africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
growth that fails to diversify out of natural resources, while others may be able to
sustain current growth with diversification or limited natural resource dependence.
It is unlikely however that development aid will disappear in the foreseeable future.
Aid remains an important source of resources for development finance, and it is likely
that a financing deal around the new Development Goals will emerge that maintains
a key role for aid. Among donor countries, there has been a notable divergence
of political appetite for a sizeable aid budget, but in most places development aid
continues to receive relatively broad political support.
In this brief paper, we argue that we should guard against some of the naïve narratives
that persist about the role of aid, while recipient countries could benefit from
using aid in more sophisticated ways, as an instrument for positive change. It is an
appeal to think about development aid less as finance and more as a lever to support
the more important aspects of a commitment to development in Africa, which
may have less to do with finance per se.
19.2 How relevant is Sweden?
Development aid has long been justified by a legitimate concern for the needs of
the poor. The articulation of global development goals in the form of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 turned this into an implicit contract between aid
donors and recipients: that both a country’s level of progress and the development
finance offered to support this progress ought to be judged with reference to the
MDGs. The MDGs embody a broad multidimensional view of what poverty is, with a
dashboard of specific targets in areas such as incomes, health, education, and gender
equality. Even though it is not clear how strong their focus on the targets proved to
be, with disparate experience among donor and recipient countries (Bourguignon
and others, 2010), the MDGs articulated a vision of what success in development
should look like, alongside an apparent view of how development takes place. They
saw development as the process of turning each and every developing country into
a wealthier, more peaceful, and more stable version of itself, with low poverty, low
inequality, excellent social services, and admirable human development indicators
for all. In effect, they suggested a path towards a mythical version of Sweden, with
the how interpreted as an active and efficient welfare state focused on spending for
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