ineffectual, risk averse, contradictory, vacillating—these and many similar criticisms of CIDA have now become commonplace.” See Johnston, “Modernizing Foreign Aid and Development,” 3.

48 Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Overcoming Forty Years of Failure: A New Road Map for Sub-Saharan Africa (Ottawa, 2007), 96–97.

49 See Nilima Gulrajani, “Bilateral Donors in the ‘Beyond Aid’ Agenda: The Importance Of Institutional Autonomy For Donor Effectiveness,” Global Economic Governance Working Paper 2015/106, August 2015.