reduction in aid budgets was presented as part of a larger effort to
limit government spending, and as the price to pay to ensure the long-
term sustainability of development assistance programs. An “aid
fatigue” among the public of donor countries was also evoked, and
attributed to the apparent failure of past policies. In Africa, it was
often said, the allocation of vast resources had not succeeded in pushing
back poverty. Conservatives also argued that it was unacceptable to
continue to subsidize inefficient governments, which rejected market
mechanisms and stubbornly held on to state-centered development
strategies.^88 At the end of the 1990s, the World Bank fueled such
criticisms when it concluded that developing countries with “mediocre”
policies received more financial aid than those with “good” policies.^89
As aid agencies understandably sought to reverse this trend, slashing
development assistance budgets was increasingly legitimized by the
need to fight against waste and corruption.
Although this was rarely admitted publicly, there is no doubt that
the end of the Cold War also contributed to the decline of aid. Until
the end of the 1980s, the struggle against communism and the desire
to prevent Third World countries from aligning themselves with the
USSR pushed Western governments to maintain relatively generous
development assistance policies. From the moment the Soviet Union
converted itself to a market economy, that strategic motivation van-
ished. In addition, as former territories of the Soviet bloc became
themselves aid recipients, they drained a share of the total resources
available to the poorest countries.
In keeping with the neoliberal approach, the rise of private finan-
cing was presented as minimizing the need for aid in the fight against
poverty. Many on the right contended that the quality of aid was a
good deal more crucial than its volume. Following the precepts of the
“new public management,” aid agencies increasingly tried to make
their organizational culture more “results-oriented.”^90 This new philo-
sophy had a significant impact on the design of development assistance
(^88) David K. Fieldhouse,The West and the Third World, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999,
89 p. 243.
World Bank,Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 23–25.
(^90) Hyun-sik Chang, Arthur M. Fell, and Michael Laird (with the assistance of
Julie Seif),A Comparison of Management Systems for Development
Co-operation in OECD/DAC Members, Paris, OECD, 1999, p. 97.
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