By James Copestake<\/p>\n
DFID lasted 23 years, created as an autonomous department by the incoming Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997 and dissolved by the Conservative government headed by Boris Johnson in June 2020. This book tells its story from the perspective of two senior civil servants, drawing collectively on the thirty years they spent working for DFID, supplemented by interviews with five Secretaries of State, five Permanent Secretaries, and others among its 10,000 employees (their estimate). Their rich, descriptive, chronological account is organised into four periods: \u201csetting the compass\u201d (1997-2003) under the leadership of Claire Short; \u201cdelivering on the job\u201d (2003-10) during the remaining years of Labour government; \u201cheadwinds slow progress\u201d (2010-16) mostly under the Coalition government led by David Cameron; and \u201cfall and beyond\u201d (2016-20) during and after Brexit. From a base of around \u00a34 billion a year, UK overseas development assistance grew to a peak of \u00a317 billion in 2016\/17, dropping to \u00a312 billion in DFID\u2019s last year (at constant 2022 prices).<\/p>\n
While acknowledging some failures, the account is infused by the authors\u2019 enthusiasm for what DFID was set up to do, and their belief in its success in delivering on those goals. The penultimate chapter offers a scathing account of how the UK moved from \u201ctrusted partner to pariah\u201d (p.241) through a combination of cuts in aid spending and erosion of delivery capabilities through DFID\u2019s absorption into the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Without attempting to estimate how much change could be attributed specifically to DFID, they note that during its lifetime the incidence of extreme (\u201cdollar a day\u201d) poverty fell from one third of the world\u2019s population to less than 10%, a trend that was matched or exceeded in most of the 18 countries DFID prioritised (p.52) which also experienced marked improvements in educational enrolment, life expectancy and other human development indicators.<\/p>\n
The final chapter attributes DFID\u2019s rise to three key factors: (1) clear, credible, and ambitious long-term goals, centred on global poverty reduction; (2) continuity and stability in building up delivery capability, including through recruitment and motivation of high calibre staff; (3) relatively generous funding, underpinned by high-level political commitment to achieving the UN-mandated target of spending 0.7% of national income on development assistance. They are more equivocal in their discussion of a fourth factor \u2013 effective partnerships \u2013 including with other Whitehall departments, multilateral agencies, \u2018partner\u2019 governments, the private sector, and (less discussed) the UK public. More of this below.<\/p>\n
For a more nuanced review of DFID\u2019s evolution, it is useful (following Valters & Whitty, 2017) to distinguish Claire Short\u2019s \u201ccontribution and partnership approach\u201d (1997-2007), and a growing emphasis on \u201cresults-based management\u201d after Andrew Mitchell became Secretary of State in 2010. The former built on the influential OECD (1996) report \u201cShaping the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/em>\u201d by seeking a coordinated multi-agency approach to achieving the Millenium Development Goals, and where possible aligned with the priorities of recipient countries and delivered through general budgetary support, or pooled funding. This was justified by evidence that DFID\u2019s funding was contributing positively to progress towards agreed national goals through a combination of direct financial support, policy engagement, and encouragement of others to commit funds to the same goals too. Poor and highly indebted countries, especially, could be \u2018encouraged\u2019 to adopt a pro-development view in return for debt reduction. And positive outcomes were easier to chalk up in the context of global economic growth bolstered by technology-facilitated globalisation, and China\u2019s growth as an additional investor, supplier of relatively cheap manufactured goods, and additional source of demand for primary commodities.<\/p>\n The book documents how this model of development slowly gave way to the more tightly controlled results-based management approach, a switch that can partly be linked to a deteriorating global environment, and the need to allocate more funds to addressing humanitarian needs in \u2018fragile\u2019 and conflict affected countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. It also brought DFID more into line with the results-based delivery model favoured by the Labour government in health, social welfare, education other policy areas. Beefing up performance management capabilities and devolution of more decision-making within DFID to the \u2018recipient\u2019 country level facilitated a shift to commissioning projects and programmes (more than 30,000 in total according to the authors) tailored to country contexts, with implementation outsourced to private firms, foundations, NGOs, arms-length agencies, and even the country level offices of other international development agencies, including a World Bank \u201cmulti-bi\u201d channel (p.149).<\/p>\n The political commitment to 0.7% - attained in 2013- helped to ensure that DFID maintained its delivery capacity through the 2007 global financial crisis, but amid signs that increasingly strict \u2018value-for-money\u2019 assessment and results-based programming was reducing DFID\u2019s risk appetite, flexibility, and attractiveness as a development partner. Relations with other UK government departments across Whitehall also became more strained, with tensions exacerbated by their capture of a growing share of the 0.7% of national income spending to cover areas overlapping with other national interests - including security, scientific research, climate change, and trade. These trends deepened after the Brexit referendum, as political commitment to prioritizing poverty reduction weakened, with growing use of aid funds to pay for the cost of housing refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. The authors point out (p.257) that \u201cunlike other areas of public policy \u2013 defence, the welfare state, the NHS \u2013 development was always discretionary\u2026 the choices made by governing parties were not forced upon them by electoral necessity.\u201d Thus, capabilities and commitments that took years to build up could also be rapidly dismantled.<\/p>\n There is much to learn from this account of DFID\u2019s rise and fall for students of politics and public policy, including those concerned with a second round of Trump vs. the US Federal bureaucracy. The book emphasises the importance of strong leadership during DFID\u2019s rise, and conversely how ministerial indifference and hostility accelerated its fall. It throws useful light on the politics of evidence-based policy: perhaps no other area of public spending was so heavily monitored and evaluated, and DFID largely succeeded in depriving the right-wing press of salacious stories of corruption and waste. But this ultimately did little to protect DFID once leaders came to power who had no interest in aid as a symbol of progressive pragmatism or compassionate conservativism. More support for global citizenship education, less enthusiasm for convoluted neo-liberal procurement, and less professional disdain for \u2018amateurish\u2019 NGOs and grass roots partnerships (such as modestly encouraged under devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales) might have helped; but probably not much.<\/p>\n For all its nuanced descriptive detail, the book largely fails to engage with scholarly debate about the underlying causes of global inequality, poverty, social injustice, conflict, and climate change. The authors mirror DFID itself in their silence about the historical factors that enabled the UK to exercise such power and discretion over other people and countries - benignly or otherwise. They largely avoid discussion of solidarity, human rights (cf. Lewis et al, 2005), decolonising development, epistemic injustice, or restitution as counterpoints to their implicit positivity about the virtues of British professional competence, pragmatism, and goodwill. They do point to the success of the 2002 International Development Act in defending DFID\u2019s poverty focus for nearly two decades from being diverted or coopted into serving UK commercial and political interests. They also give some attention to DFID\u2019s attempts to ensure consistency between its own poverty-reduction goals and other UK policies, including challenging the role of the City and offshore UK tax havens in facilitating illicit financial flows. But there is almost no critical reflection on a strategy that mostly sought poverty reduction alongside a predominantly neo-liberal model of development dominated by socio-economic polarisation and wealth-concentrating large-scale business enterprises, or on its increasing reliance on outsourcing aid management to large for-profit consultancy firms.<\/p>\n Development jargon abounds in simplistic dichotomies: e.g. between \u2018little d\u2019 development as an unfolding historical process, and \u2018big D\u2019 Development as intentional action. This is too easily reinforced by a preference for narrative that emphasises the causative power of structure (\u2018rampant capitalism\u2019) over agency (\u2018inspired leadership\u2019), or vice versa. These distinctions lead all to easily to the annoying habit of labelling people as either \u2018academics\u2019 or \u2018practitioners\u2019 \u2013 as if the former never confront difficult choices or \u2018do\u2019 anything, and the latter don\u2019t agonise over what can and cannot be changed and why.<\/p>\n Where does such polarised thinking leave the possibility of \u2018policy-relevant\u2019 theory, and \u2018theory-led\u2019 action; of managing tensions and transcending paradoxes? These thoughts incline me to applaud anyone willing to risk transgressing the professional boundary between development as a professional academic field and as an area of policy and practice \u2013 Albert Hirschman, David Mosse, Steven Omamo (2022), Rosalind Eyben, and Andrew Natsios (2010) being some of my heroes in this respect. They also incline me to applaud Mark Lowcock and Ranil Dissanayake for giving us an insiders\u2019 narrative account of DFID\u2019s rise and fall, and defence of its peak effectiveness. There is more to say about causal mechanisms, costs, benefits, winners, losers, unintended consequences, alternatives, and future possibilities for development action. But thanks to this book, such analysis can be informed by a better appreciation of the complexity of choices, messy trade-offs, and mixed emotions - from hubris to humility \u2013 associated with trying to make things happen. To act or not act? It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but paraphrasing Shakespeare is not wholly inappropriate.<\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Lewis, M. ,Eyben, R., Crabtree, J., Wilson, F., Sagasti., F and Csaky C. (ed.), 2005, Alliances Against Poverty: DFID\u2019s Experience in Peru 2000-2005, Department for International Development (DFID), London. https:\/\/gsdrc.org\/document-library\/alliances-against-poverty-dfids-experience-in-peru-2000-2005\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lowcock, M., and Dissanayanke R. (2024) The rise and fall of the Department for International Development. Center for Global Development.<\/p>\n OECD (1996). Shaping the 21st<\/sup> century: the contribution of development cooperation. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.<\/p>\n Maxwell, S. (2024) Book review: the rise and fall of DFID. TWP Community of Practice. November. https:\/\/twpcommunity.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Book-Review-The-Rise-and-Fall-of-DIFD-by-Simon-Maxwell.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n